EXCLUSIVE — House Republicans sent a subpoena order Tuesday to the former top aide of Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, regarding his use of his private email address to conduct government business regarding the origins of COVID-19.
The decision to subpoena the official, David Morens, comes following the Friday release of emails by the private research firm EcoHealth Alliance showing that Morens requested for EcoHealth President Peter Daszak to communicate exclusively via Morens’s private Gmail account.
An email from Daszak to Morens dated April 26, 2020, says that Daszak will “communicate with [Morens] via gmail from now on” about the coronavirus, confirming allegations by congressional Republicans that Morens may have violated federal records statutes at the early stages of the pandemic to avoid government and public scrutiny.
Timeline of the Morens investigation
The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has been investigating Morens since last June following the release of emails from Morens’s government account encouraging NIH colleagues to contact him via his Gmail to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests.
In September 2021, Morens told colleagues via email that he would “delete anything [he didn’t] want to see in the New York Times” from his government account.
Following investigations by both the subcommittee and the National Archives and Records Administration for potentially destroying government records, Morens was placed on administrative leave from his position at NIAID last fall.
Morens served as the Senior Advisor to the Director of NIAID in a part-time capacity since 1998 and took on the position full-time in 2022. Before then, Morens served in various research roles at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and was the head of the Epidemiology Department at the University of Hawaii School of Public Health.
Morens voluntarily complied with the subcommittee’s request for a transcribed interview in January, at which time he denied all allegations of destroying government records or utilizing his personal email account.
According to subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), Morens “abruptly ceased attempting to reach an agreement with the Select Subcommittee” regarding additional document requests following the transcribed interview.
The subpoena
Wenstrup highlighted in a letter accompanying the subpoena that Morens “personally conducted the search of [his] own e-mail inbox” in an attempt to comply with the subcommittee’s request, presenting a clear conflict of interest in the investigation process.
“Your records are necessary to inform the Select Subcommittee’s investigation of the origins of and federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and potential legislation,” Wenstrup wrote to Morens.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) issued the subpoena following Wenstrup’s investigation. It demands that Morens provide unredacted copies of all documents and communications since November 2019 between himself and several former officials at the National Institutes of Health, including Fauci and former NIH Directors Francis Collins and Lawrence Tabak.
The subpoena also requests that Morens provide the committee with all of his communications to World Health Organization lead scientist Jeremy Farrar and Daszak.
Although then-NIH Director Tabak was subpoenaed by the Oversight Committee regarding Morens’s emails last October, this subpoena will specifically target Morens’s personal emails outside of the NIH’s direct supervision.
A key piece of the origins investigation
EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit viral research organization with the mission of preventing pandemics, has come under significant scrutiny since the outbreak of the coronavirus in part because of its receipt of NIH funding for research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
Several emails from Morens’s private Gmail published by EcoHealth between Morens, Daszak, and Boston University epidemiologist and former NIH employee Gerald Keusch outline Daszak’s frustration with the NIH following the suspension of funding for the project “Understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence,” which was conducted at the WIV.
The project was authorized to examine SARS-related viruses in southern China, including developing a catalog of the genomic sequences of various high-risk diseases, and funding was quickly terminated following the outbreak of the coronavirus.
Morens told Daszak in the April 26, 2020, private Gmail that EcoHealth “should be clearly documenting these things for potential future use, in your own defense, and for history” regarding the difficulties with the NIH about the project.
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Morens also informed Daszak that Fauci was “fully aware” of the project’s alleged involvement with the origin of SARS-CoV-2 and was “involved in some sort of damage control.”
Morens has until April 30 to provide the requested documents to the committee.
