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.
