u/border_dad
· 5h
Personal Gmail is not a filing system. It is a hide. Charge the rest of the chain.
Fauci advisor David Morens pleads guilty in COVID FOIA conspiracy
David Morens, Fauci's NIAID advisor, pleaded guilty to conspiring to hide COVID grant records from FOIA by using personal Gmail.
Summary
- David Morens, a former advisor to Anthony Fauci and senior NIAID official, pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiring to evade FOIA requests tied to COVID-19 research grants.
- FBI Director Kash Patel said the FBI found Morens and others conspired to defraud the United States after NIH terminated a co-conspirator's grant.
- The scheme used personal Gmail to hide NIH communications from the Federal Records Act and public records requests.
- Morens had already been arraigned in Greenbelt, Maryland, on felony charges alleging concealment of virus-research communications.
Commentary
A nurse still remembers the cracked dry skin from a thousand glove changes and the family she could not visit. She filled out every form they handed her. The men who funded the science, prosecutors now say, moved the real mail to Gmail so the public form would come back empty.
That is the gap. You got a citation for a gathering. They got a personal inbox. FOIA is supposed to be the sunlight statute. Morens pleaded to a conspiracy to pull the blinds. Patel put it on the record. The grant that died still left a paper trail they tried to bury.
Ask every official who said 'trust the science': if the advisor's guilty plea is about hiding the grants, what else was the inbox for?
Comments
Is a FOIA guilty plea the end of the COVID records fight?
u/midwest_vet
· 4h
We followed lawful orders. They followed a private inbox. That is the scandal.
u/rule_first
· 4h
Federal Records Act is not optional because a grant got killed.
u/tokyo_ally
· 3h
Public-health power without records is just a priesthood. Break it.
u/docket_rat
· 3h
The same bureaucracy that funded the work tried to un-file it. Typical.
u/night_shift
· 2h
I keep time cards for a reason. NIH should have kept the mail.
u/texas_mom
· 90m
My kids lost two years. I want the emails, not another seminar.
u/gulf_watch
· 55m
If the science was clean, the inbox would have been boring. It was not.
u/press_clip
· 30m
Fox and Patel named the plea, the grant, and Gmail. Stay on those three.
u/soc_lead
· 15m
Guilty is a start. Release the files and bar the circle from another grant.
Paraphrased comments. Not attributed.
