A scandal of massive proportions has arisen over personnel of the NIH illegally conspiring to delete crucial emails involving the actual origin of the devastating COVID pandemic.
It was an obvious attempt to frustrate citizens seeking to use the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) of 1966—designed to allow regular citizens to learn what their government is doing—to find out where the virus originated and who is to blame.
There are exemptions to the FOIA, but the act does not exempt work emails of government officials, which must be provided to citizens who request them.
And yet, concealing government emails and correspondence is exactly what it has been discovered a group of NIH personnel were doing—creating a conspiracy which illegally strikes against not only the intent of FOIA, but the very spirit of the principle that citizens have a right to transparency of government.
Now those NIH personnel’s actions are the subject of a federal investigation.
To date, the World Health Organization estimates that 3.4 million people were killed by the deadly virus. But just how this monster was able to escape from a laboratory and attack humanity has never been fully settled or revealed.
“I learned the tricks last year from an old friend, Marg Moore, who heads our FOIA office and also hates FOIAs.”
Emails from the personal account of Dr. David Morens, once a senior adviser to former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, show obvious, extensive attempts to obstruct the kind of transparency that FOIA demands.
Morens emailed: “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.”
“Plus, I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to Gmail,” Dr. Morens added, referring to his personal Gmail account.
Even more sinister, he wrote: “I have spoken to our FOIA folks” and “I should be safe from future FOIAs.” He added: “Don’t ask how….”
He also said: “I learned the tricks last year from an old friend, Marg Moore, who heads our FOIA office and also hates FOIAs.”
Get that? The “head” of the NIH’s FOIA office “hates” the FOIA.
So why is she in that position?
“Mine was erased long ago (I verified that today) and I feel pretty sure that Tony’s [Dr. Anthony Fauci] was too,” Morens continued. “The best way to avoid FOIA hassles is to delete all emails when you learn a subject is getting sensitive.
“PS, I forgot to say there is no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private Gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”
But apparently Morens wasn’t that smart. The subcommittee subpoenaed his emails, which cracked the whole case wide open.
These emails were sent to Dr. Gerald Keusch, a scientist and former NIH official, as well as Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), a private virus-hunting, government-paid group that lawmakers believe was involved in COVID’s escape through work they were doing with Chinese researchers.
“Why were you trying to hide this from members of Congress, from the government, from the public?”
The plot recently thickened when the Biden administration banned funding to EHA—funding which had amounted to $2.6 million last year.
“I have determined that the immediate suspension of EHA is necessary to protect the public interest,” Henrietta K. Brisbon, a Health Department official, wrote.
On October 4, the “FOIA lady,” Margaret Moore, former FOIA public liaison for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), pleaded the Fifth Amendment when testifying before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
That’s a tactic defendants often use to avoid incriminating themselves. It usually carries an assumption of at least some guilt.
The subpoena Moore received notes, “Moreover, the Select Subcommittee also requested your testimony, and your refusal to testify demonstrates a lack of cooperation.”
“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 recordkeeping laws,” Committee Chairman Rep. Brad Wenstrup of Ohio said.
“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.”
The coverup just keeps getting deeper and deeper.
In one of his emails, Morens wrote, “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.”
Yet even Dr. Fauci, who had Dr. Morens as his senior adviser for 24 years, threw him under the bus, telling the committee he had no knowledge of Morens’ behavior.
“The Dr. Morens issue that was discussed by this committee violates NIH policy,” Dr. Fauci said.
“With respect to his recent testimony before this subcommittee, I knew nothing of Dr. Moren’s actions regarding Dr. Daszak, EcoHealth or his emails,” Fauci added.
“It is important to point out for the record that despite his title, and even though he was helpful to me in writing scientific papers, Dr. Morens was not an adviser to me on institute policy or other substantive issues.”
The Church of Scientology has been a relentless advocate of FOIA from its inception.
He stopped an inch short of claiming he never knew the man who was his top adviser for more than two decades.
Morens is now on administrative leave from the NIH.
During a committee hearing, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis of New York told Morens, “That’s what we’re trying to understand: Why were you trying to hide this from members of Congress, from the government, from the public?”
Exactly. As we asked before: What were they trying to hide? What were they afraid the American people would learn?
It’s the question that FOIA was created to answer.
The Church of Scientology has been a relentless advocate of FOIA from its inception, and was even acknowledged by former director of the US Justice Department’s Office of Privacy and Information Appeals, Quinlan J. Shea Jr., for its work endeavoring “to shine more light on government.”
The Church and its fellow champions of freedom of information “have issued publications on how to use the FOIA, have litigated in the courts and have testified before numerous congressional hearings calling for more openness,” Shea said.
And with good reason.
“Democracy depends exclusively on the informedness of the individual citizen,” Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard wrote.
