Posted on 06/30/2023 6:57:04 AM PDT by george76
As I understand it, using a personal email to conduct government business is not exactly kosher.
Doing it to avoid accountability is definitely forbidden. Telling others to hide their correspondence on government business is Hillary Clinton-level malfeasance.
That, my friends, is exactly what the Senior Advisor to Anthony Fauci did during the COVID pandemic. As you would expect, our “public servants” at the National Institute for Allergies and Infection Diseases want to make sure that we normies don’t have access to anything they don’t decide to tell us.
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Mr. Morens wanted to make sure that any discussion regarding the origins of COVID was kept strictly off the record, never to be seen by the eyes of the public.
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In a 2021 exchange with leading scientists about Covid origins, a long-time NIH adviser to Dr. Fauci admitted to using a personal email address in an apparent effort to evade FOIA. He also expressed his intent to delete emails
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there is a reason why FOIA exists–the public actually has a right to know what its employees are doing, at least short of disclosing information that harms national security, and such information is naturally redacted. So honestly, there is no excuse for intentionally evading the rules that apply to government documents. And no legal justification for it.
A TOP ADVISER to Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health admitted that he used a personal email account in an apparent effort to evade the strictures of the Freedom of Information Act, according to records obtained by congressional investigators probing the origin of Covid-19. The official also expressed his intention to delete emails in order to avoid media scrutiny.
“As you know, I try to always communicate on gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly,” wrote David M. Morens, a high-ranking NIH official, in a September 2021 email, one of a series of email exchanges that included many leading scientists involved in the bitter Covid origins debate. “Stuff sent to my gmail gets to my phone,” he added, “but not my NIH computer.”
After noting that his Gmail account had been hacked, however, he wrote to the group to say that he might have to use his NIH email account to communicate with them instead. “Don’t worry,” he wrote, “just send to any of my addresses, and I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”
FOIA, though, exists because in fact we the public have the right to see it in the New York Times, regardless of what some bureaucrat, no matter how up the chain of command, wants to happen.
What, exactly, is he trying to hide? After all, Fauci and the CDC have claimed from the beginning that COVID originated in a natural reservoir, and hence discussions about the origins would only be technical regarding exactly what that reservoir is and where it might be found–since nobody knows these things to this day, although they keep trying to gaslight us about it. It is not Racoon Dogs or something similar. If it were, they would go out and find a live Racoon Dog with the virus.
This hasn’t happened, and sorry folks, finding COVID fragments near Racoon Dog DNA isn’t evidence. You can find COVID residue pretty much anywhere around people infected with the virus.
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I have never understood the argument for gain-of-function research. The primary benefit claimed is that it enables the development of vaccines for diseases that may enter the human population, but such a vaccine has never been developed as a result of such research. More dangerous pathogens have been, routinely, but as far as I know, the only benefit of such research is satisfying the Dr. Strangelove-like fascination that these researchers have with apocalyptic dangers.
That view, by the way, is held by vast numbers of biological researchers, who see no benefit and great risks from gain-of-function research. And as we now know, this research was being done in collaboration with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, who are not partners you want to have.
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Government scientists have a disturbing tendency to slander people who disagree with them. The top guys at the NIH, CDC, and NIAID slandered the signatories to the Great Barrington Declaration as “fringe epidemiologists” despite being Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford faculty members.
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Whatever else you can say about them, those are not “fringe” credentials. I am not in the habit of accepting ad hominem arguments, either for or against a proposition, but calling these people “fringe” is like calling Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein “fringe” physicists. Their ideas should stand or fall on their own, but they are not ignoramuses.
But slander and hiding from the public are the best tools these officials had. Whether the virus came from a lab leak or escaped from the wild, the lab leak hypothesis and the potential role of gain-of-function research in its evolution are not crazy ideas, but viable hypotheses both taken seriously by serious people. Even Fauci, now that he is out of government, concedes that the virus might have escaped from the lab, but is itself “natural” and not engineered.
That is his new definition of “natural origin.”
Of course, during the pandemic Fauci and company worked hard to dismiss the lab leak theory, and Morens was heavily involved in the effort because Fauci “didn’t want his fingerprints” on the effort.
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Fauci, in an attempt to conceal his involvement, asked Dr. Morens to publicly suppress the lab leak theory:
▪️ "...my boss Tony actually ASKED me to speak to the National Geographic on the record about origins"
▪️ "...Tony doesn't want his fingerprints on origin stories."
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Indeed, DARPA did a deep dive into the evidence and concluded that despite arguments to the contrary being pushed by Fauci and his cronies, the engineered virus argument was totally plausible and perhaps likely. They did not conclude that it was engineered, but they did conclude that the paper that Fauci commissioned and then used to “prove” the virus was of natural origin was total BS.
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Needless to say, Fauci and NIAID were very touchy about the subject of COVID origins, and now we have his senior deputy requesting that scientists who were discussing the issue not use his government email because it could be FOIA’d.
Suspicious? Certainly. Legal? Probably not.
The evidence for a lab leak is near ironclad by now, and the evidence for COVID being engineered is compelling, if not conclusive. I believe that it is much more likely than not, but all the evidence is circumstantial. There are lots of circumstances pointing in that direction, but no smoking gun.
Still, the desperation to keep discussions out of the public eye provides yet more evidence that they definitely felt they had something to hide, and the inclusion of Daszek and others with ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and a record of gain-of-function research adds to the case.
One thing is clear: their contempt for the public. They believe we should sit down, shut up, and do what we are told. They kept us in the dark, and felt they had something to hide.
I think we all know what it is.
Oh ! It's sorta like NAID/NIH funding Wuhan Virology Institute through a third party, like Eco-Health Alliance, which is what Fauci did.
The purpose was to evade supervision and over-sight by Congress, or even knowing where the US funding was coming from
It was : Intentional Evasion
Our government is corrupt from head to toe. We need to cut funding to the government by reducing taxes by half.
Federal officials may not use private email accounts to get around public records laws.. - U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit .. Unless your name is Clinton or ..
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3446468/posts
What about Federal government employment attracts sociopaths and wanna-be mad scientists?
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