Posted on 05/28/2024 12:25:21 PM PDT by nickcarraway
A government scientist is the latest official whose attempts to evade the Freedom of Information Act have landed him in hot water.
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is based on an important principle: any document that the public pays for belongs to the public. Whenever a government official writes or records something as part of their taxpayer-funded duties, ordinary citizens have a right to request a copy, with some exemptions for privacy and security.
Politicians, of course, hate that kind of accountability. And every so often, they get caught hiding their official correspondence from FOIA requesters. Hillary Clinton's attempts to stash State Department emails on a private server were a major scandal during the 2016 election. Last week, FOIA became a part of the controversy surrounding coronavirus origins.
In emails uncovered by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic last week, government scientist David Morens apparently plotted with a FOIA officer at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on how to hide his emails. Morens, an adviser to former NIH official and White House Coronavirus Task Force member Anthony Fauci, wrote in February 2021 that "i learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia'd but before the search starts. Plus i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail."
Elsewhere in the emails, he named the source of advice as "an old friend, Marg Moore, who heads our FOIA office and also hates FOIAs."
Intentionally destroying or removing government records is very illegal, and there's no magic grace period while a FOIA request is being processed. At a Thursday hearing, Morens told the House subcommittee that he was "not aware that anything I deleted, like emails, was a federal record" because his workplace FOIA training had "defined a federal record in a very different way than you may be thinking of it. None of it defined it as an email."
The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, told The Nation that it "is committed to the letter and spirit of the Freedom of Information Act and adherence to Federal records management requirements. It is HHS policy that all personnel conducting business for, and on behalf of, HHS refrain from using personal email accounts to conduct HHS business."
To be fair, it seems that Morens was really getting bad, almost superstitious FOIA advice from his colleagues. According to another November 2021 email, Morens was under the impression that some "ant-hacking" (anti-hacking?) software installed by his IT staff would make his Gmail account "safe from FOIA and hacking on all of my devices, including government computer and phone, and my private computer and iPad."
Subcommittee chairman Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R–Ohio) also claims to have evidence suggesting that NIH officials purposely misspelled words to hide from FOIA requests. When members of the public request all documents on a certain topic, FOIA officers often ask them for specific keywords to search, so misspelling important names could keep a message out of the search results.
It isn't the first time the House subcommittee caught Morens trying to get around transparency laws. "I always try to communicate on gmail because my NIH email is FOIA'd constantly," he wrote in emails revealed by the subcommittee last year. "Don't worry, just send to any of my addresses and I will delete anything I don't want to see in the New York Times."
The NIH claimed that it had investigated Morens, but Wenstrup demanded more inquiries on Tuesday, stating that the newly revealed emails suggest that "the NIH's investigation missed important information" or even that there was "a potentially orchestrated coverup by the NIH FOIA office."
The investigation into Morens' FOIA practices spun off of a broader investigation into whether the coronavirus pandemic could have originated from a laboratory experiment.
In 2021, scientists enraged by reporting in The Intercept and other newspapers about the coronavirus discussed how they could counter the lab leak coverage. Morens, who was on the email thread, wrote that the NIH seemed interested in pushing back on the lab leak theory "but that Tony [Fauci] doesn't want his fingerprints on origin stories." And he discussed how to deal with journalists' FOIA requests. Those emails caught the attention of House investigators.
Ironically, Morens' tactics have made the story look much worse for the scientists. The emails suggest that he and his colleagues genuinely believe that the lab leak theory is misinformation and that the science points to a natural origin for coronavirus. But trying to hide documents makes it look like they have something to hide. It's a classic case of the Streisand effect.
Let the story be a lesson to government officials everywhere. The one weird trick to evade FOIA doesn't exist. Things that an official writes on the job are the people's business, whether they're recorded on paper or an email server. And although some tactics can slow down journalists, anything scandalous enough will leak and spread like an infectious disease.
bttt
We need tough laws with mandatory sentences. Hillary’s illegal bathroom server, Pierre Delecto, and all these other little incidents — a court should be forced to shrug and say, “That’s 5 years in prison for you. I’m sorry. There’s no way around it. My hands are tied because you just didn’t follow the rules.And if I don’t follow the rules, it’s 10 years in prison for me. So you’re out of luck.”
What was the crime with Pierre Delecto. Is it illegal to use a non-real name online?
I’m hazy on the details — it’s possible that Romney didn’t commit a crime. But many government people do try to hide their official communication from scrutiny. That’s not OK. If Romney was using a fake name for more minor reasons, then I erred.
Nuremberg II.
Now.
I remember when an investigator discovered Eric Holder and others had separate email accounts, under other names, to hide all their crimes and shenanigans. No matter how hard you try to delete erase, destroy, the information superhighway is unforgiving. Whatever you have sent was received somewhere. If that person saves, forwards, uses ‘Reply All, there are many more ways to uncover the cover up.
The fake fraud Fauci will probably not suffer much, but he and his ilk will go down in history as the evil, corrupt creeps they are.
I was reading where Fauci’s staff was altering key words in their emails by using special characters, so that a simple keyword search under a FOIA request couldn’t find them.
Like the way I say b@$t@rd$ on some sites with automated moderating?
Praying for The Lord’s Justice, in our lifetimes.
Listen, I think there are degrees to of severity in some of this stuff.
Some of these guys had all different kinds of jobs, including the private sector. Many of them in various parts of the government. I would imagine that you can have all kinds of email addresses for different positions and at different departments.
In other words, if I took a job at the state department, I’m not going to suddenly delete my personal email address(es) and start using my work email or my government email for everything I do, including personal correspondence.
So yes, while these are supposed to be smart people who are perfectly capable of discerning what is work and what is personal, when you build relationships with people who themselves have moved around, as well as your moving around, you might just fall back into using some old address that you both had in common.
Fine.
But once you start having IT guys building you your own secret server in a hidden room, there is only one possible reason for it, and it’s not to take the burden off of the government to save them a couple hundred dollars in hardware and bandwidth. It’s to hide your activities FROM the government that has oversight powers.
But I think a lot of these guys are in between. They know what they are hiding. They are perfectly capable of compartmentalizing their personal and professional communications if they wanted to.
Really? The Former Twelfth Lady did it.
Agree!
No one has ever answered the question to my satisfaction how government employees in CDC\NIAID, etc. got exemptions from normal conflict of interest requirements. From what I personally know in every other USG agency, etc. the higher you go in GS rank the more onerous and intrusive those conflict-of-interest requirements are.
Wait what? Fauci and his fellow ghouls know China releases the virus and that’s what they are hiding? Also hiding the smoking gun that WE the united stated are paying China to perform gain of function research. It’s the China flu, not bat flu!
BIDEN HAS BEEN USING DIFFERENT NAMES FOR YEARS
You mean like with a cloth?
The United States is corrupt to the core. You can see it in videos concerning local government, school boards, legislative bodies, executive office positions, etc. All it took was one corrupt, narcisistic, sociopathic individual to achieve a position of leadership, and the whole barrell becomes rotton.
Omit the “I’m sorry” part of your comment and I’m completely on board!
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