Republicans are accusing a former National Institutes of Health (NIH) official of making emails “disappear” after refusing to testify before a House committee investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Margaret Moore invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to “help NIH officials delete COVID-19 records and use their emails to avoid FOIA is appalling and deserves a thorough investigation.”
“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,” Committee Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) said.
Moore previously worked closely with Dr. Anthony Fauci and the NIAID for over three decades.
According to a February 2021 email from Fauci senior advisor Dr. David Morens, Moore had been “trick[ing]” colleagues at the NIAID to hide records and dodge FOIA requests.
“I learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d but before the search starts," Morens wrote in an email. “Plus, I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to Gmail.”
In 2020, Morens wrote in a separate email, “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.” After the emails were discovered, he was put on leave because they were subject to an internal NIH investigation.
However, during a May 22 hearing, Morens denied that Moore had taught him to delete documents or avoid FOIA.
Earlier this week, Moore was subpoenaed regarding the potential records violations. Her attorneys argue that the former NIH official assisted in the GOP-led investigations by cooperating with the Select Subcommittee through counsel to find alternatives rather than her sitting for an interview. This includes Moore “Expediting her own FOIA request for her own documents, which she provided to the Select Subcommittee voluntarily.”
Wenstrup vowed to hold Moore criminally liable for “any role she played in undermining American trust, which is a step towards improving the lack of accountability and absence of transparency rapidly spreading across many agencies within our federal government.”