Thursday, October 3, 2024

The FOIA Lady Pleads the Fifth

The saga unfolded after subpoenaed emails belonging to David Morens, a former top advisor to Anthony Fauci, revealed that someone had taught him to game the system and avoid emails being captured by FOIA requests.

"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," Morens wrote in a Feb 24, 2021, email.

"Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail." Morens implicated Margaret Moore, known colloquially as "The FOIA lady" in trying to hide information from the American people, particularly that related to the origins of Covid-19, which is a felony.

Wenstrup said there was evidence that a former chief of staff of Fauci's might have used intentional misspellings - such as "Ec~Health" instead of "EcoHealth" - to prevent emails from being captured in keyword searches by FOIA officials.

"Her alleged scheme to help NIH officials delete COVID-19 records and use their personal emails to avoid FOIA is appalling and deserves a thorough investigation," said Wenstrup "Holding Ms. Moore accountable for any role she played in undermining American trust is a step towards improving the lack of accountability and absence of transparency rapidly spreading across many agencies within our federal government," he added.

Her lawyers wrote to Wenstrup explaining that she'd cooperated with the Select Subcommittee to find "An alternative" to sitting for an interview, including expediting her own FOIA request for her own documents.

They also explained that Morens' emails suggesting Moore gave tips "About avoiding FOIA," were misleading because Morens, under oath said, "That was a jokeShe didn't give me advice about how to avoid FOIA." Nonetheless, Moore's decision to plead the Fifth has only fuelled concern over the lack of transparency and accountability of one of the nation's top health research institutions. 

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-foia-lady-pleads-the-fifth/

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