(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit on behalf of OpenTheBooks.com against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for the employment contracts; financial, conflict of interest, and confidentiality disclosure documents; and job description of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., as well as royalties paid to NIH employees by outside entities (American Transparency, DBA OpenTheBooks.com v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (No. 1:21-cv-02821)).
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is an agency of HHS, failed to comply fully with three FOIA requests filed between January 28, 2021, and September 2021, for the following records about Dr. Fauci:
- All employment contracts, modifications and addendums since hiring as Director of National Institute for Health, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (January 28, 2021)
- Daily calendar from 1/1/2019 to the present time. (January 28, 2021) (After a phone call in January with NIH, we agreed to narrow our request and took this calendar request out.)
- Any confidentiality documents, conflict documents, and economic interest disclosure documents. (January 28, 2021)
- Current job description. (January 28, 2021)
- Any confidentiality agreements, conflict of interest documents, and economic interest disclosure documents pertaining to calendar year 2020 to the present. These include but are not limited to the OGE Form 278e and accompanying paperwork filed for 2020 with a May 2021 deadline. (May 27, 2021)
- A complete list/database of all personal royalties paid (including, but not limited to, FY2020) to current and former National Institutes of Health employees for work done while they were federally employed. The list/database should include, but not be limited to, the royalty recipient’s name, the amount of the royalty, the reason for the royalty, the date the royalty was paid, and the name of the entity paying the royalty. (September 15, 2021)
“No one is above the law including Dr. Anthony Fauci. It shouldn’t take a subpoena or a lawsuit to force open basic employment documents that executive-level federal bureaucrats are required by law to file,” said Adam Andrzejewski, CEO and founder of OpenTheBooks.com. “We thank Judicial Watch for being a good friend and partner in this important matter.”
“Anthony Fauci wields unrivaled political power in our federal government, so it is urgent the American people have full access to his financial disclosures,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “That we had to file a federal lawsuit about Dr. Fauci’s financial disclosures and other basic employment information raises a host of concerning questions.”
About OpenTheBooks.com: Last year, the organization filed 40,500 FOIA requests – the most in American history. They successfully captured $6 trillion in federal, state, and local spending. In January 2021, their investigation found that Anthony Fauci was the #1 most highly compensated federal employee – even out earning the president, here.
Through previous FOIA lawsuits, Judicial Watch uncovered noteworthy Fauci emails and CDC/NIAID records.
In July 2021, Judicial Watch uncovered emails and other records from NIAID officials in connection with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, revealing significant collaborations and funding that began in 2014.
Also in July 2021, Judicial Watch uncovered CDC records showing that Facebook coordinated closely with the CDC to control the COVID narrative and “misinformation” and that over $3.5 million in free advertising given to the CDC by social media companies.
In June 2021, Judicial Watch revealed that the NIAID under Fauci gave the Wuhan lab $826,000 for bat coronavirus research from 2014 to 2019.
Also in June, Judicial Watch announced it filed FOIA lawsuits against the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the State Department for information on the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
In March 2021, Judicial Watch, through a lawsuit filed on behalf of the Daily Caller News Foundation, uncovered emails and other records of Fauci and Dr. H. Clifford Lane from HHS showing that NIH officials tailored confidentiality forms to China’s terms and that the World Health Organization (WHO) conducted an unreleased, “strictly confidential” COVID-19 epidemiological analysis in January 2020.
In October 2020, Judicial Watch, through a lawsuit filed on behalf of the Daily Caller News Foundation, received from HHS 300 pages of Fauci’s emails, including his approval of a press release supportive of China’s response to the 2019 novel coronavirus.