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The U.S. Department of Justice does not need to wait for Dr. David Morens to turn on his colleagues; the evidence to charge the next key adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci is already in the public record.
Greg Folkers was critical to the censorship operation at the heart of the COVID-19 response. As chief of staff at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Folkers oversaw operations for the agency’s $6 billion budget and later sought to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by conspiring with Dr. Morens and intentionally misspelling key phrases such as “g#in-of-function.”
In January 2020, he sent the first email to Fauci, warning that the NIAID had funded gain-of-function research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through grants it made to EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak’s organization. That research, Folkers cautioned, could be the source of COVID-19.
But instead of warning the public of the “lab leak” as it would come to be known, Folkers, Fauci and Morens initiated the cover-up.
Hours after Folkers’ initial warning, Fauci recruited virologists Kristian Andersen and Eddie Holmes to plant a cover story.
This conspiracy prompted “Proximal Origin,” the infamous Nature article that stated that it was “implausible” that the virus was “laboratory-based,” even though Andersen and his colleagues made over 50 direct statements that expressed their belief that a lab leak was the likely origin of the virus.
While that article became the basis to censor any dissidents who questioned the origins of the virus, Folkers, Morens and Fauci conspired to keep their role in the affair secret.
“Tony doesn’t want his fingerprints on origin stories … Don’t worry … I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times,” Morens wrote to Daszak.
Morens then coached his colleagues on how to avoid FOIA requests (in defiance of federal law) by misspelling key phrases, using code words, deleting emails and sending sensitive information to non-government accounts.
“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,” he wrote in February 2021.
This is the crime that led to the April 28 charges against Morens, which include “conspiracy against the United States; destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations; concealment, removal, or mutilation of records; and aiding and abetting.”
FBI Director Kash Patel spoke out against the “illegal obfuscation of … communications” and vowed that “if you have engaged in activity conspiring against the United States, we will not stop until you face justice.”
The U.S. government already has concrete proof that Folkers conspired to evade FOIA requests on at least three occasions in June 2021 alone.
On June 4, 2021, in an email exchange discussing Daszak’s gain-of-function research, he intentionally misspelled “EcoHealth” as “Ec~Health.”
Three days later, in an email to Morens, Folkers attempted to hide his reference to Andersen by typing his last name as “anders$n.” Morens forwarded the message to his personal email account.
Three weeks later, Folkers intentionally misspelled “gain-of-function” to be “g#in-of-function” in another email to Morens.
While President Joe Biden (or his autopen) granted a startlingly broad pardon to Fauci in the final days of his administration, there is still ample opportunity to bring his co-conspirators to justice.
Folkers was a central figure in the COVID-19 operation. He knew of NIAID’s culpability, he served as Fauci’s liaison and he helped orchestrate a massive cover-up. In the process, he partook in the same crimes that now support the indictment against Morens.
There are many more besides, among whom are the heads of the Cybersecurity Inflation Security Agency, which divided the population between essential and nonessential, and masterminded the censorship regime, the employees of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services who worked to close medical services to non-COVID-19-related diagnostics, and the people at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who used the crisis to push for mail-in ballots.
May all this come in time. We’ve got a good start. Much more needs to be done.
Originally published by Brownstone Institute.
