A National Institutes of Health (NIH) public liaison for Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests — who taught a senior adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci how to “make emails disappear” — is refusing to testify before a House committee investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In an Aug. 5 letter signed by her lawyers, Margaret Moore informed the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic that she would plead the Fifth Amendment and her right against self-incrimination — but was still handed a subpoena on Monday to testify about the potential records violations.
“Instead of using NIH’s FOIA office to provide the transparency and accountability that the American people deserve, it appears that ‘FOIA Lady’ Margaret Moore assisted efforts to evade federal record keeping laws,” said Committee Chairman Brad Wenstrup in a statement.
“Her alleged scheme to help NIH officials delete COVID-19 records and use their personal emails to avoid FOIA is appalling and deserves a thorough investigation.”
Moore’s attorneys William Vigen and Ronald Jacobs, who specialize in government investigations and white-collar criminal defense, in their August letter said their client has helped the committee in other ways.
“Ms. Moore has cooperated with the Select Subcommittee through counsel to find an alternative to her sitting for an interview, including expediting her own FOIA request for her own documents, which she provided to the Select Subcommittee voluntarily,” the lawyers wrote.
The 35-year veteran of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a subagency of the NIH, at one time served as a special assistant to Fauci and allegedly helped conceal information that may have been critical to uncovering the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
Dr. David Morens, a former NIAID senior adviser to Fauci, bragged about using a private email account to evade FOIA requests and deleting records that were sought with some “tricks” that Moore taught him.
“[I] learned from our foia [sic] lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d [sic] but before the search starts,” he wrote in a Feb. 24, 2021, email sent from his private Gmail account. “Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail [sic].” --->READ MORE HERE
The Wuhan Institute of Virology’s chief American collaborator leveraged connections in Anthony Fauci’s inner circle to survive federal scrutiny and keep millions in public funding flowing without turning over key data, new records show.
Hundreds of documents — emails obtained under Freedom of Information Act lawsuits or Congressional subpoena, as well as Congressional interview transcripts — show Fauci’s institute protected EcoHealth Alliance, which collaborated on novel coronavirus discovery and engineering projects with the Wuhan lab.
At a congressional hearing this summer, Fauci cast EcoHealth and its president Peter Daszak — who are currently under proposed debarment by the federal government — as minor and rogue grantees.
But EcoHealth was among the first grantees that Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases contacted as news of a novel coronavirus first swirled, and Daszak requested supplemental funds to respond to the crisis. In early February 2020, when NIAID began conducting weekly calls with a few experts about the novel coronavirus, Daszak was among the invitees. And at the height of pandemic confusion and controversy in the summer of 2020, EcoHealth maintained the goodwill of NIAID, which awarded EcoHealth two new grants totaling $19.8 million, weakening the leverage of other officials to obtain information from one of the US government’s only sources of insight into the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Fauci “asked how Peter is doing, as he often does, and he seemed to commiserate with him to a degree,” Fauci’s senior scientific advisor David Morens wrote in apparent reference to Daszak on Nov. 18, 2021.
At the time, officials at the National Institutes of Health’s central headquarters or “Building One” — at the demand of the Trump White House — had suspended EcoHealth’s existing NIAID grant and sought lab notebooks and unpublished genomic data as a condition of getting its funding back. This information could have shed light on the coronavirus research in Wuhan before the pandemic.
But aided by allies within NIAID, millions continued to flow to EcoHealth, and Daszak would not ask his longtime collaborators in Wuhan for information sought by the US government until 20 months later, in January 2022 — two years after the pandemic began.
Some of the NIAID officials who helped Daszak were key to approving his coronavirus research in Wuhan in the first place, including gain-of-function research, research that can enhance the pathogenicity or transmissibility of a pathogen. Some of these NIAID officials had spent years championing gain-of-function research as worth the risks, Congressional transcripts also show. Namely, Morens and another NIAID employee named “Jeff T.” were the liaisons between the scientific community and Fauci during the years-long debates about gain-of-function research leading up to the pandemic, one email shows. After the pandemic arose, Morens and another NIAID scientist named Jeffery Taubenberger wrote an editorial defending EcoHealth and referred to people concerned about gain-of-function research as “luddites” and “the complaining crowd.” --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
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