What is the difference between the letter "S" and the dollar sign "$?"
A whole lot if you are a government entity trying to stop people from obtaining public documents and reports.
Good government attorney Paul Wolf has battled governments at every level for them to be more honest and open with the public they serve. He's filed lawsuits and fought the good fight for transparency. He's seen it all when it comes to big government doing everything it can to block the public from accessing public records.
That is until he heard about the slick trick the National Institute of Health (NIH) tried pulling to hide the source of tens of millions of dollars in government grants orchestrated by Dr. Anthony Fauci during the height of the COVID crisis.
"This one takes the cake for secretive creativity, that's for sure,” said Wolf. "It is outrageous that officials deleted emails and even went so far as to intentionally misspell record names to avoid public disclosure. It is disturbing to learn that NIH officials proactively took steps to avoid compliance with the Freedom of Information Act."
Citing “apparent mishandling of government information,” the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic recently sent a letter to Dr. Monica Bertagnolli, Director of NIH regarding the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Senior Scientific Advisor, Dr. David Morens. Over 150 emails were released.
Dr. Morens’s recent testimony raised concerns about his “use of personal e-mail accounts to avoid transparency, intentionally avoid transparency via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and the possibility that he intentionally deleted official records—specifically records related to the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
At the center of the controversy is the allegation that government officials intentionally replaced the letter "S" with a dollar sign "$" on official documents. This was supposedly done to hinder public access and scrutiny of a COVID-origin scientific paper authored by Kristian Andersen.
It appears that a team led by Dr. Anthony Fauci intentionally misspelled Andersen's name by using a "$" sign in the spelling. This way, if the public or media requested a copy of her controversial report using a Freedom of Information Request (FOIA) and spelled her name the "correct way," the request could be denied because the name was "wrong."
In June 2021, Greg Folkers, a former chief of staff to Dr. Fauci, misspelled EcoHealth as "Ec~Health." Members of the House committee said this misspelling seemed to be a deliberate attempt to prevent the email from being found in FOIA keyword searches related to EcoHealth.
The Subcommittee cited that “evidence in possession of the Select Subcommittee suggests that NIAID officials would give forewarning of potentially damaging FOIA productions to non-governmental individuals, in particular, Dr. Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth.
One of the emails cited in the Subcommittee letter is damning. Daszak writes to Morens, “I hope the NIH can help reduce the amount that comes out – some of the emails between us all via your NIH account were a bit embarrassing re: criticizing the lab leakers and will be reported as showing that we were ‘conspiring’ together.”
The Subcommittee letter cites email evidence that, “suggests a conspiracy at the highest levels of NIH and NIAID to avoid public transparency regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.” "It is highly suspected that NIH, NIAID, and Ecohealth were conspiring together to keep information related to the US government funding gain of function research in a lab in China that may have led to the global pandemic."
The House plans to conduct transcribed interviews with NIH employees to uncover the apparent conspiracy. They point to the “apparent attack on public trust.”
Paul Wolf said, "The public has a right to know and it is important that the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act be followed and that government officials not seek to evade the law. The press and our elected representatives must remain vigilant in holding the government accountable to the people through FOIA requests."