The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic reviewed more than 30,000 pages of subpoenaed emails and documents from Dr. David Morens, Dr. Anthony Fauci's former senior adviser, and WWL's Newell Normand couldn't believe how much turned up in the records -- and how little it's being covered by the media.
Notably, Morens wrote explicitly about dodging Freedom of Information Act rules, which is important since many in the GOP believe Fauci hasn't been truthful about the origins of COVID and some proof of that could turn up in his electronic communications.
Morens urged people to contact his private email address rather than his government-issued account, and seemed to infer that Fauci was doing the same. He wrote: "PS, I forgot to say there is no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony [Fauci] on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble."
Per Newsweek, many of Morens' emails were sent to or copied Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based nonprofit that received a $3.4 million U.S. federal grant in 2014, of which about $600,000 was sent to the Wuhan virology lab to study bat coronaviruses.
Fauci has long denied that the lab leaked the virus that ended up wreaking havoc on the world.
"They're digging down into the minutia to cover the lie, apply upon lie upon lie that they articulated to the public each and every day, and more importantly, to Congress. Look, anyone else but these folks would be in jail already. There's no doubt about that. I mean, it's unbelievable," Normand said.
After the hearing a few days ago on Fauci, the Republican-led subcommitee put out a press release saying Dr. Morens undermined the operations of the U.S. government by unlawfully deleting federal COVID-19 records, using a personal email to avoid the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and "repeatedly acting unbecoming of a federal employee."
The findings left Newell reeling. "One has to ask what are they hiding? What's their concerns? What are you afraid of? If you're on the up and up and you're communicating about one of the most significant crises that we've had in modern times, why are you deleting emails?" Normand asked.
Sen. Rand Paul has taken on Dr. Fauci and to many eyes looked a little kooky in the process, as he suggested Fauci and the NIH could be partly responsible for the pandemic and the deaths of 4 million people worldwide. The two have had more than one heated public exchange, including one where Fauci told the Kentucky Republican "You don't know what you're talking about."
But the findings of the hearing seem to prove there's something to what he's said.
"A lot of the observations that Senator Rand Paul has made from the very beginning -- and I have to admit, I was a little skeptical of some of what he was saying -- (because) I wanted to put faith in what our public health officials were saying. I still believe a lot of what they said was a truth, but I also believe that a lot of what they said, they were shielding the public, knowing that the story that they were telling was very nuanced. And when you read stuff like this, what it leads me to believe today is that they were trying to pull the wool over our eyes about the science, about the six feet separation, about how a lot of this actually worked. How the vaccines worked."
Dr. Fauci himself is set to testify before the committee on June 3 about his role in overseeing our nation’s pandemic response, pandemic-era polices, and his narrative about the origins of COVID-19.
"And I'm certain that they are going to be asking significant questions about where his emails are, whether he coordinated with, Dr. Morens ... I'm gonna be quite honest with you, how this guy is not in jail is beyond me. He readily admits to deleting and destroying emails, records, communications. Basically, to cover up and preserve the NIH and others and some of their subcontractors like EcoHealth, knowing all the while that they were funding things that they had actually lied to Congress about. It's going to be interesting to see where this ends up."