Fauci’s Former Advisor David Morens Pleads Guilty to Conspiracy to Defraud the United States by Hiding COVID Origin Records and Evading FOIA

David Morens, the longtime senior adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to one count of conspiracy to commit offenses and to defraud the United States.

Morens, 78, entered the plea in federal court in Maryland under an agreement with prosecutors.

The charges stem from Morens’ role in a scheme to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests during the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the Department of Justice, Morens and his co-conspirators used his personal Gmail account to hide communications about restoring NIH funding to EcoHealth Alliance’s controversial bat coronavirus grant, the same grant tied to the Wuhan Institute of Virology that was terminated over lab-leak concerns.

Additionally, Morens co-authored papers that dismissed the lab-leak theory as “thoroughly discredited” and promoted the natural-origin narrative while protecting EcoHealth Alliance and its Chinese partners.

According to the DOJ announcement of the guilty plea:

“Morens is facing up to five years in prison for conspiracy to commit offenses and to defraud the United States. Actual sentences for federal crimes are typically less than the maximum penalties. A federal district judge determines sentencing after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.”

As The Gateway Pundit has previously reported, Morens worked to undermine Trump’s 2020 ban on gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche called it “a profound abuse of trust” at the height of the pandemic.

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Wuhan’s ‘Bat Woman’ Runs A New Lab Creating Coronaviruses That Can Infect Humans. U.S. Tax Dollars Are Still Supporting Her Work.

Shi Zhengli is recruiting researchers for “pathogen discovery/coronavirus” and “cross-species infection risk” work. NIH-backed scientists continued collaborating with her after COVID, including on research using materials she supplied from her new Chinese laboratory.

Shi Zhengli, the Chinese virologist whose years of bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology made her one of the most scrutinized scientists in the world after COVID-19, did not disappear.

She moved on to another powerful Chinese state laboratory, where she is now helping train a new generation of coronavirus researchers.

Chinese-language records reviewed for this report show Shi is currently affiliated with Guangzhou Laboratory, a national laboratory established in 2021 that describes itself as part of China’s strategic scientific and technological apparatus for combating respiratory diseases. Her current research profile focuses on discovering new viruses in bats and other wildlife, studying their biological characteristics, and investigating the mechanisms that allow viruses to jump between species.

Even more striking is what Guangzhou Laboratory is recruiting scientists to do under Shi today.

2026 doctoral recruitment notice lists Shi as an adviser in pathogen biology with a research concentration explicitly described as “pathogen discovery/coronavirus.”

Another 2026 doctoral program, jointly operated by Guangzhou Laboratory and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, lists Shi as an adviser for “pathogen discovery and cross-species infection risk research.” Students in the program conduct their coursework primarily through the Wuhan Institute of Virology before carrying out most of their scientific research and dissertation work at Guangzhou Laboratory.

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National Security Experts: Accountability Cannot End with Fauci, China Must Answer for COVID

National security experts are calling for the Chinese Communist Party to face accountability over the coronavirus pandemic following a Senate committee’s vote to hold former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress, arguing scrutiny of Fauci should not end the effort to determine responsibility for COVID-19.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted 8-5 Thursday to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress after he invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times during testimony before the committee, whose inquiry included COVID-19’s origins, risky life sciences research, and his federal service. Chairman Rand Paul (R-KY) argued Fauci’s Fifth Amendment claims were improper because former President Joe Biden had granted him a sweeping pardon covering his government service from 2014 through January 2025. 

Paul said Fauci therefore had little risk of prosecution for truthful answers about conduct covered by the pardon, while Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) pointed to Fauci’s refusal to answer even basic questions, including whether a folder was sitting in front of him, as evidence that his invocation of the Fifth Amendment was not tailored to any specific threat of prosecution. Fauci’s attorney David Schertler called the vote a “crude political stunt” intended to punish Fauci for exercising his constitutional rights. The vote came as the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations obtained a copy of Fauci’s cellphone from the Department of Health and Human Services and Florida subpoenaed Fauci, focusing on his alleged self-dealing during the pandemic.

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FBI Pressured U.S. Customs to Ditch Plan to Question Key Fauci Ally on Return Trip From Wuhan

The FBI intervened to prevent U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents from questioning “virus hunter” Peter Daszak, Ph.D., on a return trip from Wuhan, China, according to documents released this week by Sen. Rand Paul. Three days before Daszak was scheduled to arrive in New York, a CBP Joint Terrorism Task Force liaison wrote, “Please be advised FBI New York requested we do not stop the subject.”

