Dr. FOIA

every single day. We do is eight days a week. Today obviously the Friday podcast, but we have on Saturday we will take a look at some random things that pop up. Whatever is on the Saturday podcast and the mailbag on Sunday. So very exciting. Joined by the man west of the four oh five making his way down east of the four oh five, David Gascon on the fifth foul h. It's a nice little bag of fun

that we have over the weekend. And of course I dip my hand into the deep end of the pool and pull out guests that is unsuspecting to those that listen to our show, do not pull the muscle here patting yourself from the back. I will not. I will not do that. I will not do I U. I don't have any fan boys like you that do that for me either. I do not. I do not have fan boys. I have supporters. I have people that are believers in the Mallard Militia cause and support what we

do here. But yeah, every Friday. Now. Last week we had the big radio story, so we didn't have anyone on because the big Clay Travis replacing Russia INMBOSS story was a big, big deal in our world, so we didn't end up putting anybody on. But this week the big story. It's not a sports story, although guests on will argue it is a sports it's it sampled our occupation for quite a while. Yes, the world, we know

the music stopped in the world. We know there were no no games, no games for you, no games for you. The sporting world shutdown for a hundred and thirty four days as a result of the COVID and the whole world shut down, working from home and whatnot. So I bring this up because BuzzFeed News, through a freedom of information requests, they had to file a lawsuit here. They tracked down not all but a large number thousands of pages of email from Dr Fauci, the man running the

COVID nineteen crisis in America. And as you might imagine, the reaction to these emails has been over the top, split down party lines of some But I think this is nothing, and there's other people who think, my god, this is the smoking gun. And it's it's like a jury trial where you put two people into a room and you give them the same evidence and they look at it differently. It's like my it's like my minor investment into a MC stock. It is pretty volatile at

the moment. Fair to say, right is it up or down? It's up right now? I don't know. It depends did I short the market or did I find I don't know. I see the problem is when to It's like being a gambler. You gott know when to hold it and you gotta know when to let it go. Yeah, And

that's the tough thing about the stock market. That's the interesting thing about this story, though, is is when when was information I guess discovered and what was it released to the public, And then of course what happened between I don't want to say enemy lines, but for all intensive purposes. You're you're working with a foreign adversary. So a lot of these things that are happening with the coronavirus have been upening on foreign land. And you know,

BuzzFeed obviously looking into this heavily. It's uh, it's a mountain of information. Yeah, it's a it's it's an interesting story. I didn't get through a fraction of the emails. I did look through some of them, but I read the story that was on BuzzFeed News and and it's it's it's like I used the analogy all the time. We do this in sports, but in politics, it's a political term. You have a public position and you have a private position.

And so with Dr Fauci, you know, the way you read these emails, you could interpret them that he had a public position that he was telling the American people, and privately he thought this was a lot of stuff he was saying was bullshit based on based on what we were reading in some of those emails. That's that's my takeaway from it. But let's talk to the one of the people to put this story together, one of the reporters at BuzzFeed News joining us. He's a up

and coming reporting star. You're gonna hear a lot from this woman here over the next few years. Imagine. Natalie Bentendorff is her name. She was one of the writers there at BuzzFeed to put the story together and went through all Dr Fauci's emails there. So, uh, Natalie, welcome, thank you for joining us here on the fifth hour. And in your opinion here, what was the most interesting thing that you uncovered from these thousands of emails from

Dr Fauci. Yeah, so I think that the thing that I took away was really what we see is the content of these emails. Right. There's a lot of interpretations as to what some of these emails mean, what this Faucci Um, what he's thinking at the beginning of this pandemic,

where is it going? But if we're looking at the actual content and his words, I think the thing that struck me the most was really this email where you know, an ABC reporters asking him early on of last year in you know, what do you think the death toll is going to be from COVID nineteen and he responds um with the number that the report has given him, which is five K, and says, you know what I

think that's way too high, um. And just reading that exchange, you know, it's a short sentence in reply to the reporter saying that he thinks that death told too high. And we're here, right, we're well past five hundred thousand

deaths from COVID in this country. And I think it really is a telling um thing about Fauci, which is that you know, he's a human, right, he's the physician who a lot of us have turned to in pandemic, but he also didn't understand how much of a force this virus was going to take our country by, um, And so I think a lot of those emails actually

showcase that. Right from January until June, I mean, we didn't know how long this thing was gonna last, even Sauci didn't, and he didn't know how how many lives it would claim, and it's a really devastating thing to see, but it's very enlightening to see how much we've learned from that point. So I think that's what I really took away from a lot of these emails. Yeah, I love the fact that they were like regular people, and you mentioned in that were like emailing, and he was

