Fauci Aide Sparks New Investigation

A "potential conspiracy at the highest levels of the National Institutes of Health" is being investigated, according to an announcement Tuesday.

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, led by Republican Rep. Brad Wenstrup, announced the investigation is regarding the use of encrypted private email accounts, forwarded confidential information, and the intentional misspelling of words to avoid the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

The new investigation comes after Dr. Anthony Fauci's senior adviser, Dr. David Morens, recently testified and released thousands of emails and documents to the committee. The emails suggested that Morens deleted government emails, sought help to navigate FOIA protocol, conducted official business on his personal email and avoided "public transparency related to the COVID-19 pandemic."

Fauci, as the nation's top infectious-disease expert and former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), led the emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in 2020. Over the years, he has faced public backlash over mask and vaccine mandates and theories about the virus' origin and subsequent alleged cover-ups. Several GOP leaders believe the virus originated from a scientific lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China—not through species-to-species transmission, a widely supported theory in the scientific community.

Morens' lawyer, Timothy Belevetz, told Newsweek "I have no comment" in an email Wednesday afternoon. Newsweek reached out to Wenstrup for additional comment via email on Wednesday.

Wenstrup sent two letters on Wednesday in relation to the new investigation: one to NIH Director Dr. Monica Bertagnolli and another to Archivist of the United States, Colleen Shogan.

To Bertagnolli, Wenstrup outlined the select subcommittee's findings from Morens' emails and testimony, attaching screenshots of Morens' emails. The committee included a screenshot of an email from Morens on February 24, 2021, which says, "I learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia'd but before the search starts, so I think we are all safe." The letter alleges that the NIH FOIA office "may have been complicit in the destruction of official records."

In addition, it cites several examples of NIAID employees using "apparent intentional misspellings to avoid FOIA searches," using Fauci's former chief of staff, Greg Folkers, as an example, where he wrote "...I think comes from Ec~Health" instead of "EcoHealth."

EcoHealth Alliance and its president, Peter Daszak, have also recently come under scrutiny. EcoHealth Alliance is a former NIH grant recipient, and one of Morens' emails shows potential bias and influence when he asks for a "kick-back" regarding the NIH grant. Earlier this month, Daszak and the organization were suspended and proposed for debarment.

The letter to Bertagnolli concludes by stating that "this evidence taken together suggests a conspiracy at the highest levels of NIH and NIAID to avoid public transparency regarding the COVID-19 pandemic." The letter requests a staff-level briefing no later than June 4, 2024.

In the second letter to Shogan, the head and chief administrator of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Wenstrup requests a "staff-level briefing regarding the breadth and status of NARA's open investigation into Dr. Morens's alleged disposition of federal records." The letter states that the committee is concerned that the NIH did not "conduct a fulsome or thorough investigation and that many government records have not been properly captured."

In a press release on Tuesday, the committee writes, "Although the NIH claims it conducted a thorough investigation into Dr. Morens, these evasive tactics — along with previously uncovered evidence that Dr. Morens began using a Proton Mail account after his Gmail was probed by the Select Subcommittee — raise serious concerns that the NIH's investigation missed important information."

A post on X, formerly Twitter, by the subcommittee reads: "Did @NIH's 'FOIA lady' teach Dr. Fauci's team how to hide COVID information?" adding that "...all in an apparent effort to thwart federal law."

Corrected 5/30/2024 at 10:00 a.m. ET: Corrected Shogan's title.