Dr. Anthony Fauci is being accused of lying to Congress last month when he said he never used private email to conduct official business.
Fauci, 83, told a journalist in 2021 that he would reach out to them through his private email as he faced backlash over research being done on beagle puppies by his National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID).
The project saw innocent hound dogs tormented and killed in a lab in Tunisia to learn more about a parasitic disease, something the NIAID initially denied funding before Fauci confirmed this year that was a fib.
It also saw the hashtag #ArrestFauci trend on the site formerly known as Twitter, as he also faced backlash over his handling of the pandemic. The now-retired expert faced a grilling about this in June as well.
The White Coat Waste Project, who years ago revealed how NIAID spent $1.86million in taxpayer funds on the tests, has now uncovered correspondence where the doctor told a reporter he would message him personally as they spoke briefly about the then budding scandal.
Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is seen testifying at a coronavirus pandemic hearing on June 3, 2024. There, the former head of the NIAID told lawmakers he never used a personal email to discuss work
‘I will send you an e-mail via my gmail account,’ Fauci wrote in a 2021 email sent to Washington Post reporter Yasmeen Abutaleb. She had been the national health policy reporter for the paper at the time, before becoming a White House reporter the same month Fauci retired
Back in June, the former head of the NIAID told lawmakers he never used a personal email to discuss work – a stance that, while now coming into question, he continues to maintain.
‘I will send you an e-mail via my gmail account,’ Fauci wrote in the email dated October 29, 2021, and sent to Washington Post reporter Yasmeen Abutaleb.
Shortly before, the journalist who had been the national health policy reporter for the paper at the time, sent a message that appeared to air pity toward the doc about the series of ‘crazy articles’ that had surfaced surrounding the beagle experiments.
Earlier emails showed how Fauci shared an article from the fact check website Snopes, in which journalists seemingly sought to cast doubt on his connection to the experiments.
The article further suggested Fauci, who retired in August 2022, did not sign off on the taxpayer-funded experiments, which, aside from spawning widespread outrage, warranted a scathing rebuke from members of Congress.
The Snopes article called them ‘rumors’ designed to ‘disparage’ the then-NIAID director, and Fauci in turn wrote to the journalist, ‘As per our discussion, more of the same.’
The latter appeared to dismiss legitimate questions about the experiments where dogs were left for sand flies to be eaten alive for research purposes as outlandish.
Some three years later, he would concede to a House subcommittee that he ‘signed off’ on grants that funded the tests – an admission offered before several lawmakers on June 3.
The correspondence appeared to center around the project that saw innocent hound dogs tormented and killed in a lab in Tunisia to learn more about a parasitic disease, something the NIAID initially denied funding before Fauci confirmed this year that was a fib
The inconsistency isn’t the first from the lifelong doctor, and apparently isn’t the last either, if the FOIA records obtained by the White Coat Waste Project and The New York Post are to be taken seriously.
As mentioned, the exchange – occurring less than a year before Fauci’s retirement and Abutaleb’s seemingly simultaneously ascension to Post White House reporter – suggested the doctor sent an email to the woman from his personal account.
In a statement offered Monday in response, Fauci’s attorney David Schertler, said his client “stands by his June 3rd testimony’
He further claimed the email ‘was a personal matter and not a matter related to government business’.
“For that reason, Dr. Fauci used his personal email account to communicate about the matter,” he told the New York Post, the first to report on The White Coat Waste Project’s latest qualms.
The founder of the firm that first brought attention to the then-shrouded beagle experiments responded by telling the New York paper the email was proof that Fauci ‘broke federal law’, alleging he lied under oath about a variety of things.
‘We’ve followed the money and exposed how Fauci lied… about not funding gain-of-function at the Wuhan animal lab, that he lied about not bankrolling beagle torture in Tunisia,’ Anthony Bellotti reportedly said
‘And, now, that he broke federal law by using his personal email to evade FOIA requests about Beaglegate and secretly communicate with a Washington Post reporter who then published NIH disinformation to protect him and discredit us.’
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene holds up a photo of the experiments unveiled by the The White Coat Waste Project in 2021 at the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus pandemic last month
In a fact-check last month surrounding the now confirmed Beagle experiment, the Washington Post found the government-sanctioned was erased from a grant database weeks after members of the press began inquiring about it in 2021.
‘Beaglegate’ was thus born, a mostly online movement that questioned Fauci and the government’s involvement that culminated with White Coat Waste Project in 2022 releasing internal NIAID documents that included the full grant proposal.
Months before, Fauci had asked NIAID staff for details of the grant – after which one of the agency’s employees pressured the journal that published the study to remove its affiliation, according to internal NIAID documents obtained by White Coat Waste.
Representatives for the NIAID would then argue it funded a separate but similar study involving sand flies, before Fauci slammed reports on the experiments as ‘lunacy’ from the ‘far-right’ in his recent memoir.
However, days before the book published, he suddenly changed his tune – telling Congress he did, in fact, sign off on the Tunisia experiments – ‘because they were approved by a peer review’, he said in his June 3 testimony.
The committee had already obtained a trove of emails showing one of his top aides, Dr. David Morens, using a private email account to evade FOIA requests while bragging about deleting ‘smoking guns.’
Fauci’s top adviser at NIAID from 1998 to 2022, Morens is now the subject of an internal NIH investigation for alleged FOIA evasions and the deletion of federal records.
Correspondence between EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak and Fauci was also uncovered, after the nonprofit received more than half a million in funding from NIH to help conduct gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology beginning in 2014.
He continues to deny covering up the origins of Covid-19 as some claim the gain of function experiments were the cause, after 100 hours of testimony and a 15-month investigation failed to turn up any evidence linking him to potentially dangerous research relating to Covid-19
The committee had already obtained a trove of emails showing one of his top aides, Dr. David Morens, using a private email account to evade FOIA requests while bragging about deleting ‘smoking guns.’ Morens is now the subject of an internal NIH investigation
But perhaps the most disturbing incidents funded by Fauci’s National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases involved the Tunisian research lab, where $375,000 was given to have beagle puppies heads held in cages, before being left for sand flies to be eaten alive.
Distressing snaps showed the pups with their heads kept inside the muslin-type cages filled with the hungry insects.
Another procedure – which the NIH funded to the tune of $1.8m – saw 44 beagles undergo a ‘cordectomy’ that saw their vocal cords cut to stop them barking.
That experiment, which took place in Menlo Park, California, saw the dogs then pumped full of drugs, before being killed and dissected.
Fauci would announce his impending retirement months after the White Coat Waste Project exposed both, the same month Abutaleb changed jobs to become the Post’s White House reporter.
He continues to deny covering up the origins of Covid-19 as some claim the gain of function experiments were the cause, after more than 100 hours of testimony and a 15-month investigation failed to turn up any evidence linking him to potentially dangerous research in Wuhan.
He has also dismissed the – in his own words – ‘absolutely false and simply preposterous’ Republican claims he influenced the CIA’s analysis of whether the pandemic started naturally or escaped from the lab.
