Fauci’s Top Advisor May Have Illegally Evaded Records Requests, Experts Say

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

“These revelations are startling,” Judicial Watch senior attorney Michael Bekesha told the DCNF. ” It appears as though Dr. Morens and maybe others at NIH sought to circumvent, if not violate, the law by using personal email accounts and deleting emails.”

A top advisor for former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci may have illegally taken actions to avoid records requests, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

David Morens, a former senior adviser to Fauci, both deleted emails to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and told people multiple times to contact him at his personal email address to get around such requests, according to emails released by the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday. Morens, in his emails, also suggested that Fauci used his private email address to conduct government business.

“This is very illegal,” Matthew Hardin, a lawyer specializing in issues related to FOIA, told the DCNF.

“The Federal Records Act has strict requirements for preserving agency records in the agency’s custody for various reasons, including for purposes of facilitating the agency’s compliance with the Freedom of Information Act,” he continued. “This means that anybody conducting agency business through a ‘secret’ back channel or through Gmail is still creating a federal record, even if they are wrongfully concealing that record on a personal account instead of the government’s custody.”

In addition to using his private email address to communicate with others with the express purpose of getting around FOIA requests, Morens instructed others to reach Fauci at a private address for similar reasons.

In an April 2021 email to Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, Morens said that there is “no worry about FOIAs” as he can “either send stuff to Tony [Fauci] on his private email, or hand it to him at work or at his house.”

“He is too smart to let his colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble,” Morens continued.

“These revelations are startling,” Judicial Watch senior attorney Michael Bekesha told the DCNF. ” It appears as though Dr. Morens and maybe others at NIH sought to circumvent, if not violate, the law by using personal email accounts and deleting emails.”

Bekesha said Morens’ conduct could run afoul of the Federal Records Act, the Freedom of Information Act and the Privacy Act.

Daszak’s EcoHealth has received scrutiny for working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which some have posited was where the COVID-19 pandemic originated. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Energy now both believe that COVID-19 likely emerged from a Chinese lab. EcoHealth was cut off from federal funding on May 15 in part due to issues with its monitoring of work done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

🔥 🔥 🔥

Chairman Comer GRILLS Dr. Fauci’s Senior Advisor, Dr. David Morens, who was caught deliberately obstructing @COVIDSelect’s investigation into the origins of COVID-19 to protect Dr. Fauci. pic.twitter.com/mWwAq3iDvd

— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) May 22, 2024

Beyond using personal emails to evade possible FOIA requests, Morens also said that he worked with his agency’s FOIA office to delete records of his communications.

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

Morens sent multiple emails between June 2020 and October 2021 suggesting that he’d deleted his government communications. “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,” he said in one email.

“The right of citizen access and the transparency of public records is constitutional and enshrined in Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of the U.S. Constitution—within the powerful Appropriations clause,” Open The Books CEO Adam Andrzejewski told the DCNF. “Such an important and significant admission of the destruction of public records begs a non-partisan, criminal investigation,” he continued.

“The question now is how often are the feds working to hide or destroy information that belongs in the public record? Is it limited to the public health complex, or is it happening all over the government?”

If Morens deleted his emails to evade FOIA, Hardin says that could constitute “destroy[ing] government property.”

Michael Chamberlin, director of Protect the Public’s Trust, told the DCNF that “federal employees are obligated to preserve federal records” and that “destroying records for the express purpose of evading FOIA is a blatant and egregious violation of this obligation and should be treated as such.”

Morens also claimed to have a “‘secret’ back channel” to Fauci, a statement he walked back during congressional testimony on Wednesday by saying that he was only joking. Morens said during his testimony he did not recall sending information related to COVID-19 to Fauci’s personal email address, but that it’s possible he did so at some point.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which the NIAID operates within, declined to comment on the specifics of Morens’ emails.

“HHS doesn’t comment on personnel matters,” a spokesperson for the department said. “HHS 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,” they continued.

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Freedom Convoy leader Tamara Lich to face sentencing July 23

Published on May 12, 2025

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Freedom Convoy leader Tamara Lich is slated to be sentenced on July 23.

In a recent update by The Democracy Fund, the group noted that “Sentencing for Ms. Lich is scheduled for July 23rd and 24th before Justice Perkins-McVey in Ottawa.”

In April of this year, Lich and Chris Barber were found guilty of mischief for their roles as leaders of the 2022 protest and as social media influencers. The conviction came despite the non-violent nature of the popular movement.

TDF also noted that the full 108 page judgment of Justice Perkins-McVey’s ruling is now available online.

