Anthony Fauci’s top adviser, David Morens, once bragged about “how to make emails disappear,” emails obtained by a congressional subpoena revealed.
Morens — who works at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — served as an adviser for Fauci for over two decades. It has been disclosed that he boasted about making emails “disappear” in correspondence with EcoHealth Alliance’s (EHA) Peter Daszak. EcoHealth Alliance is notable for receiving a grant before the pandemic that subsequently funded coronavirus studies at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
“I learned from our FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] lady here how to make emails disappear after I am FOIA’d but before the search starts,” Morens told Daszak, providing advice on how to conceal emails and asserting that they are “all safe.”
“Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to Gmail,” he mentioned, adding, “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 would delete them,” he continued.
This disclosure has heightened concerns among lawmakers on the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. They worry that such officials may have hidden more evidence to avoid accountability, reflecting a significant lack of transparency.
Additionally, this aligns with findings the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released in 2023, where Morens admitted using his personal email instead of a government email “because my NIH [National Institutes of Health] email is FOIA’d constantly.”
“’Just send to any of my addresses and I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times,” Morens reportedly wrote.
This revelation comes following the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) suspending funding to EcoHealth Alliance. In a memo detailing this decision, the HHS stated that EcoHealth “did not adequately monitor WIV’s compliance, and, therefore, its own compliance, with the terms and conditions of its grant award.”
“Therefore, given the issues regarding the management of EHA’s grant awards and subawards, I have determined that the immediate suspension of EHA is necessary to protect the public interest,” it notes.
HHS suspension and debarment official Henrietta Brisbon wrote in a separate letter, “HHS believes there is adequate evidence in the record for this debarment cause and that immediate action is necessary to protect the public interest.”
