EXCLUSIVE — House Republicans on Monday issued a subpoena for the deposition of the former public records officer at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for her possible role in assisting members of then-Director Anthony Fauci’s senior staff in avoiding records requests.
Chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) issued a subpoena for Margaret Moore to testify before the committee in a closed-door deposition on Friday regarding her discussions about Freedom of Information Act requests with one of Fauci’s top scientific advisers, David Morens.
Evidence produced by the subcommittee over more than a year shows that Morens used his private email to communicate about official National Institutes of Health business, including communications with other scientists about NIH-funded projects on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, China.
The subcommittee’s investigation into Morens has not unearthed any smoking guns that definitively tie the NIH to the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it has revealed alleged impropriety within the agency’s public records department.
Emails between Morens and Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, the organization that received NIH funding to conduct experiments in Wuhan, showed that Morens had been in contact with Moore asking how to ensure that certain documents are not subject to FOIA searches.
“I learned from our FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear after I am FOIA’d but before the search starts, so I think we’re all safe,” Morens wrote to Daszak in 2021. “Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”
Morens testified in May during a hearing before the select subcommittee that the email was “a joke” and that Moore “didn’t give [him] advice about how to avoid FOIA.”
“I was worried because I was getting so many FOIAs, I was worried that personal things were going to get into it. So I went and talked to her,” Morens said in his public testimony.
Morens told the subcommittee that Moore assured him that no personal matters would be revealed in the FOIA requests because she would be able to “negotiate to limit the scope of what they’re looking for to, among other things, make sure that inadvertent stuff doesn’t get in there.”
The select subcommittee has attempted to negotiate with Moore for either informal or formal testimony since late May, when the subcommittee made public more than 155 pages of Morens’s subpoenaed emails that made multiple references to the “FOIA lady.”
Moore’s attorney, William Vigen, sent a letter on his client’s behalf to the subcommittee in August, refusing the opportunity to testify willingly about her conversations with Morens, which Moore insists were innocent.
Vigen said in the August letter that the subcommittee’s interest in Moore’s role in the email scandal is only based upon “spurious allegations and threats of prosecution,” considering that Morens testified under oath to the subcommittee.
Despite the fact that both the select subcommittee and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) have called for the Department of Justice to open criminal investigations into Morens’s conduct, Wenstrup noted in the letter attached to the subpoena that there have been no threats of prosecution against Moore regarding her potential involvement with Morens’s private email use.
Wenstrup also stressed that Moore has “information vital to each line of inquiry” within the subcommittee’s jurisdiction, “specifically regarding the Executive Branch’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) policies and validating previous testimony.”
“In light of evidence that Dr. Morens may have made false statements to the Select Subcommittee, we believe any reliance on his testimony, until independently validated, is spurious,” Wenstrup wrote in the cover letter attached with the subpoena.
Vigen’s August letter to Wenstrup refusing to testify voluntarily argued that Moore would have no choice but to plead her Fifth Amendment right to silence to avoid self-incrimination. Legally, this does not imply guilt or complicity.
Moore’s attorney also said that calling for his client to testify may potentially violate the D.C. Rules of Professional Conduct that govern standing for attorney licenses in the district, arguing that the subcommittee is harassing Moore.
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Wenstrup said that the subcommittee “is not seeking to expose [Moore’s] conduct for exposure’s sake” and that it is not an improper use of subpoena power.
The deposition will be held Friday at 10 a.m.
The Washington Examiner contacted Moore’s attorney for comment.