The more we learn about the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Anthony Fauci's involvement in it, the more it stinks to high heaven, particularly when it comes to the governmental response to the COVID pandemic. We previously found out (subscription required) that Fauci and his merry band had been at best making things up on the fly or simply lying to the public. That was particularly true of "social distancing," which was entirely fabricated with no studies supporting it, as well as the supposed efficacy of the mRNA vaccines. But now, additional evidence has emerged showing that some of the people at NIH were intentionally deleting records to avoid leaving a "paper trail" and working to thwart the FOIA process when journalists and citizens sought records explaining everything that went on, including all of the dubious activity taking place at the Wuhan laboratory. This incident further demonstrates that the entire FOIA system is in need of an overhaul. (NY Post)

A top adviser at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) deleted records critical to uncovering the origins of COVID-19 — and used a “secret back channel” to help Dr. Anthony Fauci and a federal grantee that funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, evade transparency.

NIH senior adviser Dr. David Morens improperly conducted official government business from his private email account and solicited help from the NIH’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) office to dodge records requests, according to emails revealed in a memo by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which The Post obtained Wednesday.

“[I] learned from our foia [sic] lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d [sic] but before the search starts,” Morens wrote in a Feb. 24, 2021, email. “Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail [sic].”

Perhaps surprisingly, I first learned of this report while listening to a recent podcast covering the Congressional investigation into UFOs. That topic generates a vast number of FOIA requests, and I've sent more than a few of them myself. The results are almost uniformly disappointing. The podcast host brought this up as a possible explanation of why the public gets so little transparency from the government, and these problems obviously reach much further than just the Pentagon's Public Affairs Office.

As noted above, Dr. David Morens was a senior adviser at NIH who worked directly with Anthony "Tony" Fauci. In the leaked documents, he confesses that he conducted a great deal of business using his private Gmail account rather than his NIH government email address. When something sketchy did wind up in his work email, he learned from a woman working on FOIA responses how to make his emails "disappear" before a search could find them if he was hit with a request.

In a separate message to his contacts who were involved in the Wuhan lab work, he stressed that he wanted "NOTHING" sent to him except to his private Gmail account. Other damning confessions are included. The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic now believes it is possible that both Morens and Fauci were involved in "a conspiracy amongst the highest levels” of the agency to “hide” and potentially “destroy official records regarding the origins of COVID-19.”

This clearly isn't some sort of conspiracy theory and the committee has what amounts to the closest thing to a smoking gun that we're likely to see. Who would go out of their way to destroy official records (which is a federal crime, by the way) and intentionally avoid using their government email account unless they knew they were doing something wrong? Morens even went out of his way to brag about this to his colleagues. In another message, he reveals that Fauci was also using a private email address. (Emphasis added)

“[T]here is no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail [sic], or hand it to him at work or at his house,” Fauci’s adviser wrote in an April 21, 2021, email. “He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

This is an example of a government official blatantly violating the rules regarding transparency and official records, then laughing about it with his friends. Whenever "Tony" and his colleagues were discussing "stuff that could cause trouble" (presumably including the gain-of-function experiments at Wuhan), they would just take the conversation to private email accounts and/or destroy the records.

If the people in Congress, particularly the members of the UAP caucus, are honestly interested in government transparency for all things not legitimately endangering national security, they should prioritize fixing the FOIA system. If they don't have enough people to respond to all FOIA requests in a timely fashion, give them the funding to hire and train more. (My friend John Greenewald Jr. has waited as long as fourteen years to close out a FOIA request, which is obscene.) The training should include full familiarity with the law regarding FOIA and what their responsibilities are. A full investigation needs to be launched to see how many FOIA responders might be out there like Morens' "friends" who are teaching officials how to destroy documents and avoid detection. That is precisely the opposite of how FOIA is supposed to work and it's a criminal act.

I'll get down off my high horse now and return to business as usual. This is just a pet peeve of mine and it's a situation that Congress could legitimately fix to make things work better in Washington without costing us a massive amount of money. I hope you will consider contacting your representatives about this.