Sen. Rand Paul is calling on the Justice Department to probe whether a top adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci improperly concealed, and perhaps even destroyed, documents pertaining to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Kentucky Republican is formally calling for an investigation into accusations of improper concealment and destruction of COVID-19 origin records by Dr. David Morens in a letter addressed to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday. 

The letter, citing emails obtained by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, presents “significant evidence” suggesting Morens may have violated federal law by hiding and erasing records related to the origins of COVID-19 to avoid leaks through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

“Moreover, newly revealed emails suggest a broader conspiracy within the NIH FOIA office to assist Dr. Morens in unlawfully destroying records and evading public records laws,” Paul wrote. 

For his part, Fauci has repeatedly publicly repudiated theories suggesting a lab leak as the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.

HIGH-RANKING FAUCI ADVISER USED PERSONAL EMAIL TO AVOID FOIA REQUESTS, DISCUSS COVID ORIGIN

“These emails provide strong evidence that Dr. Morens violated federal law by concealing and destroying federal records. It is imperative that your Department investigate the allegations against Dr. Morens and, if substantiated, ensure that he is held accountable to the fullest extent of the law,” the letter continued.

Paul’s letter comes as emails recently released between Morens and the president of a non-governmental organization being funded to conduct coronavirus research in Wuhan, China, the EcoHealth Alliance, were investigated by House lawmakers last week.

NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak testified on Thursday that Morens allegedly deleted emails to thwart the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic’s investigation into the origins of COVID-19. 

“Don’t worry, just send to any of my addresses, and I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”

During the hearing, Tabak informed Republican House Oversight Chairman James Comer that Morens purportedly breached NIH policy by deleting emails after public records requests.

“Dr. David Morens, a senior advisor to Fauci for decades, wrote in an email to Dr. Daszak, ‘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.’ Is that consistent with NIH document retention policies?” Comer asked Tabak, to which he responded that it is not.

FAUCI ADMITS SOCIAL DISTANCING NOT BASED ON SCIENCE, ‘SORT OF JUST APPEARED’

The coronavirus mutation COVID-19 illustration with dark blue brain cell background. (iStock)

WUHAN LAB SCIENTISTS WERE FIRST TO CATCH COVID-19: REPORT

“He also later wrote Dr. Daszak, ‘We are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns and if we did, we wouldn’t put them in emails. And if we found them, we would delete them,’” Comer said. “Finally, emails show that Dr. Morens would share internal questions about upcoming FOIA releases with Dr. Daszak. He would then help Dr. Daszak craft responses to documents being released in these FOIAs.”

In other emails, Morens expressed concern over what was sent to his work email and what was sent to his personal email, informing those on the email chain that they did not need to worry and that he would “delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”

“As you know, I try to always communicate on gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly,” Morens wrote in a September 2021 email, which was sent at the time to many scientists involved in the debate over the origins of COVID. “Stuff sent to my gmail gets to my phone … but not my NIH computer.”

“Don’t worry, just send to any of my addresses, and I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times,” he added in the email.

Fox News Digital has reached out to the NIH and Garland for comment. 

Fox News Digital’s Kyle Morris contributed to this report.

UCLA Chancellor Gene Block will testify before a Republican-led House committee Thursday, where he is expected to face aggressive questioning about antisemitism on his campus and how a pro-Palestinian encampment ended in violence.

His appearance comes as UCLA, among the nation’s most prestigious public universities, has been roiled by months of tense protests over the Israel-Hamas war, including a violent mob attack three weeks ago on a pro-Palestinian encampment.

The testimony — which will take place just over two months before Block steps down as chancellor — will be the first time the head of a California university addresses the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. The group has grilled university presidents and K-12 school leaders on a national stage since the fall, contributing to the resignations of the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.

Setting the tone for questioning, chair Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) said in a Monday statement that the “committee has a clear message for mealy-mouthed, spineless college leaders: Congress will not tolerate your dereliction of your duty to your Jewish students. No stone must go unturned while buildings are being defaced, campus greens are being captured, or graduations are being ruined.”

