From the Brownstone Institute

By  Maryanne Demasi  

Morens implicated Margaret (Marg) Moore, known colloquially as “The FOIA lady” in trying to hide information from the American people, particularly that related to the origins of Covid-19, which is a felony.

A relatively unknown public records officer at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is now at the centre of a burgeoning scandal involving Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

The saga unfolded after subpoenaed emails belonging to David Morens, a former top advisor to Anthony Fauci, revealed that someone had taught him to game the system and avoid emails being captured by FOIA requests.

“i learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia’d but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe,” Morens wrote in a Feb 24, 2021, email. “Plus i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”

Morens implicated Margaret (Marg) Moore, known colloquially as “The FOIA lady” in trying to hide information from the American people, particularly that related to the origins of Covid-19, which is a felony.

It sparked an investigation by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic to expose what Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) called a “cover-up.”

A letter to NIH director Monica Bertagnolli in May suggested “a conspiracy at the highest levels” of these once trusted public health institutions.

“If what appears in these documents is true, this is an apparent attack on public trust and must be met with swift enforcement and consequences for those involved,” Wenstrup wrote.

Wenstrup said there was evidence that a former chief of staff of Fauci’s might have used intentional misspellings — such as “Ec~Health” instead of “EcoHealth” — to prevent emails from being captured in keyword searches by FOIA officials.

Today, Wenstrup announced a subpoena to compel Moore (The FOIA lady) to appear for a deposition on October 4, 2024, saying that she’d repeatedly resisted these efforts and delayed the Select Subcommittee’s investigation.

“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,” said Wenstrup.

“Holding Ms. Moore accountable for any role she played in undermining American trust is a step towards improving the lack of accountability and absence of transparency rapidly spreading across many agencies within our federal government,” he added.

Moore, however, has indicated through her lawyers that she would invoke her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Her lawyers wrote to Wenstrup explaining that she’d cooperated with the Select Subcommittee to find “an alternative” to sitting for an interview, including expediting her own FOIA request for her own documents.

They also explained that Morens’ emails suggesting Moore gave tips “about avoiding FOIA,” were misleading because Morens, under oath said, “That was a joke…She didn’t give me advice about how to avoid FOIA.”

Nonetheless, Moore’s decision to plead the Fifth has only fuelled concern over the lack of transparency and accountability of one of the nation’s top health research institutions.

It’s not over until the FOIA lady sings!

Further reading: The great FOIA dodge

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

Maryanne Demasi

Maryanne Demasi, 2023 Brownstone Fellow, is an investigative medical reporter with a PhD in rheumatology, who writes for online media and top tiered medical journals. For over a decade, she produced TV documentaries for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and has worked as a speechwriter and political advisor for the South Australian Science Minister.

From the Brownstone Institute

Mere words cannot restrain our aspiring censors from weaponizing their power to silence dissent. Enemies of the First Amendment vow to “hammer it out of existence,” as John Kerry explained this week, and they are prepared to circumvent legal protections to achieve their aims at all costs.

Kerry, speaking on a panel on climate change at the World Economic Forum, lamented what he regards as insufficient censorship of “disinformation” and called on his allies to “win the ground, win the right to govern” in order to be “free be able to implement change” despite the “major block” of the First Amendment.

But a survey of the dismal state of free speech in the United States shows that Kerry and his allies have already developed means to sidestep the “major block” of our founding documents. Hillary Clinton herself has floated the idea of criminal penalties for the spreading of “misinformation.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has similarly called for “reining in the media environment” so that people cannot just “spew information.”

Earlier this year, journalist Mark Steyn was forced to pay $1 million in “punitive damages” for mocking a climate scientist and comparing him to convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky.

The prevailing attorney urged the jury to inflict the punishment to demonstrate the ramifications for engaging in “climate denialism,” which he compared to President Trump’s “election denialism.”

In New York, State Attorney General Letitia James has demonstrated the threat that change poses to our foundational freedoms. During her 2018 campaign for office, James proudly broadcasted her antipathy to the First Amendment, pledging to weaponize the justice system against a range of political enemies from President Donald Trump to the National Rifle Association.

Her intolerance for dissent led her to target VDare, Peter Brimelow’s immigration-restrictionist website. Unable to find a crime, James used her office to drown the organization in legal costs until it was forced to cease operations. Despite having never advocated for violence or committed libel, Brimelow and his group were guilty of dissent in a jurisdiction that elected a zealot.

Steve Bannon, Julian Assange, Douglass Mackey, Roger Ver, and Pavel Durov have undergone similarly brazen persecutions that debunk the supposed safety of free speech protections in the West.

Our Constitution cannot survive Soviet-style justice of “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” Brimelow, Assange, and Durov were targeted for their dissent, and the regime reverse-engineered means to punish them.

A similar process occurs in academia. Last week, the University of Pennsylvania announced that it would sanction law professor Amy Wax, a critic of affirmative action, by suspending her for a year and docking her pay. Penn insisted that the sanctions did not implicate freedom of speech and instead concerned “professionalism” standards for its faculty.

But Wax’s sanctions are explicitly based on 26 incidents of wrongthink, including criticizing “anti-assimilation ideas,” “rap culture,” and cities being “run like third world countries” as well as commenting on differences between the sexes and racial groups.

As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression explains, “Penn’s willingness to sidestep academic freedom protections to punish Wax sets a troubling precedent. If scholars with controversial views can lose their academic freedom merely for unspecified ‘unprofessionalism’ concerns, all faculty who hold minority, dissenting, or simply unpopular views are at risk.”

Americans more broadly face the same risk. Neither the First Amendment nor abstract free speech principles will stop the censors in their crusade. They will sidestep legal protections of our freedoms under the guise of ostensibly innocuous sloganeering.

Germany is already showing the way, with a guilty verdict for CJ Hopkins, an American living there who objected to Covid controls. With the documents already in place for “the future of the Internet,” the existing administration has a stated aim to close the Internet to free speech and install censors at all levels. This will necessarily run headlong into a confrontation with Elon Musk, but it will eventually hit Rumble and every other alternative source of information.

The target is the First Amendment but with a precise purpose: securing regime control over the whole population, with a public culture wholly controlled in the interests of protecting the administrative state against populist resistance. Those are the stakes.

Let there be no mistake about this. Your freedom to know the truth is what is at issue.

Author

Brownstone Institute

Brownstone Institute is a nonprofit organization conceived of in May 2021 in support of a society that minimizes the role of violence in public life.