by Fred Lucas
Sen. Rand Paul, D-Ky., says there are grounds to impeach Dr. Anthony Fauci, the face of the Covid-19 pandemic in America, based on congressional testimony from a top aide to the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“The most important thing we learned was this [Dr.] David Morens, Fauci’s 20-year assistant, deliberately avoided FOIA, which is the law. Moreover, he also destroyed evidence,” Paul told The Daily Signal, referring to the Freedom of Information Act and Morens’ testimony Wednesday before a House select subcommittee.
“He would take emails and destroy them.” Paweł talked about Morens. “When he was asked about it, he said he had no idea the emails constituted federal data. Nobody is that stupid.”
Paul later added, referring to the veteran government immunologist and his staff: “I think if Fauci ordered you to destroy those records, I think he could be impeached.”
Morens, a former senior adviser to Fauci at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified before the House Oversight Subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic.
The select committee said it had evidence that Morens obstructed the House investigation into the origins of Covid-19, deleted related federal data and shared nonpublic information about the National Institutes of Health with Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based organization. York. unprofitable.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced it was cutting funding for the EcoHealth Alliance.
Fauci’s critics say the NIH used EcoHealth to fund “gain of function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, that likely led to the spread of Covid-19. The term “gain of function” describes the risky process of making a pathogen more perilous or contagious in order to test for a response.
For his part, Morens apologized to the pandemic subcommittee and said he was unaware that using personal email for business purposes violated the National Institutes of Health’s record-keeping rules.
“I shouldn’t have done it. It is inappropriate,” he told the House panel.
During the hearing, Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., asked: “Have you ever deleted any official documents?”
Morens responded: “We are in the process of defining what is a federal registry. I deleted many emails. I do it every day.”
The subcommittee’s report found that Morens undermined NIH’s operations by “passing” confidential information to Daszak at his EcoHealth Alliance.
In his comments to The Daily Signal, Paul emphasized that Fauci was involved in Morens’ testimony.
“He said, ‘Well, I think Tony deleted his too,'” Paul said. “So basically in his email he accused Tony of destroying records as well.”
Fauci, who retired at the end of 2022 after 38 years leading his agency NIH, has repeatedly said the United States has never funded gain-of-function research projects at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. He also stressed that he had never misled Congress on issues related to Covid-19.
Paul and Fauci clashed repeatedly during Senate hearings. In one of the more celebrated exchanges, the Kentucky Republican accused the immunologist of lying to Congress. Fauci responded: “Sen. “Paul, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Paul is the author of the recently released book “Fraud: The Great COVID Conspiracy,” which features Fauci’s image on the cover.
Other government employees involved in the removal of federal information should be called to testify and respond if such actions resulted from the following orders, Paul told The Daily Signal.
Circumventing the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the law requiring disclosure of federal public records, is not a crime. But destroying government records is a crime, Paul noted, and it appears this happened during a federal investigation.
“Failure to comply with FOIA and use of Gmail [instead of a government email account], you can’t put anyone in jail for this; but destroying records does [a felony]– said Paul. “It also involves destroying documentation during the investigation. We first referred the matter to the Department of Justice over a year ago. So in the middle of what is supposed to be an investigation, they destroy records.”
During Wednesday’s hearing before a House subcommittee, Morens tried to explain that he didn’t know that using a Gmail account for government work might violate the Freedom of Information Act.
“I realized that if an email came to me from Gmail or an email from NIH and I responded to it, for some reason there was a default situation where the signature I had in Gmail that said David Morens at Bethesda in the state of Maryland or something, he didn’t go out,” Morens told the House panel. “But the email from NIH was sent. I do not know how this happened. I didn’t do it consciously.”
During the hearing, Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, chairman of the select subcommittee, asked Morens, “Are you aware that destroying or attempting to destroy federal documents carries a potential penalty of both imprisonment and a fine?”
Morens replied in the negative.
“I wasn’t aware of that and I wasn’t aware that anything I deleted, like emails, was a federal record because we periodically train on federal records,” he told Wenstrup. “And the training that I remember we took defined federal records in a completely different way than you might think about it. None of them defined it as email.
Between 2014 and 2019, the U.S. government donated nearly $600,000 to the EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn used the money to pay for coronavirus research at a lab in China.
The National Institutes of Health, of which Fauci’s agency is part, sent a letter to EcoHealth Alliance in July 2020 asking about its relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. NIH also suspended the nonprofit grant pending answers to several questions.
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Fred Lucas is chief news correspondent and investigative reporting project manager for The Daily Signal.
Photo “Anthony Fauci” by Trump White House Archive CC2.0. Cover photo “U.S. Senate” by Stefan Melkisetian CC2.0.
