Experts Believe Fauci’s Leading Aide Likely Broke Law By Erasing Emails
Jose Nino
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A leading advisor for former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci may have illegally taken actions to avoid records requests by deleting several emails.
David Morens, who formerly served as senior adviser to Fauci, deleted emails to avoid Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and informed people multiple times to reach out to him at his personal email address to circumvent such requests, per emails disseminated by the House Oversight Committee on May 22, 2024. Morens, in his email correspondence, also hinted at Fauci using his private email address to carry out government business.
“This is very illegal,” Matthew Hardin, a lawyer who specializes in issues connected to FOIA, told the Daily Caller.
“The Federal Records Act has strict requirements for preserving agency records in the agency’s custody for various reasons, including for purposes of facilitating the agency’s compliance with the Freedom of Information Act,” he added. “This means that anybody conducting agency business through a ‘secret’ back channel or through Gmail is still creating a federal record, even if they are wrongfully concealing that record on a personal account instead of the government’s custody.”
On top of that, he was using his private email address to correspond with others with the intent of circumventing FOIA requests, Morens directed others to contact Fauci at a private email address for similar reasons.
In an April 2021 email to Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, Morens stated that there is “no worry about FOIAs” as he can “either send stuff to Tony [Fauci] on his private email, or hand it to him at work or at his house.”
“He is too smart to let his colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble,” Morens added.
“These revelations are startling,” Judicial Watch senior attorney Michael Bekesha said to the Daily Caller. “It appears as though Dr. Morens and maybe others at NIH sought to circumvent, if not violate, the law by using personal email accounts and deleting emails.”
Bekesha stated that Morens’ behavior could be in violation of the Federal Records Act, the Freedom of Information Act, and the Privacy Act.
Daszak’s EcoHealth has been placed under the microscope for working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which some have argued was where the Wuhan virus pandemic originated. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Energy currently both believe that the Wuhan virus likely came out of a Chinese lab. EcoHealth stopped receiving federal funding on May 15 partly due to issues concerning its surveillance of work carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In addition to using personal emails to avoid possible FOIA requests, Morens stated that he worked with his agency’s FOIA office to delete records of his communications.
“[I] learned from our foia [sic] lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d [sic] but before the search starts, so [I] think we are all safe,” Morens wrote in a February 2021 email. “Plus [I] deleted most of those earlier after sending them to gmail [sic],” he added.
Morens sent multiple emails between June 2020 and October 2021 hinting that he deleted his government email communications. “We are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them,” he revealed in one email.
“The right of citizen access and the transparency of public records is constitutional and enshrined in Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of the U.S. Constitution—within the powerful Appropriations clause,” Open The Books CEO Adam Andrzejewski said to the Daily Caller. “Such an important and significant admission of the destruction of public records begs a non-partisan, criminal investigation,” he added.
“The question now is how often are the feds working to hide or destroy information that belongs in the public record? Is it limited to the public health complex, or is it happening all over the government?”
If Morens actually deleted his emails to avoid FOIA requests, Hardin argued that could potentially be a case of “destroy[ing] government property.”
Michael Chamberlain, director of Protect the Public’s Trust, informed the Daily Caller that “federal employees are obligated to preserve federal records” and that “destroying records for the express purpose of evading FOIA is a blatant and egregious violation of this obligation and should be treated as such.”
Morens also asserted that he has a “‘secret’ back channel” to Fauci, a statement he reversed from at a congressional testimony on May 22 by stating that he only said this in jest. Morens said during his testimony he did not recall ever sending information connected to the Wuhan Virus to Fauci’s personal email address, but that it’s possible he did so at least on one occasion.
There’s clearly a sense of bureaucrats, politicians, and corrupt businessmen thinking of themselves as above the law. These people seriously think they can commit crimes and get away with them, while peons would otherwise receive stiff criminal penalities for committing the very same acts.
Such a dynamic can’t hold in this republic, lest we want our polity to descend into a death spiral of corruption and institutional decay.
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