A former senior aide for Anthony Fauci, the retired National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, used Gmail instead of his government email to conceal his communications.
Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R., Ohio) released findings Thursday from an investigation by his committee, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, that show potential violations of federal record-keeping laws by David Morens, senior scientific adviser at NIAID.
Morens admitted in emails obtained by Wenstrup that he used his private Gmail account to hide communications in case of Freedom of Information Act requests.
"In one e-mail you write that you ‘always try to communicate over gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly,’" Wenstrup wrote to Morens in a letter requesting his personal email communications. "You continue, ‘[d]on’t worry, just send to any of my addresses and I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.’"
In another email, Morens said Fauci asked him to participate in a media interview about the origins of COVID-19 because, Morens speculated, "Tony doesn't want his fingerprints on origin stories."
In that interview, according to Wenstrup, Morens implied against the likelihood of the lab leak theory, which has been embraced to some extent by all U.S. intelligence agencies.
Wenstrup said the findings "raise additional serious concerns about your objectivity while stationed in the Office of the Director of NIAID."
In March, reports revealed Fauci commissioned a study to disprove the lab leak theory and later pretended to not know the study's authors.
Fauci cited the February 2020 report, called "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2," during a White House press conference on April 17, 2020, where he pretended to be unfamiliar with the authors.
But Fauci held a call with the four authors in February 2020 to discuss new evidence that the pandemic emerged from a leak at China's Wuhan Institute of Virology. The authors sent Fauci the paper, which claimed that COVID likely emerged from an animal-to-human infection, for edits before its publication, the New York Post reported.