Yesterday the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment of David Morens, who was a Senior Adviser to Anthony Fauci during the covid era. The indictment includes allegations against two co-conspirators, who have been identified as Dr. Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, and Dr. Gerald Keusch, an associate director of Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Disease Laboratory Institute. EcoHealth Alliance is the nonprofit that got grant money from the National Institutes of Health and passed it on to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to do research on coronaviruses in bats that included gain of function, i.e., making the virus more contagious.
From the earliest days of the covid epidemic, Fauci and his minions at NIH asserted tenaciously, even fanatically, that covid-19 emerged naturally in the wild, and not as a result of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Why were they so committed to this theory, when the scientific evidence was at best mixed? Now, I think it is fair to say that most scientists believe that covid-19 did leak from the Wuhan lab.
The reason that NIH closed ranks on this issue is obvious: Fauci and his men had a massive conflict of interest. If the virus leaked from WIV, NIH’s funding of highly relevant research through the intermediary of EcoHealth Alliance would come to light, and there was a real danger that NIH and its scientists, from Fauci on down, would be blamed for the epidemic. Whether such blame would have been fair is beside the point: Fauci’s minions obviously were desperate to avoid that scenario.
That is the subject matter of a large number of emails that circulated among David Morens and his alleged co-conspirators, beginning in 2020. Morens sought to prevent their communications from coming to light by deleting them from his official government account, and instead using a private gmail account. (It is illegal to transact government business on private email accounts, but it appears to be common practice in Democratic administrations.) The purpose is to prevent communications from being made public as a result of a FOIA request. Thus, from the indictment:
“Senior NIAID Official 1” is Anthony Fauci.
The co-conspirators were not acting as neutral scientists. Rather, they were activists and advocates who regarded those who suspected a lab leak as “the enemy”:
They explicitly sought to avoid Congressional oversight:
The co-conspirators were hostile to the Trump administration in which Morens served:
Morens was no master criminal. At some point he realized that his emails had been retained on NIH servers even though he deleted them:
The conspirators were explicit about why they were destroying evidence:
“Leading scientists conspire to undermine investigation into lab leak theory via back-channel to [Anthony Fauci].”
Morens is 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. The DOJ’s press release on the indictment is here. The indictment is brought in Maryland, which means a mostly Democratic jury. But the case against Morens seems airtight, so most likely the prosecutors will be able to get a guilty plea.
Whether more indictments are forthcoming remains to be seen.
