Charges of a Covid Coverup，福奇的顧問被起訴

看來當年講的不是空穴來風。

WSJ：

It will take years for public-health officials to regain the trust they squandered during the pandemic. Charges unveiled by the Justice Department this week against a former adviser to Anthony Fauci for obstructing investigations into the virus’s origins show why. 

The press is portraying the indictment of former National Institutes of Health official David Morens as political retaliation. That’s hard to square with the facts in the indictment, which say he intentionally sought to obfuscate the NIH role in funding the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, which may have contributed to the virus leaking from a Chinese lab. 

The NIH last decade provided some $8 million in grants to EcoHealth, some of which funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function virus experiments. Dr. Fauci dismissed the theory that the virus may have leaked from the Wuhan lab. The indictment says Dr. Morens worried that the public and Congress would probe deeper.

He sought to protect the NIH, Dr. Fauci and former EcoHealth President Peter Daszak. Between February and March 2020, Dr. Morens and a co-conspirator—whom press reports say is Mr. Daszak—co-authored articles arguing that the virus most likely emerged from the wild. Dr. Morens also emailed members of “a prominent medical organization” to enlist them to speak out in defense of Mr. Daszak.

On April 25, 2020, as the lab leak hypothesis was gaining more attention, the indictment says Dr. Morens instructed Mr. Daszak to send all emails to his personal Gmail account. “There are things I cant say except [senior NIAID Official 1] is aware and I have learned that there are ongoing efforts within NIH to steer through this with minimal damage to you [co-conspirator 1], and colleagues, and to nih and niaid,” Dr. Morens wrote to Mr. Daszak. Press reports say the senior NIAID official is Dr. Fauci.

Dr. Morens is alleged to have repeatedly stressed in emails to outsiders that they should communicate with him using his Gmail account to avoid the correspondence being picked up by Freedom of Information Act searches. Communicating with personal email violates the Federal Records Act if government officials don’t forward correspondence to their government emails. Dr. Morens allegedly didn’t. 

On Feb. 24, 2021, he allegedly wrote to Mr. Daszak that he “learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe. Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.” 

On June 17, 2021, the indictment says, he warned Mr. Daszak and “others” that he had received a document production request by five Senators investigating the virus’s origins. Dr. Morens assured his correspondents that he had “retained very few documents on these matters.” Public officials are required by federal law and instructed to retain all such documents. 

Dr. Morens wrote to Mr. Daszak on Oct. 5, 2021 that “a foia picked up an email” he thought he had deleted: “Gmail, phone, text... .i need to scrupulously rely on those exclusively,” he allegedly wrote. A few weeks later he wrote that he was working “with our IT guys to get a fix where my gmail no longer” would get picked up on his government phone.

The indictment charges Dr. Morens with crimes related to concealing and destroying records in a federal investigation. His lawyer has declined comment. Dr. Morens will get his day in court, but he isn’t a victim of lawfare. The efforts at a Covid coverup did great harm to public trust in government.