The FBI intervened to prevent U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents from questioning “virus hunter” Peter Daszak, Ph.D., on a return trip from Wuhan, China, according to documents released this week by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).

The documents show that in February 2021, Daszak, a key ally to Dr. Anthony Fauci and then-president of the EcoHealth Alliance, traveled to Wuhan as part of a World Health Organization (WHO) investigation into the origins of COVID-19.

CBP planned to stop and question Daszak on his return to the U.S. that month. But in an email dated Feb. 2, 2021 — three days before Daszak was scheduled to arrive in New York — a CBP Joint Terrorism Task Force liaison wrote, “Please be advised FBI New York requested we do not stop the subject.”

The CBP Tactical Terrorism Response Team was prepared to question Daszak about the business he conducted in China, his contacts at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and whether he collected or was carrying any samples of viruses or other pathogens.

One document states that CBP viewed Daszak as “an extremely high person of interest” due to his longstanding ties with the Wuhan laboratory.

A Jan. 11, 2021, CBP email flagged Daszak’s participation in the WHO’s team investigating the pandemic’s origins in Wuhan as a potential “conflict of interest.”

A Feb. 2, 2021, email noted that much of the funding Daszak was receiving was “put toward gain of function research.”

Notably, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security email contained within the documents, which provided background information on Daszak’s research activity, referenced an article The Defender published in January 2021.

Paul released the documents as part of his ongoing congressional investigation into the origins of COVID-19. In a post on X earlier this week, he said the documents challenge the narrative that a lab leak was implausible.

“The American people can finally judge the evidence for themselves,” Paul wrote.

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HHS Unveils Policy To End Funding For ‘Dangerous Gain-Of-Function Research’

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on July 28 unveiled a new policy that would end federal support for “dangerous gain-of-function research,” an experiment in which scientists genetically modify an organism to enhance its characteristics.

In a statement, HHS said the policy would prohibit federal funding for dangerous gain-of-function research conducted in the United States and abroad.

It would establish stricter oversight of certain life sciences research that the government deems could pose “significant risks” to public health, biosecurity, or national security. The policy would also restrict federal funding for research conducted in countries or institutions that lack sufficient biosafety and oversight standards, according to the department.

“The federal government has a duty to protect the American people – not fund research that could put them at risk,” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in the statement. “Today, we are ending federal support for dangerous gain-of-function research and replacing weak oversight with clear, enforceable safeguards.”

The policy followed President Donald Trump’s May 2025 executive order directing federal agencies to stop funding gain-of-function research in countries of concern, such as China and Iran, that lack research oversight.

According to a White House fact sheet, the order seeks to prevent federal funding from being used for foreign research that will likely cause another pandemic.

Trump’s order will halt U.S. research involving infectious pathogens and toxins until a safer and more enforceable policy can be implemented, the White House stated.

“Dangerous gain-of-function research on biological agents and pathogens has the potential to significantly endanger the lives of American citizens,” Trump said in his order. “If left unrestricted, its effects can include widespread mortality, an impaired public health system, disrupted American livelihoods, and diminished economic and national security.”

In December 2024, the Republican-led House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a 520-page report detailing findings from a two-year investigation indicating that the COVID-19 virus likely originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

The report found that the U.S. National Institutes of Health funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), and that EcoHealth Alliance Inc. used U.S. taxpayer dollars to facilitate this research at the lab.

The committee said COVID-19 possesses biological characteristics not found in nature and that data indicates that all COVID-19 cases stemmed from a single introduction into humans. This differs from previous pandemics, where there were more spillover events.

The report said that in January 2021, the U.S. State Department published an unclassified fact sheet that says: “The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness.”

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Fauci, vast majority of scientists he consulted didn’t believe ‘wet market’ COVID origin: ‘diary’

Neither Anthony Fauci nor the vast majority of scientists consulted by the then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases accepted the Chinese “wet market” theory of COVID-19 origin in early 2020, before they changed the official consensus in the “Proximal Origin” paper several weeks later, according to purported Fauci diary entries published by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.

“It now appears using epi data and genomic data that the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market,” Fauci allegedly wrote in his personal notes Jan. 26, 2020 after the Chinese health minister said the novel coronavirus was spreading asymptomatically.

“Remember, early on the Chinese were saying that there is no human to human transmission and all the original 27 cases were from the market,” Fauci allegedly wrote, referring to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market about 12 kilometers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the prime suspect for the lab-leak theory. “Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier.”

