What’s a little Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) evasion between friends? For Anthony Fauci’s inner circle, it seemed to be the name of the game, according to a series of recent explosive congressional hearings and revelations.

Doctor and Senior Advisor at National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases David Morens and Fauci’s lesser-known former chief of staff, Greg Folkers, are at the center of the latest controversy. Both corresponded extensively to or about EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based nonprofit that performed gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and its infamous president Peter Daszak, who is fresh off an incoming debarment from the Biden administration for both him personally and for the organization he helms. 

Daszak and his organization famously funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s research on bat coronaviruses in conjunction with the Chinese government and with National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant money from Fauci. Daszak was the sole American that the Chinese government allowed to visit Wuhan as part of the World Health Organization’s investigative team. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Daszak was an early proponent of the widely-debunked conspiracy that COVID-19 may have originated in Thailand, Japan, or Cambodia. “Ecohealth Alliance is already starting our work in tracing their origins,” he told the Chinese Communist Party propaganda outlet, Global Times in February 2021. 

What seems to have prompted a flurry of letters from the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic last week, to the directors of the NIH and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), was in part Morens’s e-mail traffic about what he called the NIH’s “foia lady,” who taught him “how to make emails disappear after i am FOIA’d but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe. Plus i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”

Morens also wrote that 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.”

“I ask you both that NOTHING gets sent to me except to my gmail [sic],” Morens said on another occasion to Daszak. What was Morens’s goal in conducting so much official business on his gmail? 

Two months after EcoHealth Alliance’s Wuhan grant was originally suspended, Morens wrote that “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.”

Unsurprisingly, the Republicans on the COVID Select Committee wrote to NIH’s leadership requesting a briefing on “NIH’s document retention, transparency, FOIA, and personal e-mail policies.” The subcommittee noted that “previously uncovered evidence that Dr. Morens began using a Proton Mail account after his Gmail was probed by the Select Subcommittee.”

NIH, for its part, seems to suggest that what Morens said happened with the so-called “foia lady” helping him didn’t actually happen. In a response to a FOIA from U.S. Right To Know, a group at the forefront of holding NIH accountable, NIH stated that its “FOIA Officer is not aware of any of the alleged actions.” NIH’s word should be taken with several grains of salt, however. 

Back in 2021, NIH’s Office of the General Counsel told its FOIA office to “not release anything having to do with EcoHealth Alliance/WIV . . . Previously uncovered evidence that Dr. Morens began using a Proton Mail account after his Gmail was probed by the Select Subcommittee.”

Helpful NIH cooperation would require the organization to do more than just look into Morens, who is far from alone in going to absurd lengths to avoid routine FOIA requests. Fauci’s former chief of staff, Folkers, for example, went to avoid scrutiny. “Mr. Folkers appears to have purposefully misspelled ‘EcoHealth’ as ‘Ec~Health,’” the subcommittee noted. 

In another example, Folkers misspelled the last name of Dr. Kristian Andersen, who co-authored a paper downplaying the likelihood of the virtually now-proven COVID-19 lab-leak origin theory. In the email, Folkers referred to the doctor as “Anders$n,” which was likely an attempt to outsmart targeted FOIA requests. The irony, of course, is that his efforts failed.

While much of the scrutiny has focused on Fauci’s allies, he hasn’t been immune himself. Last week, Republicans wrote to Fauci requesting access to his email and cell phone for any information relating to COVID’s origins, as the Daily Caller first reported.

The latest tranche of evidence obtained by Congress suggests the cover-up was systemic: “Evidence in possession of the Select Subcommittee suggests this [employees ‘strategically us[ing] language to avoid key word searches’] may have been a common tactic within NIAID and routinely employed by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s former-Chief of Staff, Greg Folkers,” Republicans said. “This evidence taken together suggests a conspiracy at the highest levels of NIH and NIAID to avoid public transparency regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Government watchdogs have taken note of the recent congressional probes. Michael Chamberlain, the executive director of Protect the Public’s Trust, noted that “the irony is not lost on us that the Biden administration is holding up NIH as a model for scientific integrity as it develops principles that will govern future administrations. Yet, the contemptible actions that are being revealed are precisely the types of things that would be protected from oversight if these principles are adopted.”

Americans don’t need tin foil hats to heed Chamberlain’s concern about the “vast, deep, and intentional” corruption and obfuscation dominating the highest ranks of the nation’s so-called public health officials.

What comes next for Fauci, et al.? Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R., Ohio) promised “swift enforcement and consequences for those involved.” Fauci himself is testifying in front of Congress for the first time since leaving government service later today with Wenstrup’s subcommittee.