The Department of Justice indicted a former senior adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday for allegedly partaking in an unlawful “scheme” to avoid open records requests related to Covid-19 research grants.
“These allegations represent a profound abuse of trust at a time when the American people needed it most — during the height of a global pandemic,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement announcing the charges. “Government officials have a solemn duty to provide honest, well-grounded facts and advice in service of the public interest — not to advance their own personal or ideological agendas.”
According to a DOJ press release, Dr. David Morens has been charged with “conspiracy against the United States; destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations; concealment, removal, or mutilation of records; and aiding and abetting.” Morens previously served as senior adviser to Fauci — the now-former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — from 2006-2022.
The Justice Department noted several key allegations against Morens, including that he, two co-conspirators, and others “conspired during the COVID-19 pandemic to defraud and commit several offenses against the United States after [the National Institutes of Health] NIH terminated Co-Conspirator 1’s grant.” The NIH ended the grant based on allegations that the Covid virus came as the result of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in Wuhan, China, according to the agency.
Some observers have suggested that Co-Conspirator 1 is former EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak. As Federalist Senior Contributor Helen Raleigh previously wrote in these pages, from 2014-2020, EcoHealth sent “more than half a million dollars’ worth of U.S. government grants, including those from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) with Anthony Fauci’s approval, to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to conduct gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.”
Daszak previously dismissed the lab leak theory as a “consipracy theor[y].”
The Department of Health and Human Services formally cut off federal funding and debarred EcoHealth and Daszak last year for five years over the organization’s reckless coronavirus research.
[RELATED: 5 Takeaways From Peter Daszak’s Testimony On U.S.-Funded Coronavirus Research]
According to the DOJ’s summary of the indictment, Morens and an individual identified as Co-Conspirator 2 “pledged to help Co-Conspirator 1 restore the termination of the bat coronavirus grant and counter the narrative that COVID-19 leaked from a lab.” The agency noted how, “In anticipation that their communications would be requested through a [Freedom of Information Act] FOIA Request,” Morens and the two co-conspirators allegedly “agreed in writing to intentionally hide from public view their communications by corresponding using Morens’s personal Gmail account, rather than his official NIH email account.”
“The indictment alleges that the conspirators used Morens’s personal Gmail account to exchange non-public NIH information; correspond about their efforts to influence NIH to fund Company #1; exchange edits to drafts of letters addressed to NIH leadership for Company #1 and Co-Conspirator 1; and ‘back-channel’ information to Senior NIAID Official 1,” the DOJ presser reads. “According to the indictment, each of these matters fell within Morens’s role as senior advisor and constituted federal records that needed to be created, maintained, and exchanged on government systems.”
The Justice Department further noted allegations that Morens and Co-Conspirator 1 “conspired to pay illegal gratuities,” with the indictment contending that the latter gifted the former “wine for his ‘behind-the-scenes shenanigans,’ and arranged for its delivery to Morens’s residence in Maryland.” Per the agency, Morens then purportedly “identified an official act” that he could undertake to “deserve” the gifted item, which “was a scientific commentary in a prominent medical journal advocating that COVID-19 had natural origins.”
The indictment’s allegations seemingly align with findings unearthed in records previously released by House Republicans. Those documents appeared to show Morens corresponding with Daszak about evading open records requests.
In one Sept. 9, 2021, email to several colleagues and Daszak, for example, Morens reportedly wrote, “I try to always communicate over gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly.”
“Yesterday my gmail was hacked, probably by these [gain-of-function] -ssholes, and until IT can get it fixed I may have to occasionally email from my NIH account,” Morens wrote. “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.”
The unearthed emails also suggested that Fauci had instructed Morens to speak with legacy media in an apparent effort to downplay the lab leak theory, as The Federalist previously reported. President Biden granted Fauci a sweeping pre-emptive pardon hours before leaving office.
According to the DOJ, if convicted, Morens could face a maximum sentence of five years in prison on the conspiracy charge; a maximum of 20 years for “each count of destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations;” and a maximum of three years for “each count of concealment, removal, or mutilation of records.” The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Joseph R. Baldwin and Bijon A. Mostoufi for the District of Maryland.
