A National Institutes of Health (NIH) public liaison for Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests — who taught a senior adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci how to “make emails disappear” — is refusing to testify before a House committee investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In an Aug. 5 letter signed by her lawyers, Margaret Moore informed the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic that she would plead the Fifth Amendment and her right against self-incrimination — but was still handed a subpoena on Monday to testify about the potential records violations.
“Instead of using NIH’s FOIA office to provide the transparency and accountability that the American people deserve, it appears that ‘FOIA Lady’ Margaret Moore assisted efforts to evade federal record keeping laws,” said Committee Chairman Brad Wenstrup in a statement.
“Her alleged scheme to help NIH officials delete COVID-19 records and use their personal emails to avoid FOIA is appalling and deserves a thorough investigation.”
Moore’s attorneys William Vigen and Ronald Jacobs, who specialize in government investigations and white-collar criminal defense, in their August letter said their client has helped the committee in other ways.
“Ms. Moore has cooperated with the Select Subcommittee through counsel to find an alternative to her sitting for an interview, including expediting her own FOIA request for her own documents, which she provided to the Select Subcommittee voluntarily,” the lawyers wrote.
The 35-year veteran of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a subagency of the NIH, at one time served as a special assistant to Fauci and allegedly helped conceal information that may have been critical to uncovering the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
Dr. David Morens, a former NIAID senior adviser to Fauci, bragged about using a private email account to evade FOIA requests and deleting records that were sought with some “tricks” that Moore taught him.
“[I] learned from our foia [sic] lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d [sic] but before the search starts,” he wrote in a Feb. 24, 2021, email sent from his private Gmail account. “Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail [sic].”
“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,” Morens also said a June 16, 2020.
The documents, which have been highly sought for years by congressional investigators, are central to uncovering NIH officials knowledge of a controversial $4 million NIH grant, more than half-a-million of which was funneled directly to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in the city where the coronavirus pandemic started in late 2019.
Another May 2021 email obtained by the select subcommittee show NIH’s general counsel’s office instructing its FOIA office “not release anything having to do with EcoHealth Alliance/WIV,” referring to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
By October of that year, NIH acknowledged that via the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance it had funded experimented on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab, though it dismissed that there were risks involved.
EcoHealth President Dr. Peter Daszak that same month leaned on Morens in an email to have “the NIH FoIA [sic] group actually help reduce the scope and make some useful redactions” about the grant.
The resulting chimeric virus — which was 10,000 times more infectious — was “genetically far distant from SARS-CoV-2,” according to then-NIH Director Francis Collins, but another EcoHealth proposal, which was never funded, is seen as a potential roadmap to how the virus could have been created.
Morens was later subject to an internal NIH investigation and put on administrative leave after the emails were uncovered.
“Dr. Morens never testified that Ms. Moore instructed him on how to delete documents or avoid FOIA,” said Moore’s attorneys, who declined further comment, in their letter last month.
“That was a joke,” Morens characterized the email — and other highly inappropriate remarks he made to federal grantees and colleagues — while under oath during a May 22 hearing. “She didn’t give me advice about how to avoid FOIA.”
Wenstrup (R-Ohio) told reporters in May he believed Morens may be criminally liable for several of his statements in the hearing — and had already provided demonstrably false testimony in earlier transcribed interviews.
Fauci later denied any knowledge of Morens’ conduct and distanced himself from his former senior adviser of 24 years.
“The Dr. Morens issue that was discussed by this committee violates NIH policy,” he told House COVID Subcommittee members in a June hearing.
Wenstrup said that “holding Ms. Moore accountable for any role she played in undermining American trust is a step towards improving the lack of accountability and absence of transparency rapidly spreading across many agencies within our federal government.”
“The Select Subcommittee is working tirelessly to ensure that federal health officials are never again unaccountable to the American people nor feel empowered to willfully undermine our elected government.”