Ex-Fauci adviser charged in COVID-19 pandemic cover-up case over secret emails and alleged backchannel deals

The Justice Department is building a case that aims to expose what some believe is a hidden conspiracy behind the COVID pandemic. An ex-adviser to Anthony Fauci — David Morens, 78 — has recently been indicted by Donald Trump administration’s top prosecutors for illicitly concealing federal records during the height of the pandemic.

Conspiracy theorists aside, Trump has had his own vendetta against Fauci’s leadership at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which Trump blamed for costing him his re-election bid in 2020. In between blaming China for ruining his poll numbers and claiming he won but that Democrats rigged the election, Trump has also been very hostile toward the preemptive pardons that Joe Biden issued while leaving office, which included Dr. Fauci — though, of course, those pardons did not include everyone.

Politicization aside, there have still been well-researched theories pointing to either a natural spillover or a potential lab leak. So even people who have no interest in Trump’s ulterior motives remain invested in what actually caused the pandemic in early 2020.

The Guardian reports that the indictment includes evidence that NIAID awarded a research grant to a company that then issued a sub-award to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. The National Institutes of Health later terminated the grant after subsequent reports alleged that the pandemic might have originated from the lab. However, prosecutors now allege that Morens tried to restore the funding and “counter the narrative” about the leak.

There are two other co-conspirators in the case who have yet to be named, but the Justice Department believes that, together, they anticipated their communications would be subject to the federal Freedom of Information Act. The Justice Department said in a statement that they “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.”

Prosecutors also allege that Morens included information in his emails that the NIH had not yet revealed to the public. The Justice Department accuses Morens of using his personal email to coordinate efforts to influence funding decisions. He would also allegedly draft persuasive letters designed to be more palatable to institutions and use his personal email as a “back channel” to reach out to senior officials.

Allegedly, Morens and his co-conspirators would also “pay illegal gratuities” to certain individuals while receiving wine as a form of gratitude from those he was communicating with through these back channels. The Justice Department statement added: “Morens then allegedly identified an official act that he could perform to ‘deserve’ the gift, which was a scientific commentary in a prominent medical journal advocating that COVID-19 had natural origins.”

The acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said there is enough evidence to show that Morens and his co-conspirators “abused trust” while handling the worst pandemic the public has seen globally in about a century. Whether the case will ultimately be strong enough will be decided in court.

Should Morens be convicted, he reportedly faces up to five years in prison for conspiracy and an additional 20 years for each count of falsifying records.