A House subcommittee has been investigating virus research activities and has uncovered efforts to avoid discovery by at least two key players.
According to a letter sent by the Chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic to the Director of the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Senior Scientific Advisor Dr. David Morens used personal e-mail accounts to intentionally avoid transparency via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and may have intentionally deleted official records related to the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Here’s one example of an email sent by Dr. Morens where he stated: “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 are all safe” and “Plus i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”
Part of the allegation was that Morens and other NIAID personnel was help Dr. Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance Inc., to help “one of [his] oldest and best friends” avoid scrutiny. Part of that effort allegedly included intentional misspellings to avoid detection by keyword search terms, which the Select Subcommittee contended “may have been a common tactic within NIAID and routinely employed by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s former-Chief of Staff, Greg Folkers.”
Here’s one example of an email where “EcoHealth” is spelled “Ec~Health”. Notably the tilde symbol (~) is on the other side of the keyboard from the letter “o” which seems to indicate that it’s less likely to be a typo.
Dr. Fauci testified on Monday before the committee, defending his handling of the pandemic and virus research while seeking to distance himself from Dr. Morens: “Despite his title, and even though he was helpful to me in writing scientific papers, Dr. Morens was not an adviser to me on institute policy or other substantive issues”, Fauci testified.
Anything having to do with virus research, where the coronavirus originated and how it was handled by our government tends to get political, but this isn’t a political post, it’s a post focused on what parties can do to avoid identification of evidence in discovery. Intentional misspellings and sending emails to personal accounts are just a couple of examples of hiding the evidence. From a discovery standpoint, it’s important to be prepared to identify tactics like this. The use of fuzzy searching can help catch misspellings. Identifying emails sent to personal accounts can open up discovery of those accounts (here’s one case where that happened).
Hat tip to Candi Smith for making me aware of this story! Believe it or not, the discussion originated from a Gates Dogfish meme! 😀
So, what do you think? What other tactics have you seen from parties looking to hide evidence? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
Image created using GPT-4o’s Image Creator Powered by DALL-E, using the term “robot doctor looking at an email on a computer”.
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