NIH 'FOIA Lady' Who Taught Fauci Advisers How to 'Make Emails Disappear' Will Invoke Fifth House COVID Subpoena

A National Institutes of Health (NIH) Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) public liaison assigned to a senior advisor to Dr. Anthony Fauci, who taught 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 told the House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic that she would invoke the Fifth Amendment and her right against self-incrimination — but she was still issued a subpoena on Monday to do so about the possibility of testifying, records violations.

“Instead of using the NIH's FOIA office to ensure the transparency and accountability the American people deserve, it appears that 'FOIA Lady' Margaret Moore has supported efforts to circumvent federal records laws,” said Committee Chairman Brad Wenstrup said in a statement.

“Your alleged plan 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, said in their August letter that their client helped the committee in other ways.

“MS. Moore has worked in an advisory capacity with the Select Subcommittee to find an alternative to her participation in an interview, including expediting her own FOIA request for her own documents that she voluntarily provided to the Select Subcommittee,” wrote the lawyers.

The 35-year veteran of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a sub-agency of the NIH, once served as a special assistant to Fauci and allegedly helped hide information that was crucial to uncovering the origins of SARS could -CoV-2.

Dr. David Morens, a former senior NIAID adviser to Fauci, bragged about using a private email account to avoid FOIA requests and some “tricks” Moore taught him to delete searched records.

“(I) learned from our foia (sic) lady here how to make emails disappear after I foia (sic) but before the search begins,” he wrote in a Feb. 24 email 2021, which was sent from his personal Gmail account. “Also, I deleted most of those previous emails after sending them to Gmail (sic).”

“We are all smart enough to know that we should never have smoking guns, and if we had them we wouldn't put them in emails, and if we found them we would delete them,” Morens said on June 16, 2020 also.

The documents, which congressional investigators have urgently sought for years, are central to uncovering NIH officials' knowledge of a controversial $4 million NIH grant, more than half a million of which came directly went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, based in Wuhan, the city where the coronavirus pandemic began at the end of 2019.

Another May 2021 email received by the Select Subcommittee indicates that the NIH Office of General Counsel instructs its FOIA office “not to publish anything related to EcoHealth Alliance/WIV.” and refers to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In October of that year, the NIH admitted that it had funded bat coronavirus experiments in the Wuhan lab through the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, but dismissed the risks involved.

EcoHealth President Dr. Peter Daszak backed Morens in an email that same month, demanding that “the NIH FoIA (sic) group actually help reduce the scope and make some useful changes” regarding the grant.

The resulting chimeric virus — which was 10,000 times more infectious — was “genetically distant” from SARS-CoV-2, according to then-NIH director Francis Collins, but another EcoHealth proposal that was never funded is seen as a potential roadmap how the virus could have originated.

Morens was later subjected to an internal NIH investigation and was placed on leave after the emails were discovered.

“Dr. Morens never testified that Ms. Moore directed him to delete documents or avoid FOIA,” Moore's attorneys, who declined further comment, said in their letter last month.

“That was a joke,” Morens described the email — and other highly inappropriate comments he made under oath to federal grantees and colleagues during a May 22 hearing. “She didn’t give me any advice on how to avoid FOIA.”

Wenstrup (R-Ohio) told reporters in May that he believed Morens could be criminally responsible for several of his statements at the hearing — and had already made demonstrably false statements in previous transcribed interviews.

Fauci later denied any knowledge of Morens' behavior and distanced himself from his former senior adviser of 24 years.

“The Dr. Morens question discussed by this committee violates NIH guidelines,” he told members of the House COVID-19 subcommittee in a hearing in June.

Wenstrup said that “holding Ms. Moore accountable for every role she played in undermining the American trust is a step toward improving the lack of accountability and transparency that is rapidly spreading across many agencies of our federal government.”

“The Select Subcommittee is working tirelessly to ensure that federal health officials are never again unaccountable to the American people or feel empowered to intentionally undermine our elected government.”