Newly released documents contradict Dr. Anthony S. Fauci’s testimony to Congress in 2024 about his use of private email accounts for government business — and his relationship with Dr. David Morens, a top Fauci advisor who now faces up to 51 years in prison for breaking federal records laws.
The documents show that on Jan. 4, 2022, Fauci’s chief of staff, Gregory Folkers, used a text message on Slack to tell Morens of “a new assignment from asf [Fauci] that we did not want to put in email [emphasis added].”
Minutes later, Morens responded he would begin Fauci’s “assignment” — secretly reviewing a book manuscript Bill Gates had written and asked Fauci to read — as soon as he reached the National Institutes of Health campus.
Fauci, Folkers, and Morens were all federal employees at the time. Fauci ran the NIH infectious diseases division and was chief medical advisor to President Biden. Folkers and Morens worked for him.
Yet, on June 3, 2024, Fauci repeatedly told a Congressional subcommittee investigating his relationship with Morens he had never conducted official NIH business with Morens or anyone else outside of his government emails.
Fauci tried to give himself an out by telling the committee he might have used private emails to work with Morens when they co-wrote papers for scientific journals. But the “new assignment” Folkers gave Morens didn’t fall in that category.
Fauci does not face any risk of a perjury charge over the contradiction between his sworn testimony and the new documents. On January 20, 2025, his last day in office, President Joe Biden pardoned Fauci from any federal prosecutions related to his NIH work between 2014 and the day of the pardon.
But the documents, which have largely gone unnoticed since Senate investigators published them 10 days ago, help reveal why Fauci is so reluctant to testify to the Senate committee headed by Rand Paul (R-KY) investigating Covid’s origins. On July 29, Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination to the committee more than 100 times.
After decades testifying under oath, Fauci is skilled at dodging questions he does not want to answer. But the committee’s investigators have access to many documents, files, emails, and text messages Fauci may have believed were deleted. They continue to find omissions and contradictions in his earlier Congressional testimony.
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(The search for the truth never ends. Please help.)
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The Slack chats are buried in a 1375-page tranche of files about Gates that Paul’s investigators released on July 31.
The tranche also includes an email from Fauci to Gates in which Fauci calls Morens a “trusted colleague.” Publicly, Fauci insisted to the House subcommittee in 2024 that he was not close to Morens and Morens did not advise him on “substantive issues.”
That contradiction might not rise to the level of a perjury charge even if Fauci did not have Biden’s pardon.
The Slack chat is more problematic. It shows both that Fauci was ordering Morens to work for him on a “new assignment” and that Fauci and Folkers, his chief of staff, wanted to keep the work outside the NIH’s record-keeping system. In another Slack chat, Folkers again advises Fauci to “use gmail to write back to bill g.”
Fauci did not, instead forwarding Morens’s comments about Gates’s manuscript to Gates from his official NIH account. (That contradiction might be another problem for Fauci if the pardon did not protect him, showing that he believed his relationship with Gates was related to his official work.)
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(Pls keep confidential)
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Morens played a crucial role for Fauci in 2020 and 2021 by connecting him to Peter Daszak, the British zoologist whose EcoHealth Alliance served as a link between the NIH and the lab in Wuhan that is the likely source of Covid.
An NIH grant to EcoHealth funded research at Wuhan to help make coronaviruses, which are mostly found in bats, more dangerous. EcoHealth applied in 2017 for additional federal funding for research in Wuhan tailor-made to have produced the Sars-COV-2 virus that called Covid. (EcoHealth has denied the research the NIH funded directly could have produced the Sars-COV-2 virus.)
As the epidemic exploded out of China in 2020, Fauci and prominent virologists downplayed the potential that the virus had leaked from the Wuhan lab, despite his and their private concerns such a leak was possible. Meanwhile, Daszak and Morens schemed to hide documents and attack any scientist or journalist trying to investigate a possible leak.
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A one-time donation funds years of work.
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Six years later, details about the relationship between Fauci, Morens, and Daszak are still emerging.
But unlike Fauci, Morens does not have a presidential pardon that insulates him from federal criminal charges. On April 28, federal prosecutors in Maryland charged him with hiding records about Covid’s origins from the public, investigators, and journalists.
Morens faces 51 years in prison.
Fauci does not.
He had my former employer in his hip pocket in DC. Lost my job and for what? All lies and BS. I’ll beat this dead horse forever, they should all pay the price.
You are far too kind Alex. “Appears to have mislead” is semantics. He repeatedly lied.