In a campus-wide letter distributed Monday, Block said he would “speak honestly, and personally, about the challenges UCLA faces and the impact of this pernicious form of hate” during the testimony. “I will continue to insist that antisemitism — as well as Islamophobia, anti-Arab hate and any form of bigotry, hostility or discrimination — is antithetical to our values, corrosive to our community and not to be tolerated.”

Thursday’s testimony will represent a key moment in Block’s 17-year career at UCLA and comes a week after he survived a “no confidence” vote by the university’s Academic Senate but saw half of voting faculty representatives endorse censuring him for his response to pro-Palestinian protesters.

The House committee is investigating how UCLA handled the encampment that was dismantled May 2 by police who arrested more than 200 people, in addition to allegations of antisemitism that have grown on the Westwood campus since the Oct. 7, when Hamas militants attacked Israel and the nation launched its retaliatory war in Gaza.

The committee, made up of 44 representatives — 24 of them Republicans — has three Californians, Republican Rep. Michelle Steel and Democratic Reps. Mark Takano and Mark DeSaulnier. The panel describes itself on its website as “promoting access to high-quality education for students” and opposing “one-size-fits-all government-run schools.”

During an explosive Dec. 5 committee hearing on antisemitism, the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faced pressure after giving evasive responses to whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” was a violation of student conduct rules, including saying in their answers that it depended on “context.” Presidents and school administrators facing elected officials since then have fared better on similar questions.

Block will be joined by the leaders of Northwestern and Rutgers universities, where presidents recently signed off on agreements with protesters to end encampments but did not agree to their main demands: to divest from weapons companies and ties to Israel and to boycott academic partnerships with Israeli universities. Block has not made any agreements with pro-Palestinian activists.

The presidents of Yale and Michigan, who were previously slated to testify alongside Block at the hearing, titled “Calling for Accountability: Stopping Antisemitic College Chaos,” will be called to appear for transcribed interviews. The head of the Berkeley public school district testified earlier this month in during a similar hearing aimed at K-12 schools.

Foxx has admonished UCLA and the other universities for making what she sees as “shocking concessions to the unlawful antisemitic encampments on their campuses” and criticized UCLA leadership for failing to have police prepared to intervene April 30 when the mob attacked the pro-Palestinian camp.

UC released a statement Tuesday describing UCLA’s free speech and anti-discrimination policies.

“While free speech is protected on UCLA’s campus — and at all other public universities — that right is not absolute. We also have legal obligations under the federal law to protect students from discrimination and harassment,” said Charles F. Robinson, general counsel and senior vice president. “Our policies do not allow for anyone to intimidate, harass or stop someone from moving freely about our campus. UCLA follows the University of California’s Anti-Discrimination Policy, which prohibits harassment and discrimination based on an individual’s actual or perceived protected category. The protected categories include religion and national origin [shared Jewish ancestry].”

Critics say the hearings are an attempt by House Republicans to use campus unrest for political gain during an election year. They also point out that while reports of campus antisemitic incidents have grown significantly since Oct. 7, there have been no similar hearings on the anti-Muslim and anti-Arab hatred that has also shot up.

A spokesman for the committee did not respond to a request to interview Foxx. A UCLA spokesman also did not respond to a request to interview Block.

Foxx previously directed Block, UC President Michael V. Drake and Rich Leib, chair of the UC Board of Regents, to produce all documents, communications and security videos related to alleged antisemitic incidents at UCLA since Oct. 7. She gave them until Tuesday afternoon to share those documents, as well as texts and other communications from staff, police and the regents.

In a letter last week demanding the documents, Foxx described what she saw as an antisemitic trope: an image of Block, who is Jewish, displayed at the encampment that “featured him with horns and red eyes.”

Before the protests began, Block was widely praised for expanding enrollment, diversity, philanthropy and research funding to get the university through a financial crisis and the global pandemic. The last controversy Block faced was in 2019 when The Times revealed that years earlier, UCLA had been aware of allegations of parents pledging donations to its athletic programs in exchange for their children being admitted to the university.

But after the encampment attack overnight on April 30 and a hours-long delay in the police response to quell the melee, he has faced condemnation from some elected officials, faculty, students and staff. While his biggest critics at UCLA have been from the left, he’s more likely to face opposition at the hearing from the right, following a pattern in previous hearings.

