Fauci accused of lying under oath, violating FOIA by using personal email to talk to reporter

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.

Collins would later contradict Fauci on whether he invited Collins to participate in the conference call with scientists who initially thought SARS-CoV-2 did not look fully natural but then wrote the opposite in the "Proximal Origins" paper dismissing the lab-leak theory of COVID-19.

Fauci told Abutaleb Oct. 29, 2021: "I will send you an e-mail via my gmail account" related to a Snopes article about a "social media smear campaign" that falsely alleged Fauci's Office of AIDS sponsored unethical clinical drug trials on children in the 1980s.

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.

"As per our discussion, more of the same," Fauci told Abutaleb, apparently referring to their previous communications about supposed conspiracy theories about Fauci's unethical behavior. 

"Thank you for sending," she replied, calling the Snopes article "especially helpful since someone took the time to unpack it. I saw the crazy articles and had no idea what it was based on."

NIH didn't answer queries on what, if anything, it knew about Fauci using personal email to talk to reporters.

White-collar criminal defense lawyer David Schertler told the New York Post in response to the FOIA production that his client "stands by his June 3rd testimony before Congress," in which Fauci said "to the best of my knowledge" he never used personal email for "official business."

The former NIAID director's conversation with a reporter working on a story about Fauci's latest controversies – published three weeks later – "involved a personal matter and not a matter related to government business," according to Schertler, who is perhaps better known for defending Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez's wife in the couple's bribery prosecution.

Schertler did not answer Just the News queries on how a government official talking to a reporter about the agency's work is a personal matter exempt from FOIA obligations, which would seemingly create a massive loophole in the federal transparency law.

Abutaleb didn't answer queries on how she characterized her communications with Fauci related to the puppy controversy – a personal matter, a professional exchange between a government official and a journalist used to inform her coverage, or something else.

WCW exulted in the disclosure of Fauci using personal email, which was suggested in Morens' comments to EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak that Fauci is "too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble" if revealed in FOIA requests.

The emails show that Fauci intentionally violated FOIA and lied to Congress, whose criminal penalties include "fines and jail time," the watchdog said Tuesday.

Going further than Collins' idea to criminalize the spread of purported disinformation, a scientist thanked by Morens for "bitch-slapping" a critic on social media even suggested using the Department of Homeland Security and NATO to halt dissent against COVID narratives.

Baylor College of Medicine professor Peter Hotez, dean of its National School of Tropical Medicine, made the remarks at the International Symposium of Pediatric Updates in Colombia in early July.

While the Sociedad Colombiana de Pediatria, which hosted the event, has since made the Hotez interview private on its YouTube channel, Hotez made similar comments in a Scientific American interview last fall, as noted by former Senate Finance Committee investigator Paul Thacker.

Thacker clipped 82 seconds from the interview before its removal, and several X accounts shared it too. Children's Health Defense said the full video, which it watched and summarized, was taken down July 24.

"We're going to have to bring in Homeland Security, Commerce Department, Justice Department," Hotez said at the conference.

"I don't know that the World Health Organization can solve" the problem of "antivaccine aggression, anti-science aggression," which Hotez blamed for the deaths of "200,000 Americans." He said this "security problem" is a "lethal force" requiring other United Nations agencies and NATO to intervene.