In a major step toward accountability, a senior advisor to Dr. Anthony Fauci pled guilty on Tuesday to partaking in a “scheme” to dodge open records requests related to coronavirus research grants.
According to the Department of Justice, Dr. David Morens pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge “to commit offenses and to defraud the United States.” Morens was indicted by federal prosecutors in April and previously served as a senior advisor to Fauci — the now-former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — from 2006-2022.
In summarizing the guilty plea, the DOJ said that Morens and two co-conspirators “conspired” during the Covid outbreak to defraud America after the National Institutes of Health (NIH) “terminated the grant, Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence, based on allegations” that the Covid-19 virus originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. The agency noted that the Fauci-led NIAID “awarded the grant to Company 1 and Co-Conspirator 1, who made a subaward to the WIV.”
Some observers have suggested that Co-Conspirator 1 is former EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak. As Federalist Senior Contributor Helen Raleigh previously reported, 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.”
Similar to Fauci, Daszak previously dismissed the lab leak theory as a “conspiracy 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]
The DOJ noted that Morens and Co-Conspirator 2 “pledged” to assist Co-Conspirator 1 with getting the bat coronavirus grant restored and to squash the credible lab leak theory. The agency said that Morens and his co-conspirators “agreed in writing to intentionally hide their communications from public view by corresponding using Morens’s personal Gmail account, rather than his official NIH email account,” in anticipation that their communications would be subject to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
“The co-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 court documents, 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.”
In pleading guilty, Morens also admitted to colluding with Co-Conspirator 1 to “to pay illegal gratuities.” This includes Co-Conspirator 1 gifting Morens wine for his “behind-the-scenes shenanigans,” and arranging for it to be delivered to Morens’ residence. Per the DOJ, “Morens then allegedly identified an official act that he could perform to ‘deserve’ the gift, which was to author a scientific commentary in a prominent medical journal advocating that COVID-19 had natural origins.”
Morens’ guilty plea seemingly confirms the veracity of communications previously unearthed by congressional 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. President Biden granted Fauci a sweeping pre-emptive pardon hours before leaving office.
Morens is facing a maximum of five years in prison on the conspiracy charge, with a federal judge expected to determine his sentence at a later date. The case was prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland.