Fauci’s alleged Feb. 1, 2020 personal notes recount the phone call that eventually produced the Proximal Origin paper, which concluded natural origin was the only credible explanation for COVID’s emergence.

Only two of a dozen scientists on the call were “sure that this could occur naturally and we should not waste our time and divert effort to pursue this,” Fauci said, referring to the possibility that SARS-CoV-2’s unusual ability to easily infect humans was engineered. One of those two worked on gain-of-function research, he said.

According to Fauci, “the rest felt that deliberate insertion [virus engineering] was possible and given the fact that Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in GOF in coronaviruses to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor, we could not let this go.”

Paul has not answered Just the News on the nature of Fauci’s purported diary, reproduced in Paul’s 1,141-page document titled “Tony’s Diary Package,” published Saturday afternoon. The entries begin Dec. 30, 2019.

“Dr. Anthony Fauci took meticulous notes about his work,” Paul’s preface reads. “He made note of conversations, decisions, and his thoughts about actions taken by politicians and other officials. This is his own historical record containing almost-daily entries,” many of which “completely undermine the official narrative that Fauci and other public health officials espoused.”

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Flashback: Fauci Funded Technique To Hide Evidence Of Genetic Engineering According To RFK Jr.

Four years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made an accusation that got him shadowbanned, “fact-checked,” and dismissed as a crank: that Anthony Fauci’s NIAID had bankrolled the development of a laboratory technique whose primary utility was erasing the fingerprints of human engineering from a manipulated virus – and that the technique was then handed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

With Fauci’s personal diaries now public, Tulsi Gabbard’s last-day document dump on the record, Ralph Baric stripped of his NIH grants and placed on leave by UNC, and Fauci himself scheduled to appear under subpoena before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee this Wednesday at 8:30 a.m., Kennedy’s remarks are worth revisiting.

Here’s what he said:

“He [Fauci] funded Ralph Baric to develop a technique called seamless ligation. And that is a technique for hiding the engineering project.”

“So, normally, when you do that kind of engineering, you can see it, and you can say, ‘That bug was created in a lab.'”

“He [Baric] developed a way of hiding all traces [of what] was developed. And he taught that to the Chinese scientists – to Shi Zhengli.”

“There is no public health [reason for this]; it is the OPPOSITE of what you would do if you are interested in public health… To teach people how to hide that only has a nefarious purpose.”

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Rand Paul Should Make Fauci Answer For Wuhan And BeagleGate Lies

Fauci no longer faces any realistic risk of criminal exposure for perjury or other past federal offenses covered by the pardon.

Next week, Dr. Anthony Fauci is scheduled to testify before Sen. Rand Paul’s Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. After years of stonewalling, evasions, carefully parsed denials, and outright lies, this hearing presents a rare opportunity to get answers from America’s most notorious mad scientist, who recklessly funded dangerous animal experiments that likely caused COVID-19 and financed beagle torture in labs worldwide.

This time is different.

In one of his final acts in office, in January 2025, President Joe Biden granted Fauci a sweeping pardon that conspicuously covered a decade-long period starting when he first funded the infamous grant that paid the Wuhan lab, which was first exposed by White Coat Waste in early 2020 and cut days later by President Donald Trump.

This means that Fauci no longer faces any realistic risk of criminal exposure for perjury or other past federal offenses covered by the pardon. So, the usual Fifth Amendment justification for refusing to answer questions about potentially self-incriminating conduct is largely off the table.

Paul should press Fauci on three false statements he has repeatedly made to Congress, the press, and the American people about the Wuhan lab and BeagleGate – claims debunked by evidence obtained by White Coat Waste.

First, Fauci needs to finally fess up about funding gain-of-function animal experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In multiple Senate hearings in 2021, Fauci categorically told Paul and others that “the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” He repeated essentially the same claim during a House Oversight Committee hearing in 2024.

But White Coat Waste has receipts. Our Freedom of Information Act investigations uncovered damning internal government emails from 2016 showing that NIH officials told EcoHealth Alliance that its Fauci-funded animal experiments with the Wuhan lab “appear to involve” gain-of-function research that was banned at the time.

Instead of stopping the experiments, NIH worked with disgraced EcoHealth president Peter Daszak to skirt the ban. Daszak gleefully celebrated the decision, writing, “This is terrific! We are very happy to hear that our Gain of Function research funding pause has been lifted.”

In May 2024, then-acting NIH Director Lawrence Tabak finally admitted to the House Oversight Committee that NIH did, in fact, fund gain-of-function in Wuhan.