According to TDF, the “Court determined that both Ms. Lich and Mr. Barber were leaders of the Freedom Convoy 2022 movement and were involved in organizing and leading trucks and other vehicles from western Canada.”

“While there was no evidence that Ms. Lich owned a vehicle emitting fumes or honking, or that she blocked access to buildings, the Court noted her creation of the Freedom Convoy 2022 Facebook page, which gained a large following, and her involvement in setting up the GoFundMe and later GiveSendGo fundraising pages,” noted TDF.

As for Barber, his sentencing has been further delayed. The delay in his case follows an update he gave earlier this month in which he announced that the Crown wants to jail him for two years in addition to seizing the truck he used in the protest. As such, his legal team has asked for a stay of proceedings for the time being.

The Lich and Barber trial concluded in September of 2024, more than a year after it began. It was only originally scheduled to last 16 days.

Lich and Barber were initially arrested on February 17, 2022, meaning their legal battle has lasted longer than three years.

The actions taken by the Trudeau government were publicly supported by Mark Carney at the time, who won re-election on April 28 and is slated to form a minority government.

COVID-19

Vaccines: Assessing Canada’s COVID Response

Published on May 11, 2025

Todayville

David Clinton

I planned to be “first in line” for the shots as soon as my age cohort became eligible. By early March however, COVID itself dropped by the house, leading to the most uncomfortable (although non life-threatening) week of my life.

It’s been five years since COVID hit and one part of me wants to stuff it all in a closet somewhere and forget about it. But perhaps certain events – and especially government errors and overreach – should be documented. So this post will identify actions at all levels of government from those early days that, given our understanding of the threat available through the benefit hindsight, were both misguided and damaging.

I haven’t completely forgotten the mood through the early months in 2020. Politicians faced near-unanimous public demand for an aggressive response. Much of that sentiment was the result of messaging coming from foreign governments (mostly in the U.S.). But the local sentiment was definitely there.

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To be fair, Governments got some things right and, taking into account the chaos and uncertainty of those early months, even some of their mistakes were understandable. But it’s the job of government to lead. And to avoid making choices – even popular choices – that will lead to predictable harms.

Vaccine mandates starting in 2021 were a case in point. Federal authority largely stemmed from the 2005 Quarantine Act and the Contraventions Act that allowed officials to issue tickets for non-compliance with the Quarantine Act. Provincial mandates were based on laws like Ontario’s Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act. The question isn’t whether the mandates and their enforcement were legal, but whether they caused more harm than good.

As the first vaccines started arriving in Canada around February 2021, I planned to be “first in line” for the shots as soon as my age cohort became eligible. By early March however, COVID itself dropped by the house, leading to the most uncomfortable (although non life-threatening) week of my life.

After recovering, my family doctor advised me to wait three months before getting the shots so my body could get back to normal. During those months, I got access to preprint results from the Israeli study into natural immunity which showed that:

Natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity

Those results were later confirmed by CDC and NEJM studies, among others.

Given that context, I didn’t see any justification for exposing myself to even minimal health risks associated with vaccines. Which meant that, despite demonstrably posing no threat to public health, I would (at various times) be unable to:

Board domestic commercial flights, VIA Rail, Rocky Mountaineer trains, and cruise ships within Canada
Board international flights or trains departing Canada
Freely return to Canada through an overland point of entry
Upon return to Canada, bypass the 14 day quarantine under the Quarantine Act
Upon return to Canada via air, bypass the three day quarantine in (expensive) government-approved hotels
Engage in ‘non-essential” activities like restaurants, gyms, events (details varied from province to province)
Enter Parliament
Seek employment in federally regulated air, rail, and marine sectors

What should Canadian governments have done? Remove restrictions on individuals with natural immunity, obviously. Which, by the way, would have come with the valuable bonus of entirely avoiding the truckers protest and consequent confrontations.

If authorities were reluctant to take us at our word on immunity, they could have followed the European Union’s lead by emulating their Digital COVID Certificate for proof of recovery. Were they worried about people without immunity creating fake certificates? Hard to take that one seriously. There were more fake vaccine passports littering the streets of Ontario than abandoned Toronto Maple Leafs car window flags in a normal early May.

In the end, my own suffering was negligible. I didn’t really want to visit family in the U.S. all that much anyway. But for millions of other Canadians, the real-world stakes were far higher. And all that’s besides the billions of dollars wasted during those years’ government policies.

To be sure, resisting unscientific street-level calls for vaccine mandates would have required courage. But shouldn’t acts of courage be a source of pride for public officials?

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