writing back to like regular people. I think it's amazing to me because you know, most people are like, I'm just gonna lead that, why would I write back? But he hes a number of times right and right back exactly. Yeah. I mean he was revered as a celebrity. I mean we all know, we were all laughing right about just kind of the the fourth of nature that it became with Sauccia's um, you know, creating all these this merchandise right around him with his name everywhere and these touchy

sucks and saucy doughnuts and his face on T shirts. Um. And it's so interesting seeing actually in these emails, UM, how uncomfortable it was for him to actually see all of that, like the same and kind of this these people being obsessed with him, um, and revering him to this state of you know, he's just regarded so highly. Um, he's not super comfortable with that. I mean, science and health is what he specializes in, and he it just blew up so quickly. UM. So it's really interesting seeing

his responses to a lot of those. Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah. And and also now it kind of walked me through you're part of the team there that you're you're talking about tons of email. I mean, this is a lot to go through, Like what's the process like, like how you know, how did you guys work your way through tons of data? He is is an amazing Yeah, it's

really cool. I like sharing kind of the process behind UM stories, Right, the story behind the story is really fun to talk about because there's so much that goes into especially putting out a story of this size. Now, as we stayed in in the article, UM, what made this possible was for your request, right, So that's the Freedom of Information Act, and that actually allows us to

get documents from government agencies. Right, It's legal to put in those requests and basically the government agency is supposed to turn those over. Now, we sent these in obviously to the National Institute of Helps UM, and we were able to obtain um plus pages of these emails. And this request was one that Jason put in. This was actually probably UM starting in March and then you know

went into the summer. But the way that works is, you know what we do to actually speed up the process because obviously to get all of these emails is a really long process. And sometimes what happens is, you know, very often actually the government agency won't respond or they'll just kind of say, hey, this is too much to get back to you. And so BuzzFeed actually ended up

biling a lawsuit UM. And really all that does is just speed up the process, right because they have to get these We had documents to us a little bit quicker UM, and so what we did is we asked for all emails text sent and received by Dr Fauci mentioning or referring to COVID nineteen coronavirus, and any and all internal studies on COVID. So that was our specific request, and we had to send in multiple UM to just really keep expanding the time period. So that's really how

we got these documents. And then kind of the last five months is what Jason and I have been working on, which is the article itself of how do we really write an article that is going to sum up what these UM documents are saying? Right, so not all people are going to see these documents and read all three thousand, two hundred pages of these, but we want to pull out what's the important parts of these and what are

the things that people really need to know? What are we learning there's no crazy smoking guns, in here, Right, it's really what we're seeing from a broader you know, stepping back, what is Fauci's communication style and what were some of the things of the points of discussion from early on in the pants mix. So that was kind

of the process of how we got this thing out there. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure you've seen the reaction here and it's um some of these I mean it's been picked apart some of the emails and and right not in Uh, what is your take here on the the reaction As everything in the country, it's divided on party lines, right, people have strong opinions on each side. Something this makes Dr Facci, as you said, look more human. Other people think that we know, wait a minute, he was saying

one thing privately and there was something else publicly. So right, right, Yeah, it's it's a good thing you discussed. And something you know that we did at BuzzFeed is we said, you know what, it's important for us to release all of these documents. And that's something that differs from the article

that the Washington Post wrote. Right, they obtained um eight hundred pages of these emails, and we had, you know, several thousand of them, and we actually released all of them instead of kind of summing them up and releasing a few of the ones that we mentioned like the post did. Obviously, what comes with that is people create their own interpretations of what these emails say, right, without actually maybe reading all of the pages or getting all

of the contact. And so that's the thing that comes along with releasing this entire batch to the public, for

them to really just do what they will with them. UM. And so you know, the things that we've heard a lot about UM and seen response wise is a lot of stuff about the email where Fauci is referring to masks um not really being effective, right, and this is in back in February UM, and so people have really grabbed onto that and said, you know, this is proof that you know this masks are helping or fout she knew and kind of these very um like making these

statements that that's you know, generalizing um what thought she was thinking about that? But to be frank, I think that that shows what I was stating earlier, which is that we've really grown scientifically of what we know about this virus, and it's just showing that you know, Facci doesn't know everything about this virus. No physician in the world knows everything about um COVID nineteen and how it overtakes the human body and what works and what didn't.

