David Morens, Anthony Fauci’s top adviser for nearly 20 years, pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the United States.
Morens stood before a federal judge in Greenbelt, Maryland last week and admitted he and others worked together to hide communications from government oversight. He faces up to five years in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for November 12.
Meanwhile, the man Morens worked under, former NIAID director Anthony Fauci, already has a pardon in hand. President Biden signed it roughly 19 months before any of this came to light.
What Morens admitted in court is specific and serious. After NIH terminated EcoHealth Alliance’s bat coronavirus research grant, Morens and co-conspirators, including EcoHealth president Peter Daszak, deliberately routed communications through a personal Gmail account. The goal, according to the Justice Department, was to dodge Freedom of Information Act requests.
That private channel was used to share non-public NIH information, draft letters lobbying agency leadership on EcoHealth’s behalf, and pass information to a senior NIAID official. Daszak sent Morens wine as a thank-you for his “behind-the-scenes shenanigans” and offered Michelin-starred dinners in Paris and New York. Morens later indicated he had helped place a medical journal commentary arguing COVID-19 had natural origins rather than emerging from a Wuhan lab.
As originally reported, Fauci testified under oath before the House Oversight Committee in 2024 that he had never deleted an official record, never obstructed any FOIA request, and had no involvement in matters related to Wuhan or the origins of the virus.
Then the emails surfaced.
On February 2, 2020, Fauci wrote to NIH Director Francis Collins asking him to delete the message after reading it. Months later, he made a similar request to his own chief of staff. His written words directly contradicted what he told Congress under oath.
To be clear, Fauci has not been charged with any crime. The Washington Post reported he is not accused of wrongdoing in the Morens case. That is accurate and worth stating plainly.
But the pardon Biden granted covers any federal offense Fauci may have committed stretching back to 2014. That kind of blanket protection does not wait for charges to be filed. It makes charges irrelevant from the start.
Two pardons, two very different circumstances. One covered a man who later confessed in open court. The other covered every question federal investigators had not yet gotten around to asking.
Morens has now admitted his role. The emails are on the record. The paper trail is public. The only person at the center of this story who faces no legal consequences is the one whose subordinate just stood up in a Maryland courtroom and told a judge the scheme was real.
Sentencing is November 12. The pardon already ran its course.