Pro-Palestinian UCLA faculty have expressed frustration that their chancellor has flown to Washington, D.C., while the campus remains unsettled.

“UCLA is the center of the fire across American universities, yet he’s focusing on the hearing,” said Yogita Goyal, a professor of English and African American studies and a voting member of the Academic Senate who said she opposes Block’s leadership. “Congress should not dictate what happens on our campus.”

Graeme Blair, an associate professor of political science who is part of UCLA Faculty for Justice in Palestine, said he hoped Block would use the hearing to “push back against the narrative of the committee, which is focused on antisemitism to the exclusion of anti-Palestinian hate … the dominant force on our campus leading to violent harm to our students.”

“UCLA’s response to the encampment on campus failed to protect students against anti-Palestinian violence, but it has a chance now to come clean and start to make changes,” Blair said.

Inna Faliks, a professor of piano who is Jewish, said she “hoped the hearing would help” but that it was “hard to tell” if previous ones had made a dent.

Faliks, a voting member of the Academic Senate who opposed the recent ballots against Block, charged the UCLA encampment with being “pro-Hamas” because of its slogans and checkpoints that would not let Zionists through, saying they “made Jewish faculty and staff feel horrible.”

Judea Pearl, an Israeli American professor of computer science, said that he, too, felt the sting of antisemitism on campus but thought the issue was too often brushed aside by activists who described themselves as anti-Zionist but not antisemitic.

“There is a zionophobia on campus. But Zionism is not a bad thing,” said Pearl. “It is good to partner with Israeli universities, for example. We need their research because it’s good research.”

Pearl disapproved of Block’s handling of the encampment, he said, because it was not cleared more quickly after going up April 25. He also said that a tense pro-Israel counter-protest before the attack has been overshadowed by the night of violence.

“Unfortunately, this hearing is being done by Republicans. I wish it was done by Democrats who actually care about higher education,” Pearl said. “But it’s better than doing nothing.”

In addition to the hearing, UCLA is preparing for a possible strike by graduate student workers. The union representing such workers across the University of California’s 10 campuses voted last week to authorize a strike in response to the arrests and use of force in dismantling the pro-Palestinian encampments at UCLA and elsewhere. The strike began Monday at UC Santa Cruz.

Gene McAdoo, a doctoral student in the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies who is part of the union and joined the pro-Palestinian encampment, said he thought Block would “get it really bad.”

“I don’t think he will come out of that in one piece,” McAdoo said. “He’s been getting pressure from the left to resign, but after this it might be coming from all sides.”

The prosecution and defense rested yesterday, meaning, to no one’s shock, that Donald Trump did not testify.

Trump had said he would, but it would have been judicial malpractice for his lawyers to expose him to a hundred different lines of interrogation. 

Michael Cohen went into the hush money trial with a well-established reputation as a convicted liar.

We all knew he would be hammered on cross-examination for lying on behalf of Trump, lying to Congress, lying to investigators and lying to the press. That was baked into the equation.

CROSS-EXAMINATION THROWS MICHAEL COHEN OFF BALANCE, BUT BELABORS POINT THAT HE HATES TRUMP

But the lie he acknowledged on Monday is in a whole different category – and may be a turning point in convincing one or more jurors to dismiss him as a money-grubbing thief and vote for Trump’s acquittal.

The onetime fixer fixed up a nice deal for himself: stealing from the Trump Organization.

Yep, he did it, said Cohen. Yep, he lied about it. Yep, he gladly pocketed the money because he was angry about his bonus being cut.

This was a real Perry Mason moment – and an absolute failure by the prosecution.

On the other litany of lies, Alvin Bragg’s lawyers brought them up on direct examination, with the best possible spin, to soften the sting when Trump’s lawyers were grilling him.

But on this one? Nada. At first, I thought Cohen didn’t tell the prosecutors, but Trump lawyer Todd Blanche asked, “And you told multiple prosecutors in the District 13 Attorney’s Office that story, right?”

“Yes sir.”

So it was sheer sloppiness – an unbelievable failure.

And the narrative gets even sleazier.