And this was you know, before the who actually declared COVID nineteen pandemic. We did not know at this time that people needed to wear masks for this airborne virus. So that's an example of something that you know, people are grasping onto us this could mean this, or this could mean that. But I think as a as a journalist's important for us, and when we were reading these emails is you know, it's not something that we can do where we can read these emails and actually interpret

and guess you know what Sauchie meant? Well, what was STOUCHI like really saying like, let's read between the line. You can't do that as a journalist when you're reading these documents. You have to take it up face value, and then you have to look at the bigger picture. And so I think that's what gets really dangerous is when people start making these assumptions and bigger interpretations onto what found she could have meant, or what this means,

when it's really going beyond the words on the page. Yeah, and then I saw his quote the other day here he said he did say his emails he thought were taken out of context there and he kind of like dismissed. The reaction was just kind of like what you're saying, right, But it really is that's like, that's like a jury trial right now. I mean, that's one of the things about the court system. You know, people look at the evidence and they have different opinions on the evidence, and

so that's that's where we are right now. Uh, totally with this. And I also saw I saw the White House they said they did not want to comment. What was your reaction to that they wouldn't comment on your story? Yeah, I mean I think that there's you know, one of the big things that we had in our article was

addressing the political pressure right that fell onto Sauci. And obviously that expands because now we're in a different um administration that's in the White House than was when we were actually filing these Foyer requests and reading through these documents, UM, and so it's really interesting to see the responses. I don't see any of these kind of you know, UM

Fauci didn't comment on our story. Also, UM for the record, and you know, I don't see that necessarily as a good or bad thing when I'm reporting on this stuff, right, So my job, um, and Jason's job is really to obtain these documents and see, you know, whoever we are mentioning or getting in touch with as a source for the article is to just see, you know, reach out to them, Hey, we have your name in here. You know, we wanted to know if you'd like to comment, would

you like to add anything? Um? And obviously the White House is mentioned in their fauci has mentioned in there. Other people who have written emails to Faucier mentioned, and so it's important for us to reach out to those people and ask for comment. I think that information is important, whether they comment or not. And I can't be the judge of what that means or what that says. But um, it's important for the public to know that the White House didn't have anything to add. Thought she didn't have

anything he wanted to add to our story. UM. And that you know, people will do with what they will. Natalie, you mentioned him a couple of times, but Jason, Jason Leopold, he's obviously the colleague of yours. Can you give us, and for those that don't follow BuzzFeed, can you give us a little bit of background on Jason and what he actually does for the company. Yeah. So Jason Um has been a great mentor to me. Actually, So he is, you know, someone who I've learned a lot about UM

document reporting and really what Foyer requests are UM. And he is the senior investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News and he was previously at Al Jazeera and Vice News as well. UM. And he did some really fantastic work with the Finson Files that came out a few years ago. And so his beat really is he is a fantastic reporter when it comes to filing Foyer quests and really getting into the nitty gritty when it comes to the government and getting those documents and publishing them. That is his UM

strong suit and what he's really fantastic at. And so he you know, was a two thousand eighteen Pulitzer Prize winner UM and he was the recipient of the IRA two sixteen fl I Award UM. And he's gotten you know, many many awards for his reporting and this deep investigative work. Because it's time consuming stuff UM to read through documents and to put these stories together. But he's been a

fantastic person to learn from. UM. I'm more of an early career reporter and who's really interested in investigative work. And I've just been blown away and really impressed with um how much I've learned on this project, especially so Yeah, Jason's great. The gravity involved in this is obviously one

for a generation and generations UM. I think Ben and I have talked about this at good length in the past, just because profession were in UM we oddly enough how to bear down when sports weren't going on for a

long period of time. And I think the biggest thing, and they're not just for us, but I think Americans and a lot of people across the world as a whole, like we're looking for not only information but now accountability, and so looking at Foucci's emails and the correspondence that he's had with a lot of people, I mean, the mask issues is one thing, but the other thing is just the relationship with Foucci, the Wuhan Lab and the Chinese.

And you know, oftentimes you're taught, even when you're young. If you don't know the answer to a question, typically the answer is always money and and so that is the biggest thing for for me, and what you and Jason are doing right now is that you're connecting a lot of different dots. So where does this lead or where do you feel like this is leading? And have you looked under the I guess the Christmas tree that is the the Chinese government because obviously there's a lot

of things underneath that thing. Yeah, I think that you know again what I said about just like what we were able to extract from these right, because this is something that Jason and I were thinking about the whole time while reading through these documents, is what's the bigger picture here and what are we really grasping from his

correspondence thouts correspondence with foreign officials. I mean, it's really impressive, Um, how many emails there are from you know, different health authorities and physicians all around the world who thought she has been able to make connections with Um with his work from the AIDS crisis in the nineties and working through different epidemics, right and just building this network of

physicians all around the world. Right, So we saw this correspondence and specifically with some of those Chinese health officials too, and so I think that you know, one of the emails that people are really circulating is one from April eighteen in and that was UM from Dr Peter Dazac and that was UM, you know someone who got he made very he was acquaintances with, right, And so they actually were corresponding about UM the origins. Right. This is

obviously something that they discussed early on in UM. But I think people have really pulled that part of it and saying you know, UM, where Dr Dazak says, from my perspective, your comments are brave and coming from your trusted voice, will help disturb the myths being spun around the viruses origins and so UM. I think the thing that you know is on the top of all of our minds is what was covered up, right, like where did this virus come from? UM? Was it from a lab?

