Feds charge top Fauci aide with conspiracy to hide origins of COVID

The Justice Department announced criminal charges Tuesday against Dr. Anthony Fauci’s former top aide at the National Institutes of Health, accusing him of suppressing information about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.

Dr. David Morens was Dr. Fauci’s senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, where he had oversight of the agency’s grants — including one that paid for risky research at the Wuhan lab suspected of being the source of the virus.

In a new indictment, the government charged that Dr. Morens conspired to argue that the Wuhan lab wasn’t at fault, tried to delete emails with the firm that funded Wuhan, and sought to use his private email to hide his official activities from being disclosed to the public.

Prosecutors also said he tried to get the government to restart money to EcoHealth Alliance, the firm that acted as the go-between for taxpayer money to reach China’s Wuhan Institute of Technology. And they charged that he accepted gifts from the organization’s leadership for his “behind-the-scenes shenanigans.”

“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,” said Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general. “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.”

Dr. Morens faces charges of destruction or falsification of records in a federal investigation, concealment, removal or mutilation of records, aiding and abetting, and conspiracy against the U.S.

The case was brought in federal court in Maryland, where Dr. Morens had a first appearance on Monday. A magistrate judge said he may remain free from custody.

A lawyer for Dr. Morens declined to comment on the case.

Rep. James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, which had probed NIH’s activities with respect to the pandemic, said Dr. Morens had been caught “red-handed.”

“No one is above the law and under the Trump administration, overdue accountability is finally here,” said Mr. Comer, Kentucky Republican.

The 29-page indictment was handed up by a federal grand jury on April 16.

It paints Dr. Morens as Dr. Fauci’s key aide, preparing him for his interactions with Congress and the White House and controlling some of the information that reached Dr. Fauci.

That includes serving as the go-between for information from EcoHealth Alliance — the firm that siphoned U.S. taxpayer money to the Wuhan lab for bat coronavirus research — and EcoHealth’s chief, Peter Daszak.

As the pandemic worsened in 2020, Dr. Morens and Mr. Daszak exchanged ideas on how to explain what was happening.

At first their communications were on government emails, but eventually Dr. Morens shifted some conversations to private email, the indictment said, illegally shielding them from open-records requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

“I need to keep this correspondnce[sic] off of USG emails for obvious reasons, so am sending from gmail,” Dr. Morens wrote in one May 3, 2020, email where he made clear he was hiding from “multiple FOIAs already.” In a message 12 days later, he said he’d been told he could “cover” himself by “deleting emails and making use of foia delays.”

EcoHealth Alliance has been dinged by federal investigators for funding risky bat research at the Wuhan lab and then obfuscating the results. The firm has denied that its money went to dangerous experiments.

Origins of the pandemic are still unsettled, though some U.S. agencies say the likeliest explanation is that the virus leaked from the lab. Another explanation holds that it spawned naturally in an animal, and infected humans.

More than 7 million people worldwide, including 1.2 million in the U.S., have perished from the virus, according to the World Health Organization.

As EcoHealth Alliance was taking criticism in the spring of 2020, Dr. Morens wrote a scholarly piece challenging the lab leak theory. The indictment says that piece “was intended to benefit” EcoHealth and Mr. Daszak.

And after EcoHealth won a new $7.5 million grant in August 2020, Dr. Morens emailed from his official account asking “do I get a kickback???”

Mr. Daszak responded to Dr. Morens’ gmail account saying there would be a kickback — “5 more years of FOIA requests” and “I just hope it doesn’t culminate in 5 years in federal jail.”

In 2021, after Dr. Morens and Dr. Fauci received a “huge” FOIA request for documents mentioning Wuhan, Dr. Morens assured Mr. Daszak that his name “will not show up in this FOIA, at least not from my info.”