Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) sent a letter this week to Christi Grimm, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, demanding a probe into whether scientists working for the federal government concealed records about Covid-19.
The request, originally sent on Monday, comes after the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in late June revealed that a senior adviser with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. David Morens, explicitly asked officials to “communicate over gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’d [freedom of information request] constantly.”
In other missives, Morens – who regularly consulted and worked closely with then-agency director Anthony Fauci – asked his colleagues to re-route their communications “to any of my [personal email] addresses and I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times,” stipulating that his “gmail [account] was hacked, probably by these GoF [gain-of-function] ass—es.”
“These statements reveal an attempt to limit public access to certain communications directly related to the COVID-19 pandemic, potentially in violation of federal record keeping requirements,” the senator noted in his letter to the inspector general. Johnson further asked Grimm to broaden her search to cover the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which includes NIAID.
“It is unclear the extent to which your office has taken steps to investigate or review these recent allegations of record mishandling and destruction, as well as the use of personal email accounts to conduct official business, at NIH,” Johnson continued in his letter.
The senator also cited a plea from the National Archives and Records Administration from early July demanding the NIH probe the matter following Morens’s incriminating emails.
Johnson’s letter concluded with five specific requests for Inspector General Grimm to investigate, including the use of “non-official personal email account(s)” by other officials, the existence of “deleted or destroyed official agency records,” and the “extent to which officials with HHS and its sub-agencies…have attempted to avoid or subvert the Freedom of Information Act.”