And I think that these emails actually don't give as much of you know, UM, as many ants or as we might hope to that question about where the virus came from if it came from a lab. UM. It really is just showing that this was a discussion that was happening among health officials very early on in maybe even you know, before many people had come up with

different conspiracies at this point, right. So I think that for me, like Jason and I really didn't spend a lot of time looking into you know, what do these emails confirm, rather than what are the discussions that were happening. I don't think that there's anything that can be gleaned

from that. Um. But as you mentioned, I mean, like really Sauci has addressed that and said that, you know, he feels his emails are being taken out of context and um, that there's a lot being pulled out and kind of words put in his mouth from words that weren't said. And so I think that, you know, out of fairness and out of you know, the ethical practices of journalism, we really can't say anything definitively about the viruses origins and if the emails really say anything about them.

Be sure to catch live editions of The Ben Maller Show weekdays at two am Eastern eleven pm Pacific. Be sure to catch live editions of The Ben Maller Show weekdays at two am eastern eleven pm Pacific on Fox Sports Radio and the I Heart Radio app. Yeah, I think the biggest thing though, and something like this is that your job and that kind of capacity, especially since it is so unique, is you have to ask those

questions and not be afraid of challenge. And absolutely, yeah, the relationships that Dr fouch has had throughout the years, Uh, what those relationships comes power and influence And from what you guys have actually unfolded with these emails in the f O I A that you've had Mark Zuckerberg come into play. And I find that fascinating because a Washington Post article was recently edited that had Senator Tom Cotton talking about the origin of the coronavirus and prior to

that it was a conspiracy theory. Now it's just an alleged, you know, hypothesis. But Zuckerberg comes into play, and he's got things that are tied into the political atmosphere, voting wise, and now this and so we've seen doctors, we've seen people that have had information squash on Instagram and on Facebook. And so I guess my question comes down to this, are you and Jason looking into the relationships that Dr Fauci has from these email correspondence. That's a great question.

And honestly, absolutely, because you know something that's important is that this is UM an ongoing investigation. Right, We're gonna keep getting more documents, and we're gonna keep reading these documents UM. You know the foyer requesting basically the way it UM works as that because we put in so many requests, right, we'll still get some of these emails trickling in from later and later, or maybe ones that were miss that will just be getting in the mail.

So yeah, we're going to keep investigating that. And for the question about you know, the relationships that Dr Duchy has with these people, is it is really important UM for our reporting because you know, as much as I'm like, you know, we need to take these emails at face

value and really look at that. It does kind of feel like being a detective right when you're doing this kind of work, because you know what Stout she's saying to a regular person who is just asking, you know, a health question about how does having COVID affect UM? You know, my grandmother or my grandfather or someone who is a celebrity, who's who's saying, how can I use my platform to UM spread information about COVID and help

people get to better resources. You know, we do have to evaluate those relationships and who's reaching out to him, who is stoutily choosing to respond to, who's the choosing to ignore are and who is he getting really familiar with? UM? So those are That's a great question because that's absolutely something that like we have to consider, is how is Sauchi relating to these people and who is he um what tone is he using with each of these individuals

because of their position? And so I think that's something that we're just continuing to investigate and something that people, you know, members of the public, you and I can just look at these emails and glean for ourselves too, is um You know, it's so easy to do a Google search of anyone's name and be like, are they

in the health community? Are they kind of just a regular person who is just asking for health advice, who's worried about their family, who's maybe harassing Dr Fauci too because of political pressure, Right, So those relationships are essential to understanding UM facties communication style as a whole totally. Yeah. And Natalie, when you were going through the emails there, and you know how much I do see some things redacted? I mean how much basically how much of that stuff

was covered up where you couldn't read it. I know the email addresses obviously were, but there's there's some of these emails I'm looking at were like large chunks of them are not not available. So one of the sensitive stuff was not allowed for you to to view. That's a good question. I actually don't know like the percentage of it. But basically how FOIA work is that there are exemptions from FOIA and what that means is there

