“A former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) employee is facing indictment for his role in a scheme to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in connection with COVID-19 research grants. David M Morens, 78, of Chester, Maryland, is charged with conspiracy against the United States; destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations; concealment, removal, or mutilation of records; and aiding and abetting. Morens served as a senior advisor in NIAID’s Office of the Director from 2006 to 2022,” says a Tuesday DOJ press release.
“These allegations represent a profound abuse of trust at a time when the American people needed it most – during the height of a global pandemic. As alleged in the indictment, Dr Morens and his co-conspirators deliberately concealed information and falsified records in an effort to suppress alternative theories regarding the origins of COVID-19. Government officials have a solemn duty to provide honest, well-grounded facts and advice in service of the public interest – not to advance their own personal or ideological agendas,” said Auditioning Attorney General Todd Blanche in the press release, which then quotes drunken asshole K$H Patel saying something he didn’t write.
Quick reminder that this press release would have been about Morens’s former boss, Dr Anthony Fauci, being indicted if Joe Biden hadn’t pardoned the numero uno on the way out the door.
The press release goes on for quite some length but in summary Morens is accused of a litany of statutory crimes for the non-criminally statutory act of accepting a bribe in the form of a lobbyist dinner at a restaurant recommended by a French tire company to nudge the scientific consensus away from the Wuhan lab leak theory back toward the Wuhan wet market theory for COVID’s origin.
Which was always stupid, of course the goddamned virus leaked from the lab – though it was more likely than not a natural specimen sampled from the wild for study by virologists specializing in ‘ronas. But even more stupid – and pernicious – was the bullshit implication that Chinese communist recklessness somehow absolved convicted felon President Trump from suggesting that the virus could be treated by injecting disinfectants into patients’ lungs, just to name one of his manifold failures to properly lead the nation during a pandemic that ultimately killed over a million Americans.