A high-level adviser to Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a department within the National Institutes of Health, appeared to attempt to avoid transparency by using his personal email and deleting correspondence related to the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, emails sent in a memo by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic show.

David Morens, senior adviser to the NIAID director since 1998, wrote on February 24, 2021, that he “learned from our foia lady here how to make most emails disappear after i am foia’d but before the search starts, so I think we are all safe,” adding that he “deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”

In November of that year, Morens wrote that “his gmail is now safe from FOIA” and asked that “NOTHING gets sent to me except to my gmail.” He had previously written that he “learned the tricks last year from an old friend, Marg Moore, who heads our FOIA office and also hates FOIAs.”

In a June 16, 2020 email, Morens wrote that “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.”

Many of the communications the subcommittee released were between Morens and EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak, the leader of the nonprofit that oversaw bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Daszak testified in front of the subcommittee earlier in May in a heavily scrutinized appearance, after which the United States Department of Health and Human Services suspended government funding for his nonprofit.

Emails published in the subcommittee memo show Morens helping Daszek edit a letter in response to news of the NIH’s first termination of EcoHealth’s grant in 2020, writing that he had “attached some edits for consideration” and thought the letter made “the right points” and presented “a strong case.”

Later on, Morens wrote a letter to EcoHealth board member Nancye Green on Daszek’s behalf, attempting to ensure the security of Dazsek’s job. He wrote that he “want[ed] to put in a word for Peter and the EcoHealth team, and all the great work they have been doing,” but that he and Green had “to keep all communications like this on private email so that it can’t be retrieved via a FOIA.”

Morens also wrote of a “secret back channel” to help Fauci and Daszak avoid their communications coming to light and said he could “either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house,” adding that Fauci was “too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

In August 2020, once EcoHealth’s NIH grant had been restored, Morens asked Daszak whether he would receive a “kickback” for advocating for Daszak, to which the EcoHealth president responded, “of course there’s a kick-back.” Many of the correspondences between the two involved Morens providing Daszak with information about the status of EcoHealth’s NIH grant.

Morens testified in front of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on Wednesday afternoon, claiming that his references to the “secret back channel” and “kickback” were merely jokes and saying that he did not realize the emails he sent on his personal account constituted official government business.

He said the mention of a “kickback” was simply “typical black humor between people like Peter and me and other folks who show up in these emails.”

“I didn’t do anything that I thought was official business,” Morens told the subcommittee. “I understand now that there is some discrepancy between what I thought and what y’all may think about what’s official business” and that he “thought all these things [he] was doing that were from [his] private email — private Gmail — were outside the domain of my official job as a private citizen.”

When Representative Jill Tokuda (D., Hawaii) asked Morens directly whether he had ever “conduct[ed] government business through his personal email accounts,” Morens maintained that he had no understanding that those communications were within his capacity as a government official.

“Some of the emails I’ve seen that you all provided looked pretty incriminating,” Morens told the committee. “I don’t know what they are. I don’t remember them. But yes, it looks like I made mistake on more than one occasion, but it certainly wasn’t my intention to do that.”

Representative Debbie Lesko (R., Ariz.) then read off a list of Morens’s emails and asked whether he would like to change his previous testimony that he did not intentionally use his personal email to conduct government business.

“The context is that this Gmail communication thing was set up purely to deal with personal things that were not government business,” Moreno replied to Lesko’s disbelief.

“With all due respect, how can you say that when you clearly know all these emails were intentionally avoiding FOIA?” Lesko asked. “You said it in your own words, sir.”