Paul should ask a simple question: Does Fauci still stand by his testimony, or will he finally acknowledge that his previous statements to Congress were false or misleading?

Second, Fauci should answer for his testimony denying that he used his personal email for official NIH business.

During House testimony in 2024, Fauci declared to Chairman James Comer, “To the best of my recollection and knowledge, I have never conducted official business via my private email.”

Yet White Coat Waste’s FOIA investigations uncovered official NIH emails showing Fauci telling a Washington Post reporter covering the BeagleGate scandal, “I will send you an email via my Gmail account.”

Records have also emerged showing that David Morens, Fauci’s longtime advisor who was indicted in April for FOIA violations, told Daszak and others in 2021, “I can either send stuff to Tony on his private Gmail or hand it to him at work. . . He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

Will Fauci come clean?

Finally, Paul should revisit BeagleGate – the viral dog testing scandal first exposed by White Coat Waste that Fauci and his allies spent years falsely dismissing as a conspiracy.

In a 2021 Washington Post cover story written by the same reporter Fauci said he would contact through his personal Gmail account, he called the dog testing claims “ridiculous accusations and outright lies.” In his 2024 memoir, Fauci again dismissed the story as “lies,” “lunacy,” and “off-the-wall accusations” and defended himself by awkwardly saying, “I am a passionate animal lover, especially of dogs.”

But government documents obtained by White Coat Waste prove that Fauci funded countless dog labs, including the infamous experiments in Tunisia, where beagles were drugged and had their heads locked in mesh cages full of biting sand flies. After reviewing these records, even the Washington Post, which had aggressively defended Fauci and smeared White Coat Waste, finally acknowledged in 2024 that it published NIH disinformation, acknowledging that “NIH was not fully transparent as it tried to handle a public-relations nightmare.”

Paul was one of the lawmakers who led the charge with White Coat Waste to hold Fauci accountable for funding beagle abuse and lying about it.

Americans deserve answers.

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Pentagon asked for ‘gain of function’ research proposals years before COVID-19 pandemic, top virologist tells Congress

A War Department program requested proposals for so-called “gain of function” experiments that could make viruses more infectious nearly two full years before the COVID-19 pandemic began, a top US virologist told Congress earlier this year.

Dr. Ralph Baric, a prominent coronavirus researcher, told the Senate Homeland Security Committee in a closed-door interview April 10 that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) had solicited proposals in January 2018 to understand “what drives cross-species jumping” in viruses.

“Now, if you want to know, down to the nucleotide level, what drives a cross-species jumping event, you are talking gain-of-function experiments,” Baric told committee staffers, according to an interview transcript obtained by The Post.

Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul (R-Paul.) is making Baric’s full testimony available at a Reading Room webpage that is dedicated to providing Americans full transparency about the decisions surrounding viral research leading up to the global outbreak.

US public health officials like former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci have maintained that the research — which can involve the enhancement of potential pandemic pathogens — is safe and useful for developing vaccines or other drugs to fight emerging viruses.

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Feds Flagged Daszak As ‘An Extremely High Person Of Interest’ – Then The FBI Told Them To Stand Down

Customs officers spent three days building a border examination for the man at the center of the COVID origins fight – until Biden’s FBI put a stop to it with a single email. 

On February 2, 2021, a national targeting security specialist at U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s National Targeting Center circulated a referral to colleagues across the agency. The subject was Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, scheduled to land at John F. Kennedy International Airport three days later aboard Qatar Airways flight 701 from Doha, arriving 2:25 p.m. He was returning from the World Health Organization’s mission to Wuhan investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

The referral asked that Daszak be considered for a Tactical Terrorism Response Team examination – a secondary inspection that can include questioning and a review of electronic devices. Which, now we know, never happened.

Senator Rand Paul, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released the underlying records Monday. They show CBP flagged Daszak as “an extremely high person of interest,” built out a formal targeting event, and then stood down two days before his flight at the request of the FBI’s New York Field Office.

What The Targeting Package Says

According to the materials, officers noted Daszak’s affiliation with Zhengli Shi – the WIV virologist known as “Bat Woman” – and that EcoHealth and Daszak had been working with her for more than fifteen years. They listed him as principal investigator on two NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases grants: 1U01AI151797-01, “Understanding Risk of Zoonotic Viruses Emergence in EID Hotspots of Southeast Asia,” and 2R01AI110964-06, “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” running June 2014 through June 2024. A search of the latter grant, the officers wrote, returned 19 publications, many authored by Shi – who listed the grant on her own resume despite not appearing as a principal investigator on it.

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