The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has requested access to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s personal email and phone records, with the panel’s chairman saying the record request relates to new evidence suggesting that Dr. Fauci used a “secret back channel” to communicate about official COVID-19 information.
“The Select Subcommittee possesses communications from Dr. Morens in which he suggests he sent you official congressional correspondence related to COVID-19 to your personal e-mail account and that he had a ’secret back channel' to you,” Mr. Wenstrup wrote in the letter to Dr. Fauci.
Mr. Wenstrup gave Dr. Fauci until June 12 to provide the requested records, adding in the letter that communications already in the committee’s possession indicate that Dr. Morens was not the only official from Dr. Fauci’s time as NIAID director who took steps to avoid transparency.
“We are concerned that current and former NIAID officials have and are continuing to seriously undermine public trust by concealing vital information from the American people,” the committee chair wrote.
As part of its investigation into the origins of COVID-19, the committee is looking into EcoHealth’s activities at WIV (the Chinese lab at the center of the lab leak theory of the outbreak), ongoing questions about the facilitation of risky gain-of-function research, and efforts to by various officials to obstruct or delay the committee’s oversight efforts.
‘Secret Back Channel’
Dr. Morens’ emails were obtained by the House committee on the coronavirus pandemic and released to the public on May 22, with a committee staff memo detailing allegations of wrongdoing and illegal activity associated with the contents of the records.In one email, Dr. Morens advised friends to try to send emails to his Gmail address.
“But if something goes to my govt mail by accident it’s OK, I have spoken to our FOIA folks and am managing my stuff after emails are sent or received, such that I should be safe from future FOIAs,” he wrote.
In another message, Dr. Morens wrote that, “I learned from our FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear after I am FOIA'd but before the search starts, so I think we are all safe.”
Dr. Morens wrote in another message: “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.”
It’s illegal under federal law for any custodian of a public record to “willfully and unlawfully” destroy any such records, under penalty of up to three years in prison.
Dr. Morens defended his actions during the committee hearing, saying he wasn’t aware that the emails were federal records and that he believed the National Institutes of Health records system preserved emails in a way that made them impossible to delete.
In an email from Dr. Morens to EcoHealth Alliance president Dr. Peter Daszak, Dr. Morens wrote that, “I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work” and that Dr. Fauci is “too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”
In another message, Dr. Morens referred to a “’secret‘ back channel’ to Dr. Fauci.
“I suggested Arthur try to interview Tony directly and connected him to our ’secret' back channel,” Dr. Morens wrote in the May 1, 2021 message.
During the committee hearing last week, Dr. Morens testified that he didn’t remember if he ever sent information related to COVID-19 to Dr. Fauci’s personal email.
Asked about the secret back channel during the hearing, Dr. Morens said that the term was used as a joke.
