Dr. David Morens Bragged ‘How to Make Emails Disappear’
A top aide to Anthony Fauci bragged about “how to make emails disappear” and removing “smoking evidence” to avoid scrutiny, lawmakers investigating the origins of COVID-19 revealed Thursday.
The shocking comments came from government health official Dr. David Morens, Fauci’s top adviser from 1998 to 2022.
Some of Morens’ emails were obtained by congressional subpoena and were read by House Oversight Chairman James Comer at a hearing Thursday as part of lawmakers’ investigation into the theory that Covid came from of a leak in a Chinese laboratory.
Morens, who works at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), wrote about deleting his communications to avoid releasing them to the public under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
He was writing to Peter Daszak, whose organization EcoHealth Alliance saw its federal funding suspended this week for its role in contracting controversial coronavirus research to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“I learned from our FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear after I’m under FOIA but before the search begins,” Morens wrote to Daszak. ‘So I think we’re all safe. Also, I deleted most of those old emails after sending them to Gmail.’
“We are all smart enough to know that we should never have incontrovertible evidence,” Morens wrote in a later message. ‘And if we did, we wouldn’t include them in the emails. And if we found them, we would eliminate them.”
Morens was a senior advisor to Dr. Anthony Fauci from 1998 to 2022.
In the damning email, Morens was writing to Peter Daszak (pictured), whose organization EcoHealth Alliance saw its federal funding suspended this week for its role in contracting controversial coronavirus research to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Some of Morens’ emails were obtained by congressional subpoena and were read at a hearing Thursday. This particular email shows that Morens used her Gmail account to contact Peter Daszak.
Fauci and his NIAID advisers came into the spotlight after it emerged that the agency funded the EcoHealth Alliance to conduct research that included experiments that altered coronaviruses to make them more dangerous.
EcoHealth outsourced the work to the Chinese lab in Wuhan and, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, which withdrew its funding on Wednesday, failed to properly supervise it, potentially leading to an accident that sparked a global pandemic in 2020.
Congressman Brad Wenstrup, chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, is now concerned that Morens and Daszak have attempted to cover their tracks in the scandal by expunging federal records.
His committee released emails last year showing Morens discussing using his personal email instead of government email and deleting communications to avoid scrutiny.
The top official at NIAID, which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), wrote in an email to Daszak in 2021 that he communicates through Gmail “because my NIH email is constantly subject to FOIA.”
“Just send it to any of my addresses and I will delete anything you don’t want to see in the New York Times,” Morens wrote, according to the lawmakers.
Wenstrup has issued two subpoenas to Morens: one for all of his Gmail correspondence about the origins of COVID-19 and another to force him to testify before the committee on May 22.
DailyMail.com understands that Morens handed over around 30,000 emails to the committee on April 30.
Morens’ emails were obtained by congressional subpoena and were read by House Oversight Chairman James Comer at a hearing Thursday.
Congressman Brad Wenstrup has issued two subpoenas to Morens: one for all of his Gmail correspondence about the origins of COVID-19 and another to force him to testify before the committee on May 22.
Two shocking emails were revealed at a committee hearing Thursday in which former acting NIH director Lawrence Tabak testified.
After reading Morens’ messages about deleting communications, Comer asked Tabak, “Is that consistent with NIH document retention policies?”
“It’s not,” he replied.
The nonprofit health research group US Right to Know has been fighting the NIH in court to release officials’ emails about the origins of COVID-19.
“Over the last 31 years of public interest work, I have never seen a federal agency stymie public records requests as much as the NIH,” Right to Know CEO Gary Ruskin told DailyMail.com.
He said the NIH is a key culprit in the US government for trying to “hide or bury key information about the origins of COVID.”
‘The conduct of the NIH has been abysmal and reprehensible. And now the Select Subcommittee is starting to get to the bottom of how this evasion actually happened,” he added.
‘(Morens) was forced to hand over thousands of emails to the Select Subcommittee. He will soon testify about deleting emails and using a Gmail account to conduct official business.
“Once that testimony is complete, Congress and the public will have a better idea of what consequences are appropriate for their crimes against our democracy.”
