Five Counts Down, the Rest of the Cabal to Go: The Morens Indictment Is Just the Start

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# Five Counts Down, the Rest of the Cabal to Go: The Morens Indictment Is Just the Start

The Justice Department finally indicted someone. One person. A 78-year-old senior adviser, two years past retirement. On April 28, 2026, a federal grand jury in Maryland charged him with five crimes: conspiracy against the United States, destroying federal records, falsifying records during a federal investigation, hiding records, and helping others do the same.[^1] The law allows up to 20 years in prison for each falsification count.[^1] Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche called it a "profound abuse of trust" during a global pandemic.[^1] He is right.

The problem is that David Morens did not do this by himself. The people above him — the ones he reported to, the ones whose careers his lies protected, the ones who built a workplace where a senior NIH adviser could write down a plan to hide emails and send it from his government phone — those people walked out the door with paper in their pockets that says they don't have to answer for any of it.

## The Charges, in Plain English

For 16 years, Morens sat inside NIAID's Office of the Director. He advised the man who, for those 16 years, ran the country's response to infectious disease.[^1] After NIH canceled a grant to EcoHealth Alliance — a grant that sent money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China — Morens allegedly teamed up with two other people. The indictment doesn't name them, but reporters identified them as Peter Daszak of EcoHealth and a former NIH official named Gerald Keusch.[^2] Neither has been charged.

The plan, according to prosecutors: get the grant back, and shoot down the theory that COVID came from a lab. To do it, the three of them agreed in writing to do their work through Morens's personal Gmail. That way, public records requests would never see it.[^1]

One email reproduced in the indictment is almost too good. In May 2020, Morens was drafting a science journal piece "in part to benefit" the company. He told his co-writers he wanted no "fingerprints" of theirs on it. He added: "I need to keep this off of govt email and govt phone text."[^3] He typed that sentence on a government phone, from a government account. The man briefing Tony Fauci on what to tell the President of the United States could not even hide an email conspiracy without leaving it on the very system he was trying to hide it from.

The indictment also says Daszak sent Morens wine, as a thank-you for his "behind-the-scenes shenanigans." Morens then went looking for an official act he could perform to "deserve" the gift — a journal article saying COVID came from nature, not a lab.[^1] Prosecutors say Daszak also offered Morens dinners at Michelin-starred restaurants in Paris, New York, and Washington.[^1] In plain English, that is a bribe. A federal employee is not allowed to take either the wine or the dinners. He took both.

## The Pardons That Insult the Country

On January 20, 2025, hours before he left office, Joe Biden handed out a stack of pardons. Anthony Fauci was on the list. So was retired General Mark Milley. So were every member and staffer of the House January 6 Committee.[^4] None of them had been charged with a crime. The pardons were "preemptive" — meaning, they covered any future charges that might be brought.

Biden's team said the pardons were needed to protect these people from "unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions."[^4] What the pardons actually did was draw a circle around the most senior figure in the chain that produced the conduct now being charged at the staff level. And across that circle, they wrote: *off-limits.*

Fauci himself says he committed no crime and didn't need a pardon.[^4] If that's true, the pardon was unnecessary. If only the second half is true, the pardon was a confession dressed up as a gift. Either way, it stinks. The 78-year-old staff adviser is in front of a grand jury. His boss cannot be touched. That is not how a serious legal system works.

## The Chinese Are Going to Pay Nothing

No sanctions. No prosecutions. No formal demands of any kind that the Chinese government will feel. The Chinese Communist Party blocked outside investigators in the first weeks of the outbreak. They ran the wet-market story as long as it was useful. They disappeared the early whistleblowers in Wuhan. Whatever combination of accident, fraud, or worse happened at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the United States has now chosen — twice, across two administrations — to absorb the damage and make Beijing pay nothing.

That is its own breach of trust. The people who lost loved ones, jobs, businesses, schooling, and years of their lives are entitled to ask why. They are entitled to ask why the only person presently in federal jeopardy is a 78-year-old American science bureaucrat, while the lab at the center of the story is still running, fully funded, on the other side of the ocean.

## A Full Accounting of the People Who Helped

The cover-up was not just inside NIH. It included the media outlets that carried water for the official story and ridiculed everyone who asked obvious questions.

Remember CNN's coverage of Joe Rogan's COVID in the fall of 2021. Rogan, a grown adult, took ivermectin under the care of his doctor. Ivermectin is a Nobel-recognized drug given to humans hundreds of millions of times for parasites. CNN called it "horse dewormer." Anderson Cooper said it was "something more often used to deworm horses."[^5]

Then CNN's chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, sat down on Rogan's podcast. Rogan pressed him on it. Gupta admitted his own network "shouldn't have said that."[^6] CNN then put Gupta on with Don Lemon, who doubled down on the smear anyway.[^7] That is the whole story of pandemic-era media in a single 24-hour news cycle: caught,