House GOP presses NIH on Fauci aide who used private email to avoid COVID-19 scrutiny
Gabrielle M. Etzel
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Exclusive — House Republicans are putting pressure on National Institutes of Health acting Director Lawrence Tabak for transparency on the internal investigation of a top aide’s use of private emails to avoid congressional and media scrutiny on the origins of COVID-19.
David Morens, senior scientific adviser of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and top aide to Anthony Fauci, used his personal email account for NIH business because his work address is “constantly” subjected to Freedom of Information Act requests, according to his statements in a September 2021 email.
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In the email, he explicitly stated that he would “delete anything [he doesn’t] want to see in the New York Times” and that his personal email was hacked “probably by these [gain-of-function] assholes,” referring to people who had raised the possibility that the virus was leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.
Another email obtained by Congress from Morens in July 2021 indicated that he was reluctant to speak publicly about the origins of the virus and that, in his estimation, Fauci did not “want his fingerprints on origin stories.”
Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) wrote to Tabak on Friday saying that his subcommittee “found it very concerning that a senior U.S. scientist working on the COVID-19 pandemic was using his personal e-mail to purposely avoid transparency.”
The letter sent Friday is a follow-up to a request sent in June for a series of documents from Morens regarding the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and the NIH’s response to the outbreak.
Following the beginning of the congressional investigation into Morens, the National Archives and Records Administration began its own inquiry into Morens’s record-keeping, sending a letter to NIH Records Officer Anthony Gibson on July 10. Gibson responded to NARA’s request on Aug. 9, saying that the NIH had conducted an internal investigation and found “no evidence that any federal records within their custody have been prematurely destroyed,” according to Wenstrup’s account.
Wenstrup’s letter requests from Tabak “the details of the specific actions NIH” to address Morens’s conduct as well as all communications from Morens produced for the NARA inquiry. These documents are requested no later than Sept. 28.
The further investigation into Morens comes on the heels of Congress diving more deeply into the COVID-19 investigation as the House returned to the Capitol this week.
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On Thursday, the House Oversight and House Energy and Commerce committees, which share jurisdiction regarding oversight of public health entities, threatened to subpoena Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra for his department’s lack of transparency and compliance with the congressional investigation.
Wenstrup also announced this week that a whistleblower from within the CIA gave a transcribed interview to the subcommittee regarding potential bribery influencing the agency’s assessment that SARS-CoV-2 did not come from a lab-related incident.