The Trump campaign hired a tech firm called Red Finch to try to discredit unfavorable polls by CNBC and Drudge. The fee was $50,000. Cohen delivered $20,000 in cash stuffed into a brown bag to the company’s chief – nothing suspicious there, right?

And Cohen kept the other $30,000 – later grossed up to $60,000 for tax reasons – blatantly stealing from his ex-boss’s company. (Trump decided not to pay Red Finch because its efforts petered out but didn’t know about the bag o’ cash.)

MICHAEL COHEN, CORROBORATING OTHERS, SAYS TRUMP WANTED TO SILENCE STORMY BECAUSE OF THE ELECTION

There was little the prosecutors could do when they had their turn. Cohen said he was “angered” by the two-thirds cut in his usual $150K bonus “so I just felt it was almost like self-help. You know, I wasn’t going to let him have the benefit this way as well.”

Ah, self-help. Stealing as therapy. A pretty lame explanation.

It didn’t matter what else Cohen said in 2018, such as insisting he would never have paid the $130,000 in hush money to Stormy Daniels, which is well-documented, without the president’s explicit approval. The damage had been done.

But there were more fireworks to come.

The defense called as its main witness Robert Costello, a veteran lawyer and talented talker who represented Cohen for a few months.

Former President Donald Trump leaves Trump Tower on his way to Manhattan criminal court, Monday, April 15, 2024, in New York.  (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)

Cohen has testified that he didn’t trust Costello because he was close to Rudy Giuliani, offering a back channel to the White House, but also the risk that anything Cohen said would be repeated there.

Costello testified that he told Cohen that his legal problems could be resolved “if he had truthful information on Donald Trump and cooperated with the Southern District of New York.”

Cohen’s response, according to Costello, repeated 10 or 12 times: “I swear to God, Bob. I don’t have anything on Donald Trump.”

That was obviously a big fat lie.

Costello also alleged that Cohen had told him Trump didn’t know about the hush money payments, which gets to the heart of the case.

STORMY ALLEGES ONE-NIGHT STAND WITH TRUMP, AGREED TO LIE FOR HER $130,000 PAYOFF

But Robert Costello walked into that courtroom with a giant chip on his shoulder.  

After one question, he audibly said “ridiculous.” After another, he said “Geez.”

Judge Juan Merchan had enough and sent the jury out.

“If you don’t like my ruling, you don’t say ‘Geez,’ okay. And then you don’t say ‘strike it;’ because I’m the only one that can strike testimony in the courtroom.”

The lecture was severe. “And then, if you don’t like my ruling, you don’t give me side eye and you don’t roll your eyes. Do you understand that?”

Costello gave the judge a long stare. “Are you staring me down right now?” At that point, he declared, “Clear the courtroom.” Everyone later returned.

Michael Cohen is questioned by prosecutor Susan Hoffinger on re-direct during former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial on charges that he falsified business records to conceal money paid to silence porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016, in Manhattan state court in New York City, May 20, 2024, in this courtroom sketch. (REUTERS/Jane Rosenberg )

In yesterday’s testimony, the prosecution got Costello to acknowledge he was referring to Trump when saying he had “friends in high places.” 

An email about “getting everyone on the same page” was because Cohen “had been complaining incessantly that Rudy Giuliani was making statements in the press,” Costello said.

He said an email about getting everyone “on the same page” was about working out the complaints about Rudy.

Costello denied the prosecutor’s question about “encouraging him not to cooperate.”

On redirect, the defense asked: What about an email saying you were being “played”?

SUBSCRIBE TO HOWIE’S MEDIA BUZZMETER PODCAST, A RIFF ON THE DAY’S HOTTEST STORIES

Costello said they kept urging Cohen to sign a retainer – so they could get paid – but he kept making excuses and putting it off.

Was he pressuring Michael Cohen to do anything? Costello said he was not.

And that was it. Closing arguments are set for next Tuesday.

The prosecution has plenty of other witnesses and documents, but Cohen is the only one tying Trump directly to his reimbursement for hush money payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal in this openly partisan and shakily built case. So Cohen’s evisceration on the stand really matters to the falsification of documents charge, unless 12 jurors believe that the former president had to know.