Fauci will face fresh questions about deliberate attempts to hide information from the public
Anthony Fauci will answer questions before Congress today, after one of his former advisors admitted deleting emails to stifle Freedom of Information requests about the pandemic response.
Fauci will sit before the US House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic at 10am local time. Members will ask him questions about revelations that his colleague Dr David Morens deliberately deleted emails after FOIA requests.
Morens bragged in emails about how he had learned “to make emails disappear.” He said that his Gmail account was “now safe from FOIA [the Freedom of Information Act].”
“We are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns,” Morens wrote in another email. “[A]nd if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them.”
He also described how Fauci employed a private email address and a “secret back channel,” again to hide information that might be subject to FOIA requests.
The committee has also examined emails from other aides to Fauci that feature letter substitutions that appear to be deliberate attempts to frustrate FOIA requests, which are usually conducted on the basis of keyword searches. In one email, for example, a scientist’s name was written “anders$n” instead of “Andersen”, and in another “EcoHealth” was written as “Ec~Health.”
In testimony before the Subcommittee, Morens maintained that he was joking and that he did not recall sending any messages to Fauci’s personal account.
The Subcommittee is particularly interested in emails between Fauci and Peter Daszak, head of the EcoHealth Alliance, which was used to fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, including research on bat coronaviruses.
Fauci has been asked by the committee to provide all documents and communications from his personal email and cellphone related to the lab.
In a prepared statement, Fauci has denied knowing anything about Morens deleting emails. He also denied that Mores was an advisor to him, and said he has “never conducted official business via my personal email.”
Fauci will also face questions about testimony he have in January to the Subcommittee, after he claimed that the social-distancing restrictions “just sort of appeared” without any real justification, and that no gain-of-function experiments were performed at the Wuhan lab.
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