NIH Ordered Watchdog Group Not to Ask About Wuhan Lab

A stunning new batch of emails from a watchdog group reveals that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) warned a watchdog group against submitting any Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for documents pertaining to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

NIH FOIA official Gorka Garcia-Malene went so far as to assert that FOIA requests related to the Wuhan lab were not made “in good faith”:

"If you’re interested in filing a request in good faith, I recommend that you help by not asking for anything relating to WIV across the agency at the forefront of fighting the pandemic."

In a separate email, Jordan Betz from the NIH suggested that the watchdog group refrain from making any requests related to Covid, as all such requests would need to be processed through the office of the NIH director:

"FOIA requests relating to COVID will have to go through the Office of the Director for review and partial denial."

The emails were released this past week by Justin Goodman, the senior vice president of White Coat Waste, a watchdog organization that monitors the NIH, specifically focusing on taxpayer-funded animal experiments.

In 2020, the group made a FOIA request to the NIH seeking emails that mentioned the Wuhan lab. That request was met with a rejection on law enforcement grounds. What the NIH claimed at the time was that while emails matching that description did exist, the NIH would not be releasing them because "disclosure could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings." 

While it is not known what those proceedings were, or if they even existed, the pending enforcement proceedings excuse is one of the grounds upon which government agencies often refuse disclosure under FOIA. 

Two years later, White Coat Waste submitted a follow-up request for the same emails. The NIH could have responded by stating that the enforcement proceedings were still ongoing and that they would therefore not release the emails. However, they did not do that. Instead, the NIH informed the watchdog group that the request was overly broad, claiming that there were simply too many emails regarding the Wuhan lab for the NIH to process effectively.

The mere fact that a nearly identical FOIA request was initially rejected due to purported enforcement proceedings and later denied for a completely different reason strongly suggests that the excuses being made were not legitimate but rather intended to shield the NIH from transparency regarding its activities with the Wuhan lab. White Coat Waste politely pointed out this inconsistency, at which point they were advised not to inquire about the Wuhan lab at all, and that if they did, they would be considered to be acting in bad faith. 

Regarding the NIH's request for White Coat Waste to refrain from inquiring about Covid, as all such requests needed to be directed through the director's office, it was previously established in an earlier email release that the then-NIH director, Francis Collins, was personally reviewing any FOIA responses before the NIH would release them to requesters.

While the media has, unsurprisingly, not reported on this, it is conspicuous and highly unusual for the head of an organization with a $60 billion budget and 20,000 staff members to personally involve himself in responding to FOIA requests. This fact is further emphasized by the new email released by White Coat Waste, which indicates that the director’s vetting applied only to Covid-related requests and not to any others.

In what can only be described as a logical next step, White Coat Waste is now suing the NIH under FOIA for a copy of the NIH's FOIA policy. It is, of course, highly unlikely that the NIH would have memorialized an unlawful policy. It is far more probable that the unlawful practices—whereby requesters are threatened and instructed not to make certain requests, or where the director assigned himself veto power over FOIA releases—were simply fabricated on the spot.

The latest episode in the FOIA wars follows closely on the heels of Margaret Moore, the NIH's ignominious “FOIA lady,” invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination regarding her role in a massive FOIA scandal that should be shaking the NIH to its core, if the media were doing its job. Moore's refusal to answer any questions during a closed-door deposition by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic stems from a previous disclosure by Anthony Fauci's right-hand man, David Morens, who revealed that Moore had taught him how to evade making FOIA disclosures:

“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. Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”

In another email, which was released earlier this year along with the “FOIA lady” email, Morens wrote:

“But I learned the tricks last year from an old friend, Marg Moore, who heads our FOIA office and also hates FOIAs.”

It is not surprising, yet it is still horrific that the head of a government FOIA office harbors disdain for FOIA.

Ultimately, any legal rule can be manipulated if the bureaucrats in charge are determined to do so. True transparency will not be achieved until the excessively bloated federal bureaucracy is streamlined and all the corrupt individuals are removed.