are things that are redacted from government documents. If it has something to do with um national security especially that's

a big one. So if there's something in the government document, right, not everything can be declassified because there can actually be something that poses either a national security risk or there's just you know, more stricter privacy around people's private information, right That can be sometimes other health information, which is probably very pertinent in some of these emails, right because people are talking about their own health talking about other

people's health around COVID, So that could be a big reason things are redacted. We published the emails as we saw them, so we didn't take anything out. You know, the emails that are redacted. We didn't get to see people's emails. Um, you know, so you're looking at the emails that Jason and I saw just as they are. Um. So there are different reasons why things are redacted. So that's something that Jason and I really have to go through and see. Um. But it's impossible to guess, right,

It's impossible to guess what's behind that black box. Um, And we just kind of have to work around it. It's definitely definitely like you know, doing a puzzle, because you just gotta work with what you have, the words that are on the page. Um. But yeah, those are some different reasons as to why things are redacted, but usually it has it falls under, you know, one of

those few categories. And Natalie, what's the approach that you and Jason have and going on on something like this, Because the reality is is that doesn't matter the publication. You know, BuzzFeed and has not been immune to this, But it doesn't matter the publication, you're going to take fire from one side of the political aisle or the there right, how do you try to be not only as transparent but as as open ended as possible when

it comes to this research and information? Yeah, yeah, that's something we we talked about a lot from the beginning, what Jason really was advising me to do is just read through these documents because obviously there's thousands of pages of them, and just get familiar with them. You know.

He'd tell me to, you know, read through as many as I could for a week, take notes, take screenshots of ones that were pretty outstanding or things that I wanted to save and save for later, to go back to UM, and then just take a break, step back from them, and then go back in right. And so basically are for the first few months that we were working on the actual article, we were just reading these

documents and just getting really familiar with the content. UM. We would identify people over and over again, like maybe some of Guti's team members, his staffers who he was emailing a lot more frequently. UM. So that was the first step of it, and that was our approach UM.

And so I think that helped set up the rest of the process and kind of my mindset about reporting, because I was really thinking, you know, I'm taking this UM kind of just being as unbiased as I could, and just being really open to whatever these emails were going to hold. You know, obviously, when you get this staff, you get really excited of these documents where you're like, man, I really hope something in here is like juicy and good and we're just gonna like find a huge secret, right.

But that's not always the case, UM, with doing document reporting. UM, A lot of these emails are pretty standard, pretty boring, you know, just back and forth administrative stuff. UM. And so I think that kind of put me in the mindset of just getting used to pouch to style UM.

And I felt like it was once I got in that mindset, it was easy to take away this kind of like if there was any sort of political bias, UM, because ultimately my number one job is to just report what is in these emails, would do it as accurately as possible, UM, and in an unbiased way, but also be really frank and transparent with UM, my audience and the people who were writing this for who want to

know more about Faucci as a person. UM, Be frank about his relationship with the Trump administration, that it was tents at times, and that they did clash, right, So we do have to be, um, you know, really transparent and honest around those very real relationships and the political relationships around UM. You know, Sauci and his community and really what influenced a lot of that. So, um, it's

really taking that into consideration. But I think when it comes down to it, me and Jason were really prioritizing this idea of just being open to whatever we saw in these emails and just reading it as if we were, you know, someone just reading both feed News, not as an editor or not as a reporter. What would we find interesting that we'd want to share with other people. So that's kind of the approach we took. Yeah, well,

it's a great story. Natalie can congratulation. I know you're young, you're young reporter, your USC Trojan, I understand and all that. So is this is this your future you? I'm sure we'll hear from you many more times over there. Do you want to be a this is this what you would like to do? If we would go twenty years from now looking back at your career as a journalist is twenty as far away. I have been into journalism since I was fourteen years old, um, and I can

definitely see myself sticking on this path. I mean, investigative journalism gives you a rush like nothing else, at least that's how I feel and this has definitely been the biggest story I've worked on, and so it's really fantastic to see, um, kind of what this might be like, right, and get the exposure to what doing political reporting on a national scale like this looks like. Um, so you might see a couple more pieces for me, I think

in this realm. So um yeah, no, I really appreciate it, and that you took the time to read through our piece and wanted to get this, you know, piece out to your listeners as well. I'm so excited. That's great, that's I'm excited. I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys you do next in particular, So thanks for coming on you. Be sure to catch live editions of The Ben Maller Show weekdays at two am Eastern eleven pm Pacific.

Be sure to catch live editions of The Ben Maller Show weekdays at two am Eastern eleven pm Pacific on Fox Sports Radio and the I Heart Radio app.