Leftists love using their private phones to conduct official business, because it makes it hard or even impossible to find these messages when you sue them.
When Dr. Anthony Fauci testified under oath before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic nearly two months ago, he claimed in written testimony that "to the best of my knowledge I have never conducted official business via my personal email."
The former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director omitted that qualifier when asked directly by Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., saying, "I do not do government business on my private email."
Fauci was trying to distance himself from comments by David Morens, his longtime senior scientific adviser, suggesting the duo routinely evades Freedom of Information Act obligations by using "private gmail" or sharing printed documents by hand.
While Morens has been on administrative leave since his communications with other scientists about Morens' penchant for evading FOIA were revealed, Fauci could face criminal charges in light of his own confirmation that he used personal email to communicate with a reporter.
The White Coat Waste Project, which fights taxpayer-funded animal experiments, provided Just the News its latest FOIA production, which includes NIAID's chummy emails with The Washington Post from fall 2021 as Fauci and the agency were facing heat from the public and Congress for funding gruesome experiments on puppies.
The agency and newspaper, including opinion columnist Dana Milbank and reporter Yasmeen Abutaleb, worked together to discredit WCW allegations that the Post's fact-checker Glenn Kessler confirmed as accurate more than two and a half years later -- a week after congressional Republicans shared Fauci's admission that he signed off on the grants.
Then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins even implied WCW should be "brought to justice" for supposedly spreading misinformation, when in fact NIH denied WCW's allegations based on a researcher's unfounded statement.
He did the same to White Coat Waste as he did to the scientists who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, or scientists who questioned if covid came from the Wuhan lab: He sneakily wrote to reporters to organize a defamation campaign against them, making sure he used his own private phone to hide these messages in case he was sued for slander.
By the way: the reporters wrote to him using his official government email address, but he wrote back that he would respond via his private account.
It's not clear from the emails why Fauci wanted to switch to his personal Gmail account. He had forwarded Abutaleb the Snopes article from his chief of staff, Greg Folkers, who is also under congressional investigation for inserting punctuation within proper nouns likely to be searched in FOIA requests.
Just so you know: when subpeonas are filed for documents, the party seeking the documents do not get to actually see them and pick the ones that are relevant. The party seeking documents submits a list of keywords that are likely to be found in relevant documents to the judge, who then okays the list (or asks for modifications). The party holding the documents then runs a search for the keywords, and is supposed to turn over relevant documents containing those keywords.
If you want to find documents regarding whether Fauci knew that the Wuhan lab was performing gain-of-function research on bat viruses, you'd submit those keywords: Wuhan, lab, gain-of-function, GOF, bat virus.
The point of inserting punctuation marks into these words -- writing Wuh@n and b@t v!rus -- is to insure that when someone subpeonas documents about these matters, they cannot find anything incriminating, because you've deliberately misspelled the keywords you knew would come up in a lawsuit to defeat searches for them.
This is illegal. This is no different, in the eyes of the law, than shredding documents under subpeona.
But this is the Democrat Way. Hillary Clinton set new standards for brazenness in avoiding accountability and transparency, and the Democrat Party made sure she got away with it -- "no intent!" -- and now they all follow the trail she blazed for them.
Truly, she is An Historic Evil Alcoholic Sow.
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"As per our discussion, more of the same," Fauci wrote to the journalist, apparently dismissing questions about the experiments as ludicrous -- though he later confirmed to a House subcommittee on June 3 that he "signed off" on the grants that funded them.
White Coat Waste Project in 2022 also released internal NIAID documents that included the full grant proposal.
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David Schertler, an attorney for Fauci, told The Post that the former NIAID head "stands by his June 3rd testimony before Congress."
"The email to which you refer involved a personal matter and not a matter related to government business," said Schertler, who is also representing convicted Sen. Bob Menendez's wife, Nadine Menendez, in a sweeping federal corruption case.
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"For that reason, Dr. Fauci used his personal email account to communicate about the matter," he added.
But White Coat Waste Project founder and president Anthony Bellotti told The Post that the email was proof that Fauci "broke federal law."
"We've followed the money and exposed how Fauci lied under oath about not funding gain-of-function at the Wuhan animal lab, that he lied about not bankrolling beagle torture in Tunisia, and, now, that he broke federal law by using his personal email to evade FOIA requests about Beaglegate and secretly communicate with a Washington Post reporter who then published NIH disinformation to protect him and discredit us," Bellotti told The Post.
"Fauci's the poster child for government corruption and Congress needs to hold him accountable for his abuses, which carry criminal penalties including fines and jail time," he added.
Hear hear.