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AMERICANALMANAC (Ken Jacobs) - Fauci's former senior adviser pleads guilty to federal conspiracy in COVID-19 records cover-up Wed Aug 19 17:44:43 2026

David Morens, the 78-year-old former senior adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci, pleaded guilty to a federal conspiracy charge for scheming to hide government records from investigators probing the origins of COVID-19. Morens entered his plea on Tuesday to one count of conspiracy to commit offenses and to defraud the United States, a charge that carries […] The post Fauci's former senior adviser pleads guilty to federal conspiracy in COVID-19 records cover-up appeared first on American Almanac .

David Morens, the 78-year-old former senior adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci, pleaded guilty to a federal conspiracy charge for scheming to hide government records from investigators probing the origins of COVID-19. Morens entered his plea on Tuesday to one count of conspiracy to commit offenses and to defraud the United States, a charge that carries up to five years in federal prison. The admission caps a years-long effort by Morens and at least two unnamed co-conspirators to obstruct public-records laws and shield communications about taxpayer-funded coronavirus research grants from public view, the New York Post reported . The guilty plea lays bare a conspiracy that ran from April 2020 through June 2023, spanning the worst of the pandemic and its aftermath, in which senior federal health officials worked to keep the American public in the dark about what their own government knew, funded, and discussed regarding bat coronavirus research tied to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Gmail, deleted emails, and a three-year scheme Court documents describe a deliberate campaign to dodge the Freedom of Information Act and the Federal Records Act, the two laws that guarantee the public's right to see how its government operates. Morens admitted he conducted official government business through his personal Gmail account after the National Institutes of Health terminated a bat coronavirus research grant to EcoHealth Alliance, a Manhattan-based nonprofit. He and his co-conspirators used that private channel to exchange non-public NIH information, discuss efforts to steer NIH funding back toward EcoHealth, and swap draft letters to NIH leadership on behalf of EcoHealth president Peter Daszak. Morens went further than just hiding emails. The Washington Examiner reported that Morens instructed colleagues in 2021 to use his personal email and told them he would "delete anything [he did not] want to see in the New York Times." That line alone tells you what Morens understood about the contents of those messages: they were damaging enough that he wanted them destroyed. The concealed records involved a $3.1 million grant that included a $600,000 subaward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese lab at the center of the still-unresolved question of whether COVID-19 leaked from a research facility. Morens also admitted he pledged to help an alleged co-conspirator counter the narrative that the virus originated in that lab. Napa wine and Michelin dinners: the price of "behind-the-scenes shenanigans" The plea agreement reveals that Morens did not just conspire for free. Daszak, identified in the filing as "alleged co-conspirator 1", provided Morens with illegal gratuities, including two bottles of The Prisoner Red Napa Valley Wine, a label that retails for roughly $40 a bottle. The wine was shipped to Morens' Maryland home as a reward for what the filing describes as his "behind-the-scenes shenanigans." In a June 2020 email included in the guilty plea, Daszak called the wine a "phase II gift." He also dangled future perks: meals at Michelin-starred restaurants in Paris, New York, and Washington, D.C. Two bottles of wine and the promise of a fancy dinner may sound modest next to the billions the federal government spent on pandemic response. But the gratuities matter because they show the transactional nature of the relationship. Morens was not just a sympathetic bureaucrat. He was being compensated, however cheaply, for using his position inside the government to benefit an outside organization and its president. Fauci's name looms over every page Morens' guilty plea repeatedly references "Senior NIAID Official 1", a designation the filing's context strongly suggests refers to Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases throughout the pandemic. Morens and his co-conspirators funneled "back-channel" information to that official, court documents state. Fauci has denied knowledge of Morens' conduct. Testifying before a House subcommittee on June 3, 2024, Fauci said: "With respect to his recent testimony before this Subcommittee, I knew nothing of Dr. Morens's actions regarding Dr. Daszak, EcoHealth, or his emails." Before the House Oversight Committee that same year, Fauci downplayed his relationship with Morens, saying of the email scheme, "He should not have been doing that." But diary entries released last month by Sen. Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, tell a different story. Those entries indicate Fauci had several private discussions with Morens about bat coronavirus research grants, the very grants Morens was conspiring to shield from public scrutiny. Contempt, a pardon, and an ongoing FBI investigation Morens' guilty plea landed less than two weeks after the Senate Homeland Security Committee held Fauci in contempt for refusing to answer questions about his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The committee also referred Fauci to the Department of Justice for potential prosecution. Whether that referral leads anywhere remains an open question. Before leaving office, then-President Joe Biden granted Fauci a sweeping preemptive pardon covering any potential crimes committed between January 2014 and January 2025. That pardon window encompasses the entire conspiracy period Morens admitted to, raising the uncomfortable possibility that the senior official who received back-channel information from Morens may be beyond the reach of federal prosecutors, regardless of what the evidence shows. FBI Director Kash Patel made clear the investigation is not finished. After the plea, Patel posted on X: "No one is above the law." He added that the FBI's work "remains ongoing." $11.5 million in grants, gain-of-function research, and a five-year ban EcoHealth Alliance received two major NIH grants: $4 million in 2014 and $7.5 million in 2020. Some of that money funded gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, research designed to make viruses more transmissible or more dangerous in order to study them. The NIH eventually terminated the bat coronavirus grant, though the circumstances of that termination and any subsequent restoration remain unclear. In January 2025, the federal government barred both EcoHealth Alliance and Daszak from receiving federal funds for five years. Whether the nonprofit is still operating is unknown. Daszak has not been publicly charged in connection with the conspiracy, though he is identified in the plea as an alleged co-conspirator. Morens' defense attorney, Timothy Belevetz, offered a brief statement after the plea: "By pleading guilty today, Dr. Morens has taken responsibility for what he did, and he will continue to do so." That is one way to describe what happened. Another is that a senior federal health official spent three years lying, deleting, and conspiring to keep the American public from learning how their tax dollars funded risky research at a Chinese lab, and who inside the government knew about it. Morens faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine at sentencing. His sentencing date has not been announced. The public waited six years for a straight answer about what the government knew and when it knew it. One guilty plea is a start, but the back channel ran in both directions, and the man on the other end is holding a pardon. The post Fauci's former senior adviser pleads guilty to federal conspiracy in COVID-19 records cover-up appeared first on American Almanac .