Fauci’s Top Crony Busted in Court for Shredding COVID Cover-Up Docs, Claims He Is Innocent As Scandal Deepens [WATCH]

A former top adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci is facing serious federal charges tied to the destruction of government records about the origins of COVID-19, but the seventy-eight-year-old insists he has done nothing wrong.

Dr. David Morens entered a not guilty plea in a Maryland courtroom as prosecutors accused him of orchestrating a scheme to hide and delete sensitive information that could reveal what really happened inside the federal bureaucracy during the pandemic.

Morens, whose career at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases lasted decades, told reporters he was “innocent” while calmly working on a Sudoku puzzle before his arraignment.

He faces up to fifty-one years in prison if convicted on five counts that include conspiracy against the United States and destroying federal records.

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The charges stem from his alleged use of private email accounts to dodge Freedom of Information Act requests and cover tracks that might expose embarrassing facts about NIAID and the Wuhan lab controversy.

As the pressure mounts, Dr. Fauci has been quick to distance himself from his longtime associate.

In congressional testimony last year, Fauci denied that Morens was even his adviser and claimed he had no knowledge of any records being hidden.

Morens refused to comment on Fauci’s denial when pressed by reporters after leaving the courthouse and drove away in a white BMW without answering questions.

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Federal prosecutors allege that Morens and two unnamed co-conspirators intentionally concealed and destroyed government records related to the origins of COVID-19.

WATCH:

The Justice Department says they went as far as coordinating which messages to delete and how to bypass government systems to shield themselves from scrutiny.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the group deliberately obstructed transparency and suppressed alternative theories about how the virus began, particularly those pointing to a possible lab leak in Wuhan, China.

The indictment also refers to an alleged kickback scheme involving gifts of expensive wine and luxury restaurant meals in Washington, New York, and Paris from research partners in exchange for favorable treatment on multimillion-dollar government grants.

Emails cited by prosecutors point to Dr. Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance and Dr. Gerald Keusch of Boston University as co-conspirators in the case.

EcoHealth Alliance, which received over eleven million dollars in grants from the National Institutes of Health, funneled part of that taxpayer funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for risky gain-of-function experiments.

Critics have long warned that these experiments, which altered bat coronavirus strains to make them more contagious, could have played a role in the global pandemic.

Yet throughout it all, Fauci and his network of allies publicly pushed the so-called “natural origin” narrative while downplaying lab leak concerns.

The Department of Health and Human Services has since blacklisted EcoHealth from receiving more government funding until 2030.

The group’s website has gone offline, and Daszak has remained publicly silent since his own congressional grilling earlier this year.

Meanwhile, the new charges against Morens mark one of the first concrete criminal cases tied directly to alleged manipulation of COVID-origin information by high-level government insiders.

Emails quoted in the indictment reveal Morens bragged about operating a “secret back channel” to Fauci and discussing “how to make emails disappear after I am FOIA’d.”

In one 2021 message, Morens wrote that he could deliver information to Fauci either by Gmail or personally, saying Fauci “is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

Those statements, now under scrutiny by Congress and the Department of Justice, paint a picture of bureaucrats using taxpayer-funded agencies like their own private fiefdoms.

Prosecutors claim the records destroyed or withheld by Morens affected hundreds of transparency requests from media outlets and watchdog groups, including the Heritage Foundation and Science magazine.

These were the same outlets investigating NIH’s financial ties to controversial research in China.

Had those FOIA requests been answered fully, Americans might have known far earlier about the extent of U.S. involvement in risky virology experiments abroad.

Government watchdogs note that this case represents a major test of accountability for bureaucrats who have long operated with political protection.

Even after Fauci’s 2022 retirement, the network of influence he left behind inside the NIH and affiliated academics continues to face mounting scrutiny.

Dr. Robert Redfield, the former CDC director, has publicly supported the lab leak theory and cautioned that proposals like EcoHealth’s Project DEFUSE contained dangerous blueprints that never should have been funded or tested.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Bijon Mostoufi and Joseph Baldwin are handling the prosecution, and the judge has set a motions deadline for May 29.

A jury trial is expected to last about a week once the date is set.

Whether Morens’ proclaimed innocence holds up or not, the case has already renewed skepticism about the government’s handling of pandemic-era science and the troubling coziness between regulators and the research organizations they are supposed to oversee.

Many Americans, particularly those who watched Fauci’s public statements evolve during the pandemic, see this as vindication for asking hard questions.

It appears those “crazy conspiracy theories” about secret communications, deleted emails, and hidden research grants may have had plenty of truth behind them all along.

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