Dr. David Morens Pleads Guilty to Hiding Documents Over Coronavirus Origins
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Dr. David Morens, who spent years as chief of staff to Dr. Anthony Fauci, pleaded guilty Tuesday to trying to hide critical documents about the origin of the coronavirus pandemic and his attempts to restore funding to a firm that was siphoning U.S. cash to a Chinese virus lab.
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New York PostAs part of the plea deal, Morens, 78, admitted that between April 2020 and June 2023 he conspired with two unnamed co-conspirators and others to “defraud the United States by hampering, hindering, impeding, or obstructing, by craft, trickery, deceit or dishonest means, the lawful and legitimate functions” of public health agencies from complying with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Federal Records Act (FRA) – including by destroying and concealing records related to the termination and restoration of a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant for research on bat coronaviruses.
The HillFormer Fauci associate David Morens pleads guilty to conspiracy David Morens, former senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and once an associate to Anthony Fauci, pleaded guilty on Thursday to a conspiracy to defraud the U.S. in relation to efforts to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. The Justice Department announced the guilty plea Tuesday. In April, the…
Washington ExaminerDr. David Morens, a longtime science adviser to the 43-year director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit offenses and to defraud the United States after being indicted in April. The maximum sentence is five years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine.
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Republicans on the committee voted to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify despite receiving a pardon for the period in question from former President Joe Biden. Charges have been submitted to the Department of Justice.
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New York PostMorens’ guilty plea comes less than two weeks after Fauci was held in contempt by the Senate Homeland Security Committee after he refused to answer questions about his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Former President Joe Biden, on his last day in office, doled out a sweeping federal pardon to Fauci which covered "ANY OFFENSES against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014" until the day it was issued.
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Washington TimesDr. Fauci has received a full pardon from President Biden for any federal crimes he may have committed for activities during the pandemic.
New York PostFauci, who received a sweeping preemptive pardon from then-President Joe Biden for any potential crimes committed between January 2014 and January 2025, was referred to the Justice Department by the committee for potential prosecution.
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Congressional Republicans had pushed for prosecution of Morens. In 2024, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released an email from Morens talking about communicating with Dr. Fauci using Dr. Fauci’s “private Gmail.”
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Washington ExaminerFauci during his public testimony before the House Oversight Committee in 2024 downplayed his relationship with Morens, telling the committee “he should not have been doing that” when asked about using personal emails for government business.
New York PostWhen testifying before a House subcommittee on June 3, 2024, Fauci told lawmakers, “With respect to his recent testimony before this Subcommittee, I knew nothing of Dr. Morens’s actions regarding Dr. Daszak, EcoHealth, or his emails.”
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Independent claims that didn't surface elsewhere in our corpus. Treat as supplementary — not corroborated across outlets.
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01 New York Post “By pleading guilty today, Dr. Morens has taken responsibility for what he did, and he will continue to do so,” said his defense attorney Timothy Belevetz.
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02 Washington Examiner Morens and at least two other co-conspirators were charged on April 16 with concealing records regarding the $3.1 million grant “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” that included a $600,000 subaward to the Wuhan lab.
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03 Fox News A trio of Republican attorneys general — Florida's James Uthmeier, Louisiana's Liz Murrill and West Virginia's John McCuskey — opened a joint investigation into former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci in an effort to hold Fauci accountable at the state level despite his federal pardon.
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04 New York Times Trump Officials Ignored Their Own University Investigations, Lawyer Says A former Justice Department lawyer says Trump administration leaders ignored findings that elite schools, including Brown and Columbia, hadn’t broken the law as they pressed them into deals.
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05 PBS NewsHour Whistleblower alleges political pressure, lack of evidence in antisemitism investigations targeting universities The complaint alleges that the investigations into some of the nation's most prestigious academic institutions were designed to strong-arm the schools into cutting deals for political purposes.
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06 Washington Times That company, EcoHealth Alliance, was paying for what U.S. investigators say was risky bat coronavirus research in Wuhan, using money from the National Institutes of Health’s infectious diseases division, where Dr. Fauci and Morens worked.
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- nypost
- thehill
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- washtimes
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- washexaminer