Fauci’s NIH Consigliere David Morens Beaten Up at COVID Hearing, Advised by Own Attorney “Tie Your Shoe”

Media outlets downplayed or ignored major new findings of corruption at NIH, but you already expected this.

5 minute read

UPDATE: A journalist at the Washington Post sent a message to explain that, contrary to my assertions, the newspaper had not buried Dan Diamond’s report of the David Morens hearing: “The ‘Health Brief’ is our newsletter that goes to more than 100,000 daily subscribers; we also post the newsletter as a separate URL, where it can be read and shared. The story and its headline — ‘A Fauci adviser deleted emails. Congress demanded to know why.’ — were featured on The Washington Post homepage across Thursday.”

---

Wow, what a hearing!

Under intense grilling from Republicans and Democrats, Fauci’s NIH consigliere David Morens testified last week before the COVID Select Subcommittee that he had deleted his government emails to hide official records, implied that Tony Fauci did the same, and admitted that he had disparaged women to NIH grantees—caught in one email referring to CDC Director Rochelle Walensky as a “skirt.”

Reading back to Morens passages from his own emails and prior congressional testimony, Chairman Brad Wenstrup forced Morens to confirm that he had conspired with EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak to restore Daszak’s NIH grant. Morens admitted that he edited a compliance letter Daszak sent to the NIH, edited an EcoHealth Alliance press release after NIH terminated Daszak’s grant, and “put in a word” to the EcoHealth Alliance board when Daszak was worried about being fired.

Ranking Member Raul Ruiz berated Morens at several points, saying his actions were a “stain on the legacy” of the NIH and his colleagues. After Wenstrup banged down his gavel to end the hearing, Morens remained seated and was approached by his lawyer, white collar crime attorney Timothy Belevetz.

Leaning into his client’s ear, Belevetz whispered, “Before you get up, tie your shoe.”

To kick off the witness flogging, the Committee released a 35-page staff report that detailed “serious questions regarding potential wrongdoing and illegal activity by Dr. David Morens.” The Committee also released 155 pages of emails subpoenaed from Morens’ private email account, where he had been conducting government activity, as well as other emails from Boston University’s Gerald Keusch, an infectious disease expert and Daszak colleague.

Morens and Keusch collaborated on a 2020 essay that advocated for “a quantam leap” in funding for the type of research conducted by Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance. Their essay also claimed that “theories about a hypothetical man-made origin of SARS-CoV-2 have been thoroughly discredited by multiple coronavirus experts.”

In one November 2021 email released by the Committee, Keusch discussed another essay he had written to defend Daszak, complaining that the Washington Post had rejected it. Keusch added that Science Magazine’s Jon Cohen had given him a lead to place the essay in Cohen’s own magazine, but Cohen also suggested sending the essay to Michael Hiltzik, an ardent Fauci defender at the Los Angeles Times.

“It’s big and influential enough to garner attention in Building One,” Keusch wrote of Cohen’s suggestion to send the essay to the Los Angeles Times—“Building One” referring to the office where NIH leadership works.

True to form, Science Magazine downplayed some of the hearing’s most explosive findings, in an article whose title misinformed readers by stating that Morens’ evasion of federal record laws had only “allegedly” happened: “House panel takes Fauci adviser to task for allegedly evading public records laws.”

This headline was belied by several of Morens’ very own emails where he described deleting emails, such as a June 2020 email that he sent to Daszak and Keusch.

“I learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear,” Morens wrote in another example.

Science also quoted Keusch disparaging the hearing, without fully explaining that Keusch had been working with the magazine’s own reporter, Jon Cohen, to place essays in the media to protect Daszak. “This escalation is really dangerous to science, for scientists, and for national security,” Keusch told Science.

The Washington Post’s Dan Diamond also seemed to engage in similar downplaying, burying a piece about the hearing in the Post’s health brief section, where it got few readers. Diamond has long been viewed as a fan of Fauci, and comments by Post subscribers were rather brutal, with one noting the Post’s history of dismissing the possibility of lab accident as a “coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked.”

Another Post subscriber commented that he could not wait for Fauci’s Committee appearance.

Dr. Fauci was the quarterback of the U.S. covid response. David Morens was part of his offensive line, protecting the quarterback. And he was very offensive indeed.

We're all looking forward to Dr. Fauci's testimony, where he can explain why he said we weren't funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan even though we were funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan.

With so little good for Fauci coming from the emails and testimony, New York Times science reporter Ben Mueller ignored the hearing, as if it did not happen. The Times did not run a story.

News of Morens’ illegal deletion of government records had been teased in a prior COVID Select hearing where parts of Morens’ emails had been read aloud. “Bombshell messages reveal Anthony Fauci's top advisor bragging about making emails 'disappear',” reported the Daily Mail.

The Committee’s staff report stated that the emails raise alarming questions about whether Fauci took part in a conspiracy to hide his records regarding the origins of COVID-19. Fauci is scheduled to appear before the Committee on June 3.