Judicial Watch announced on Monday it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit on behalf of American Transparency (OpenTheBooks.com) against the Department of Health and Human Services for employment and financial disclosure records for the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) chief of the Clinical Center’s Department of Bioethics Christine Grady. Grady is the spouse of Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (American Transparency, d/b/a/ OpenTheBooks.com v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (No. 1:22-cv-02021)).
The lawsuit was filed after HHS failed to respond to an April 8 FOIA request from OpenTheBooks.com to the NIH asking for records regarding Grady:
- All employment contracts, modifications and addendums regarding Christine Grady, MSN, PhD, since her hiring as Chief of the Department of Bioethics.
- Any confidentiality agreements/documents, conflict of interest waivers or documents, ethics disclosures, and financial and/or economic interest disclosure documents.
- Grady’s current job description.
The lawsuit asks the court to require the department to search for and produce all responsive records and order the department to stop withholding non-exempt records related to the FOIA request.
“Once again, NIH is using taxpayer dollars to avoid transparency, and leaving us no choice but to enter litigation that will also burden the taxpayer,” said Adam Andrzejewski, CEO and founder of OpenTheBooks.com. “It’s time for NIH to stop routinely hiding information as simple as a job description and embrace basic transparency. We thank our friend at Judicial Watch for helping us get the answers we deserve.”
“We have good reason to believe that these financial disclosure records will give Americans a more complete picture of the conflicts of interest that have compromised NIH—and Dr. Fauci,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “That our client had to file a federal lawsuit to gain access to this basic information speaks volumes.”
Judicial Watch is pursuing two additional lawsuits on behalf of OpenTheBooks.com.
An October 2021 lawsuit against HHS asks 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. In May 2022, the lawsuit uncovered that over a 10-year period, Fauci and others at NIH received more than $350 million in secretive “royalty” payments from drug companies and other third parties.
A January 2022 lawsuit asks for Fauci’s calendars and calendar entries.
OpenTheBooks.com is the largest private repository of records of United States public-sector spending. Its mission is to post online all publicly available government spending: “every dime, online, in real time.”
Author: Judicial Watch
Judicial Watch, Inc., a conservative, non-partisan educational foundation, promotes transparency, accountability and integrity in government, politics and the law. Through its educational endeavors, Judicial Watch advocates high standards of ethics and morality in our nation’s public life and seeks to ensure that political and judicial officials do not abuse the powers entrusted to them by the American people. Judicial Watch fulfills its educational mission through litigation, investigations, and public outreach. Visit Judicial Watch at https://www.judicialwatch.org/
