A National Institutes of Health (NIH) public liaison for the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) asks – who taught a senior advisor to Dr. Anthony Fauci how to ‘make emails disappear’ – refuses to testify for a House of Representatives committee investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In an Aug. 5 letter signed by her attorneys, Margaret Moore informed the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic that she would argue for the Fifth Amendment and her right against self-incrimination — but was still subpoenaed Monday to testify about the possible consequences. records violations.

“Rather than using the NIH office to provide the transparency and accountability the American people deserve, it appears that ‘FOIA Lady’ Margaret Moore has contributed to efforts to circumvent federal record-keeping laws,” committee chairman Brad Wenstrup said in a statement.

“Her alleged scheme to help NIH officials delete COVID-19 data and use their personal emails to avoid FOIA is appalling and deserves a thorough investigation.”

Moore’s attorneys William Vigen and Ronald Jacobs, who specialize in government investigations and white-collar criminal defense, said in their August letter that their client has helped the commission in other ways.

“Ms. Moore, through counsel, has worked with the Select Subcommittee to find an alternative to her participation in an interview, including expediting her own FOIA request for her own documents, which she voluntarily provided to the Select Subcommittee ,” the lawyers wrote.

The 35-year veteran of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a subagency of the NIH, once served as a special assistant to Fauci and is believed to have helped conceal information that may have been crucial to uncovering the origins of SARS -CoV-2.

Dr. David Morens, Fauci’s former NIAID senior adviser, bragged about using a private email account to evade FOIA requests and deleting data retrieved using some “tricks” Moore taught him.

“(I) learned from our foia’d (sic) lady here how to make emails disappear after being foia’d (sic) but before the search begins,” he wrote in a February 24, 2021 email , sent from his private Gmail account. “Also, I deleted most of those previous emails after sending them to Gmail (sic).”

“We are all smart enough to know that we should never have smoking guns, and if we did, we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them, we would delete them,” Morens also said on June 16, 2020.

The documents, which have been widely sought by congressional investigators for years, are critical to uncovering NIH officials’ knowledge of a controversial $4 million NIH grant, more than half a million of which went directly to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in the city where the coronavirus pandemic began at the end of 2019.

Another May 2021 email obtained by the select subcommittee shows the NIH General Counsel office directing its FOIA office “not to release anything related to EcoHealth Alliance/WIV,” referring to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In October of that year, the NIH acknowledged that it had funded experiments on bat coronaviruses in the Wuhan laboratory through the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, although it denied there were any risks involved.

EcoHealth President Dr. Peter Daszak leaned on Morens in an email that same month to “have the NIH FoIA (sic) group actually help narrow the scope and make some helpful redactions” about the grant.

The resulting chimeric virus – which was 10,000 times more contagious – was “genetically distant from SARS-CoV-2,” according to then-NIH Director Francis Collins, but another EcoHealth proposal, which was never funded, is seen as a potential roadmap of how the virus could have emerged.

Morens was later subject to an internal NIH investigation and placed on administrative leave after the emails were discovered.

“Dr. Morens never testified that Ms. Moore gave him instructions on how to dispose of documents or avoid FOIA,” Moore’s attorneys, who declined further comment, said in their letter last month.

“That was a joke,” Morens characterized the email — and other highly inappropriate comments he made to federal grantees and colleagues — while under oath during a May 22 hearing. “She gave me no advice on how to avoid FOIA.”

Wenstrup (R-Ohio) told reporters in May that he believed Morens could be criminally liable for several of his statements during the hearing — and that he had already given demonstrably false testimony in previous transcribed interviews.

Fauci later denied any knowledge of Morens’ conduct and distanced himself from his former senior adviser of 24 years.

“The Dr. Issue Morens discussed by this committee is contrary to NIH policy,” he told members of the House COVID Subcommittee during a hearing in June.

Wenstrup said that “holding Ms. Moore accountable for any role she has played in undermining American trust is a step toward improving the lack of accountability and absence of transparency that is quickly spreading across many agencies within our federal government.”

“The Select Subcommittee is working tirelessly to ensure that never again will federal health officials be unaccountable to the American people or feel empowered to willfully undermine our elected government.”