Steven Richards writes for Just the News about the potential impact of a recent high-profile plea agreement.
The plea deal agreed to by former top Dr. Anthony Fauci adviser David Morens, filed in federal court this week, provides a roadmap for further conspiracy charges in the scheme to conceal communications about coronavirus research grants from Freedom of Information Act requests, a review of the court documents shows.
Morens, who served as a senior adviser to Fauci at the National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 16 years, pleaded guilty earlier this week to the conspiracy, admitting to working with two co-conspirators to conceal agency records from public view.
The records dealt with a National Institutes of Health grant to “Company #1,” an entity that sponsored coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory in China. Just months after the COVID-19 pandemic spread to the United States, the NIH canceled the bat coronavirus grant to the company as it reviewed allegations that the laboratory may have been the source of the virus in a lab leak after President Donald Trump publicly acknowledged his awareness of the grant in late April 2020.
Though not identified by name by prosecutors, Company #1 is EcoHealth Alliance, the former New York-based nonprofit headed by Peter Daszak that Fauci’s agency used as a pass-through to fund controversial gain-of-function research at the Chinese facility. …
… While the focus has been on Morens after his guilty plea earlier this week, the plea agreement provides significant detail about the overall conspiracy and identifies Daszak – by implication and not by name – as “Co-Conspirator 1” in the scheme to avoid FOIA requests, raising the possibility that the British zoologist could face his own legal jeopardy for his alleged involvement.
The agreement, which was signed by Morens, lays out in detail how he, Daszak and another conspirator worked to conceal records related to EcoHealth’s coronavirus research grant and used Morens’ status as a senior adviser to advance the interests of EcoHealth within the NIH.
