If it looks like FOIA evasion, walks like FOIA evasion, and quacks like FOIA evasion, it’s probably FOIA evasion
- October 9, 2024
Michael Chamberlain, Washington Reporter
If somebody ever gets around to writing a tell-all history of The National Institute of Health (NIH) and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in the COVID years, it’ll be a real page-turner. It has everything: smoking guns, a “FOIA lady who hates FOIA,” EcoHealth Alliance emails, Anthony “The Science” Fauci, and more.
There’s already more than enough material for that tome — and more coming every day. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic issued a subpoena for the “FOIA lady” to come chat with them. But we need background. Our story so far:
Dr. David Morens was a top aide to Dr. Anthony Fauci at NIH and NIAID. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Morens was obsessed with secrecy — rather an odd preoccupation for a public health bureaucrat. But obsession doesn’t always translate to facility, and the Subcommittee possesses — and has published — a trove of Morens’s emails, despite his telling colleagues in February 2021 that he learned from the NIH and NIAID’s “foia lady” how to “make emails disappear after [he was] foia’d [sic] but before the search starts.” The “foia lady” was “an old friend, Marg [Margaret] Moore, who heads our FOIA office and also hates FOIAs.” “FOIA lady” is referenced multiple times in the 155 pages of emails the Subcommittee published.
In April 2020, Morens apparently began using his private Gmail account to communicate about the pandemic, telling coworkers, “… NOTHING gets sent to me except to my gmail …” That went for “Tony” (Fauci?) too. In another email Morens wrote, “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’d delete them.” But poor Dr. Morens just isn’t cut out for this cloak and dagger stuff. In an October 2021 email he complained, “I deleted that email but I now learn that every email iever[sic] got since 1998 is captured and will be turned over, whether or not I instantly deleted it.”
Called to account by the Subcommittee, Morens said his appeals to secrecy and mention of Moore were “a joke.” And when you consider that a man worried about having a smoking gun in emails ends up leaving entire batteries of still-hot howitzers around, it is pretty funny. But that’s extent of the comedy. Morens, Fauci, and others showed nothing but contempt for the right of the public to know what the agency does in its name. Margaret Moore received the Subcommittee’s subpoena because she refused a voluntary interview. In an apparent effort to evade FOIA, Fauci’s former Chief of Staff Greg Folkers deliberately misspelled words, such as “Andersen” as “Anders$n” and “EcoHealth” as “Ec~Health,” to stymie keyword searches.