The congressional panel investigating the federal government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic subpoenaed a National Institutes of Health (NIH) employee known as the “FOIA Lady” to have her testify about her alleged efforts to assist NIH officials with evading federal records laws.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic subpoenaed on Monday the former NIH employee Margaret Moore to testify Friday — and her attorney has said she would invoke her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination if compelled to testify. Moore’s attorney and the subcommittee negotiated her testimony for months but the two sides appear to have disagreements over her level of cooperation with the panel’s requests.
“Instead of using NIH’s FOIA office to provide the transparency and accountability that the American people deserve, it appears that ‘FOIA Lady’ Margaret Moore assisted efforts to evade federal record keeping laws. 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 Representative Brad Wenstrup (R., Ohio), chairman of the subcommittee.
Moore retired from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases‘s (NIAID) FOIA office in 2021 after working at the NIH for more than three decades. The NIAID is one of multiple public health agencies under the NIH umbrella.
Top NIAID official Dr. David Morens, a lieutenant to former NIAID director Dr. Anthony Fauci, referred to Moore as the “foia lady” in a February 2021 email on his personal email account. Morens said Moore taught him “how to make emails disappear” in response to federal records requests under the Freedom of Information Act.
Moore’s attorneys wrote a letter to Wenstrup in August, citing Morens’s congressional testimony that he was making a joke and that Moore did not help him avoid FOIA. They also said his client voluntarily turned over documents to the subcommittee and tried to negotiate an alternative to delivering testimony.
“Should such a subpoena issue,” wrote attorneys William Vigen and Ronald Jacobs, “Ms. Moore would have no choice but to assert her right under the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution not to be forced to address such topics.”
In response, the subcommittee wrote a subpoena cover letter Monday disputing the credibility of Morens’s testimony and asserting that most of Moore’s documents were already publicly available because of FOIA requests.
“While voluntary providing documents in response to a Congressional request can constitute cooperation in most circumstances, providing public documents that we did not request does not. Moreover, the Select Subcommittee also requested your testimony, and your refusal to testify demonstrates a lack of cooperation,” the letter reads.
The congressional panel released Morens’s infamous email and other communications earlier this year as it ramped up scrutiny of Morens’s apparent use of a private gmail account to discuss Covid-19. Morens used his private email account to communicate with disgraced EcoHealth Alliance president Dr. Peter Daszak, whose taxpayer-funded non-profit organization oversaw bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese lab where Covid-19 is thought to have originated from.
At a public hearing earlier this year, Fauci distanced himself from Morens and denied any knowledge of Morens’s apparent effort to evade federal records laws.
The Department of Health and Human Services cut off EcoHealth Alliance’s taxpayer funding earlier this year after intense bipartisan criticism from subcommittee lawmakers over EcoHealth’s lack of transparency about the Wuhan lab research. Subcommittee investigators have accused Morens and Daszak of attempting to obstruct the subcommittee’s investigation.