The Daily BS • Bo Snerdley Cuts Through It!
The Daily BS • Bo Snerdley Cuts Through It!

Get my Daily BS twice-a-day news stack directly to your email.


The Fauci files get messier: Comer demands to know who kept COVID diary from Congress

by

BS BULLETIN

  • House Oversight Chairman James Comer is demanding former Biden HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra explain why Fauci’s COVID diary and cellphone were not produced after congressional investigators requested responsive records.
  • Comer says the diary contains terms specifically covered by the committee’s November 2023 request.
  • The demand lands one day after former Fauci colleague David Morens pleaded guilty to a federal conspiracy involving concealment of COVID-related government records.

The COVID accountability story has developed a rather remarkable recurring theme: Where did all the records go?

One day after former Fauci associate David Morens pleaded guilty to conspiring to conceal COVID-related federal records, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer is demanding answers from another major figure from the pandemic era — former Biden Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra.

And the timing could hardly be worse for Becerra. He’s currently running for governor of California. Comer sent Becerra a letter demanding that he explain why Dr. Anthony Fauci’s pandemic diary and cellphone were not provided to congressional investigators even though House Republicans had explicitly requested records that appear to encompass material contained in the diary.

The Oversight Committee announced the investigation Wednesday. In November 2023, congressional investigators requested Fauci records containing terms including “COVID-19,” “gain-of-function” and “Wuhan.”

Then came the discovery of Fauci’s diary. More than 1,000 pages. And according to Comer, those requested terms appear throughout it. Yet the committee says it didn’t receive the diary from Becerra’s HHS.

Not one page. Not even an acknowledgment that it existed. Comer put the problem rather plainly in his letter: “These terms, among others outlined in the document request, appear throughout Dr. Fauci’s diary.”

Then came the accusation: “Despite the existence of this clearly relevant and responsive information, you failed to include any portion of Dr. Fauci’s diary in your response, let alone even acknowledge its existence.”

If Congress requests records containing particular search terms, and a thousand-page document sitting within the department contains those terms, how does that document somehow fail to make the trip up Pennsylvania Avenue?

Comer sees two possibilities. Neither is particularly flattering. “The Committee is concerned that you either intentionally withheld this information, or that you failed to conduct an adequate search of the Department’s systems as requested,” he wrote.

In other words: Did you hide it? Or did your department somehow fail to find it? Pick one.

The diary and Fauci’s cellphone didn’t disappear into the Bermuda Triangle. After Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became HHS secretary, the department turned them over to Republican Sens. Rand Paul and Ron Johnson as part of their COVID investigations. Paul subsequently released more than 1,000 pages of Fauci’s pandemic-era notes. Those entries provided a fascinating window into what Fauci was saying and doing privately during the same period when he became one of the most recognizable government officials in America.

Among other things, they contain material congressional investigators believe bears on questions about school closures, government pandemic policy, media relationships and COVID’s origins. And some entries appear to complicate Fauci’s later testimony. During a 2024 House appearance, Fauci sought to distance himself from responsibility for school-distancing and closure policies, emphasizing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s role.

But one diary entry concerning then-New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio records Fauci saying he had “convinced” the mayor, based partly on their conversation, to close New York City schools.

Whatever one thinks that entry ultimately proves, it’s exactly the sort of contemporaneous evidence congressional investigators tend to find useful. Which returns us to the obvious question: Why wasn’t Congress given the diary when it was asking for Fauci’s pandemic records?

The dispute also didn’t begin yesterday. Congressional Republicans had been fighting Becerra’s HHS for Fauci-related documents for years.

In January 2022, Comer and Jim Jordan complained that HHS and its agencies were using redactions to shield COVID-origin communications from congressional scrutiny and demanded that the department produce them.

In February 2023, Oversight renewed a broad COVID-origins records request to Becerra that specifically sought official phone records for Fauci and other senior health officials.

And testimony released from the committee’s later Fauci investigation shows staff complaining that at least one responsive email had gone unproduced for nearly a year. A committee investigator testified that he had to travel to HHS headquarters, view the email there and manually transcribe it because the department had not turned it over.

So Wednesday’s letter isn’t arriving in a vacuum. It’s another chapter in a long-running fight over what records existed, what HHS searched, what it produced and what congressional investigators were allowed to see. If this story had broken six months ago, it would already deserve attention. Breaking now makes it combustible.

On Tuesday, David Morens — a former senior NIAID official who worked closely with Fauci — pleaded guilty to a federal conspiracy charge connected to efforts to evade federal transparency laws and conceal government communications involving coronavirus research. Morens admitted using his personal Gmail account for government-related communications to keep material away from FOIA requests.

Prosecutors say he and others discussed how to avoid government records requirements while communicating about the controversial EcoHealth Alliance grant associated with bat-coronavirus research. Morens faces up to five years in prison.

Remember one of the emails congressional investigators uncovered from Morens? He wrote that he had learned from a FOIA official “how to make emails disappear” after receiving a request but before the records search began. In another, he wrote that he could get information to Fauci through Fauci’s private Gmail account or personally because Fauci was “too smart” to receive troublesome material through ordinary channels. Fauci has denied knowledge of Morens’ actions. And Morens’ guilty plea does not establish that Fauci or Becerra participated in Morens’ conspiracy.

The optics are brutal. A former senior Fauci colleague admits conspiring to evade federal records laws on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Congress publicly demands that Biden’s former HHS secretary explain why another enormous collection of Fauci records wasn’t produced when investigators asked for it. At some point, “Where are the records?” stops sounding like a partisan talking point and starts sounding like a perfectly reasonable question.

Comer wants answers by September 2. Among the questions Becerra is being asked:

  • Did he know Fauci kept the diary?
  • When did he learn it existed?
  • Why wasn’t it produced?
  • Why wasn’t Fauci’s cellphone produced?
  • Did anybody else in the Biden administration instruct or pressure Becerra or HHS not to turn over responsive records?

Becerra now gets to answer those questions while campaigning to become governor of California.

And that last question may prove especially important. Because if the failure to produce Fauci’s records was simply bureaucratic incompetence, that’s one story. If somebody made a deliberate decision not to give Congress responsive material? That’s an entirely different story. At this point, Comer is alleging a failure to produce responsive records and demanding an explanation. He has not established that Becerra personally ordered the diary concealed. That’s what the investigation is now trying to determine. And after years of Americans being told that congressional inquiries into COVID origins and government transparency were little more than partisan theater, perhaps somebody ought to answer it.

DBS WIRE SOURCES:

today’s hot news