The chairman of a House subcommittee investigating the COVID-19 pandemic is seeking personal email and cell phone records of Dr. Anthony Fauci related to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, EcoHealth and the origins of the coronavirus.
The letter sent Wednesday by Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) is part of an intensifying investigation into the origins of the virus that lawmakers say has revealed efforts to conceal official government documents, evade Freedom of Information Act requests and avoid public transparency.
This comes ahead of Fauci’s scheduled remarks before a subcommittee on Monday, his first appearance before Congress since retiring from government service as longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
Republicans on the committee have accused National Institutes of Health officials of orchestrating a “potential conspiracy at the highest levels.”
The committee’s investigation did not produce any new evidence conclusively linking U.S. health officials to the origins of the coronavirus, but it raised worrying questions about officials’ efforts to avoid transparency.
The committee released a series of private emails suggesting that at least some agency officials, including top advisers to Fauci, deleted messages or used personal emails in an attempt to circumvent public records laws.
Fauci’s former aide, David Morens, testified last week that he may have sent information about government business to Fauci’s personal email address.
“Either send it to Tony in a private Gmail or hand it over to him at work… He’s smart enough not to let a colleague send him something that could cause him problems,” Morens wrote in a 2021 email made public by the committee.
In another email, Morens described a “secret back channel” he used to contact Fauci out of the public eye.
“We are concerned that current and former NIAID officials have concealed information critical to the American people and have seriously undermined, and continue to undermine, public trust,” Wenstrup wrote.
He asked for a response by June 12th.
