House COVID panel demands access to Fauci’s private email, cell records after alleged ‘secret back channel’ communications

A House subcommittee investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic is demanding access to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s personal email and cellphone records after his ex-adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) testified to Congress last week that the pair had “secret back channel” communications.

House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), in a Wednesday letter to Fauci’s attorneys, asked for any private records from Jan. 1, 2020, to the present that the former NIAID director may be harboring about the origins of COVID.

Wenstrup also asked about records that involve now-suspended federal grantee EcoHealth Alliance and the now-debarred Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). 

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The records are due June 12.

Asked by The Post on Thursday whether the subcommittee would subpoena if Fauci refused the request, Wenstrup noted previous instances when that authority had been used after records were “denied or delayed.”

“We have that authority, but we have to go through a process first right now,” he said, which involves seeking the advice of the panel’s general counsel after records requests are snubbed.

Fauci has since retired but will appear June 3 before the COVID subcommittee to answer tough questions about millions of dollars in National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants to EcoHealth, which funded risky gain-of-function research at the WIV before the pandemic.

NIAID’s Dr. David Morens served as Fauci’s top adviser from 1998 to 2022 — but is currently on administrative leave.

An explosive trove of emails released by the House subcommittee show that Morens bragged about deleting “smoking guns” about COVID and using a private email account to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from journalists.

“[T]here is no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail [sic], or hand it to him at work or at his house,” Morens wrote in one April 21, 2021, email, implicating Fauci in what he called a “secret back channel.”

“He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble,” Morens said of his attempts to shield his boss.

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In disastrous May 22 testimony before Wenstrup’s panel, Morens said the damning emails were a “joke” — but later acknowledged he “may have” sent information to Fauci’s personal email account.

The subcommittee in a press release cited the remark as having raised “serious concerns about public health officials purposefully concealing information and behaving as if they are unaccountable to the American people they serve.”

Fauci, former NIH director Dr. Francis Collins and EcoHealth president Dr. Peter Daszak have all denied that the US funded gain-of-function research at the WIV.

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But NIH principal deputy director Dr. Lawrence Tabak admitted in testimony before the subcommittee earlier this month that federal grants had indeed gone toward such experiments.

The NIH gave more than half a million dollars to EcoHealth, which the Manhattan-based public health nonprofit awarded to the WIV for a project titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” between 2014 and 2019.

The project “included genetic experiments to combine naturally occurring bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS viruses, resulting in hybridized (also known as chimeric) coronavirus strains,” according to a Government Accountability Office report.

Tabak informed Congress in an October 2021 letter that the experiments had resulted in a modified virus 10,000 times more infectious, in violation of EcoHealth’s grant terms.

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He noted that the “sequences of the viruses are genetically very distant” from COVID-19 — but other grant proposals from EcoHealth have since drawn scrutiny for their genetic similarities to SARS-CoV-2.

The FBI, Energy Department, former public health officials and former leaders of the US intelligence community have all concluded in recent months that COVID-19 most likely leaked out of a lab.

Daszak also revealed in his own testimony before the House COVID subcommittee this month that he had not received sequences of any viruses from the Wuhan lab since before the pandemic began.

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EcoHealth’s grant was suspended in 2020 and reinstated in 2023 before the nonprofit was suspended and proposed for formal debarment earlier this month following Daszak’s testimony to Congress.

The House COVID subcommittee has referred EcoHealth and Daszak for criminal prosecution by the Justice Department for making several false statements about the grant.

Wenstrup told The Post last week that Morens also opened himself up to criminal prosecution for likely making false statements to Congress about his FOIA evasions and efforts to shield Fauci as well as EcoHealth.

One Oct. 25, 2021, email from Morens to Daszak obtained by the subcommittee also references Collins’ involvement.

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“Peter, from Tony’s numerous recent comments to me, and from what Francis has been vocal about over the past 5 days,” Morens wrote, “they are trying to protect you, which also protects their own reputations.”