House COVID Panel Requests Access to Fauci's Private Email

The Republican congressman who leads the House probe on the origins of the coronavirus is requesting access to Dr. Anthony Fauci's personal email accounts and cellphone records, according to a press release from the House Oversight Committee.

The request by Rep. Brad Wenstrup of Ohio comes after the House panel released emails last week that Republican lawmakers said showed "a conspiracy at the highest levels" at the National Institute of Health to hide records related to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"New evidence suggests that Dr. Fauci may have used his personal email account to communicate about official government business during the COVID-19 pandemic," the COVID Select Subcommittee said on Wednesday.

House Republicans are accusing Fauci, and other former NIH officials, of trying to evade public records laws by communicating through "secret back channels." Emails already published by the lawmakers suggest senior government officials and their counterparts at U.S. research groups spoke openly about how to bypass Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) laws by communicating over private email and deleting messages on their government accounts.

"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," Dr. David Morens, a former top adviser to Fauci, wrote in 2021, according to the emails released by the House panel.

Morens emailed Dr. Peter Daszak, the former president of the EcoHealth Alliance research group, that he could "either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work...He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble," according to the panel.

Last week, Morens testified in front of the panel, which accused him of being responsible for "undermining the operations of the U.S. government, likely lying to Congress on multiple occasions, deleting federal Covid-19 records, and using his personal email account to evade FOIA."

At the hearing, Morens apologized for some emails, saying they were private correspondence among friends. He said he was never told to evade public records laws.

The panel also claimed Fauci had knowledge of Morens' "nefarious behavior" since Morens was under Fauci's leadership at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a research center that's part of the NIH.

Republicans have been investigating the origins of COVID, including EcoHealth's work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab in the Chinese city where the virus first originated in late 2019.

In 2022, the NIH terminated its EcoHealth partnership because the nonprofit "had not been able to hand over lab notebooks and other records from its Wuhan partner that relate to controversial experiments involving modified bat viruses, despite multiple requests."

In 2023, an audit by the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services found that the NIH did not "effectively monitor or take timely action to address" problems with EcoHealth.

Fauci is scheduled to testify before the House panel on Monday. He has until June 12 to provide lawmakers with documents regarding the Wuhan Institute of Virology, EcoHealth and the origins of the COVID-19 virus.