Five Counts Down, the Rest of the Cabal to Go: The Morens Indictment Is Just the Start
562 Podcast
# 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, conceded, then re-asserted the lie on the next show.
The 2020 *Lancet* letter — the one signed by 27 scientists that called any non-natural origin a "conspiracy theory" — was secretly organized by the same Peter Daszak now named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Morens case. That letter is still cited. The journals that suppressed open debate on origins are still in business. The fact-checkers who flagged ordinary citizens for saying things the U.S. intelligence community would later formally adopt have not apologized. None of them will be charged. All of them helped.
## The Vaccine Reckoning the Establishment Won't Hold
The same institutions that hid the lab-leak debate also hid the vaccine-safety debate. The record is now hard to dismiss.
**Myocarditis.** Heart-muscle inflammation showed up as a real side effect of the mRNA vaccines, especially in young and teen-aged males after the second dose. The CDC and FDA acknowledged the signal in 2021 and added warnings. Studies in the United States, Israel, and the Nordic countries confirmed rates above what would normally be expected.
**The J&J vaccine.** The Johnson & Johnson shot was pulled from the U.S. market over a rare but sometimes deadly clotting disorder.
**AstraZeneca.** AstraZeneca pulled its COVID vaccine, Vaxzevria, off the global market in 2024. The company said the reason was "commercial." By that point, in court filings, the company had already admitted the same clotting problem in rare cases.
These are not fringe claims. These are the drug companies' own admissions, written in the smallest print available, years after honest disclosure would have meant something.
And then there are the ordinary people in between — otherwise healthy adults who report chest pain, racing hearts, exercise problems, and exhaustion that started within weeks of a shot and never went away. The honest position is that the long-term picture is still being worked out, that the official safety-tracking systems are passive and incomplete, and that the people having these problems have been treated by their own doctors and institutions with a contempt that would be malpractice in any other context. The people who shut down open discussion of these signals — the journals, the platforms, the cable doctors, the federal communications shops — have not been called to account. Morens is being charged for hiding emails. The people who hid an entire conversation are still on television.
## What "Extreme Prosecution" Actually Looks Like
Three things have to happen.
**Follow the conspiracy.** The indictment names two co-conspirators it does not charge, and points at "others." Prosecutors should follow the trail wherever it leads — to any NIH records officer who allegedly coached the scheme, to any official whose private Gmail shows the same pattern.
**Audit the pardons.** A presidential pardon is powerful, but it has limits. It does not block state-level charges where they exist. It does not block civil lawsuits. It does not block Congress from holding hearings and putting the full record on paper. Investigate, depose, subpoena, and publish. The American people are entitled to a complete record even where they cannot have a complete prosecution.
**Open the safety data.** Release every line of the V-safe vaccine data. Release the unredacted Pfizer and Moderna trial documents. Force the journals that suppressed open debate on origins and safety to publish a full accounting of which editorial decisions were made under which pressures, and by whom. Sunlight is the only fix that's still available.
The Morens indictment is a beginning. It is nowhere near enough. The American people watched their government, their universities, their journals, and their networks line up behind a story that was not true, while the people telling the truth were ridiculed, fact-checked, and de-platformed. A 78-year-old man is finally facing a federal grand jury for a piece of it. The rest of the bill is still unpaid.
Tippecanoe and Tyler Too, Click Click, Later, I’m out of here.
Due to our extensive holdings and our clients, you should assume that we have a position in all companies discussed and that a conflict of interest exists. The information presented is provided for informational purposes only. The future performance of a security is not guaranteed. This conversation does not involve securities.
Truesdell Wealth, Inc.
A Registered Investment Advisor
The Truesdell Professional Building
200 NW 52nd Avenue Ocala, Florida 34481
352-612-1000 or
212-433-2525
Paul Grant Truesdell, The Elder
J.D., AIF, CLU, ChFC, RFC
Founder
# 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, conceded, then re-asserted the lie on the next show.
The 2020 *Lancet* letter — the one signed by 27 scientists that called any non-natural origin a "conspiracy theory" — was secretly organized by the same Peter Daszak now named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Morens case. That letter is still cited. The journals that suppressed open debate on origins are still in business. The fact-checkers who flagged ordinary citizens for saying things the U.S. intelligence community would later formally adopt have not apologized. None of them will be charged. All of them helped.
## The Vaccine Reckoning the Establishment Won't Hold
The same institutions that hid the lab-leak debate also hid the vaccine-safety debate. The record is now hard to dismiss.
**Myocarditis.** Heart-muscle inflammation showed up as a real side effect of the mRNA vaccines, especially in young and teen-aged males after the second dose. The CDC and FDA acknowledged the signal in 2021 and added warnings. Studies in the United States, Israel, and the Nordic countries confirmed rates above what would normally be expected.
**The J&J vaccine.** The Johnson & Johnson shot was pulled from the U.S. market over a rare but sometimes deadly clotting disorder.
**AstraZeneca.** AstraZeneca pulled its COVID vaccine, Vaxzevria, off the global market in 2024. The company said the reason was "commercial." By that point, in court filings, the company had already admitted the same clotting problem in rare cases.
These are not fringe claims. These are the drug companies' own admissions, written in the smallest print available, years after honest disclosure would have meant something.
And then there are the ordinary people in between — otherwise healthy adults who report chest pain, racing hearts, exercise problems, and exhaustion that started within weeks of a shot and never went away. The honest position is that the long-term picture is still being worked out, that the official safety-tracking systems are passive and incomplete, and that the people having these problems have been treated by their own doctors and institutions with a contempt that would be malpractice in any other context. The people who shut down open discussion of these signals — the journals, the platforms, the cable doctors, the federal communications shops — have not been called to account. Morens is being charged for hiding emails. The people who hid an entire conversation are still on television.
## What "Extreme Prosecution" Actually Looks Like
Three things have to happen.
**Follow the conspiracy.** The indictment names two co-conspirators it does not charge, and points at "others." Prosecutors should follow the trail wherever it leads — to any NIH records officer who allegedly coached the scheme, to any official whose private Gmail shows the same pattern.
**Audit the pardons.** A presidential pardon is powerful, but it has limits. It does not block state-level charges where they exist. It does not block civil lawsuits. It does not block Congress from holding hearings and putting the full record on paper. Investigate, depose, subpoena, and publish. The American people are entitled to a complete record even where they cannot have a complete prosecution.
**Open the safety data.** Release every line of the V-safe vaccine data. Release the unredacted Pfizer and Moderna trial documents. Force the journals that suppressed open debate on origins and safety to publish a full accounting of which editorial decisions were made under which pressures, and by whom. Sunlight is the only fix that's still available.
The Morens indictment is a beginning. It is nowhere near enough. The American people watched their government, their universities, their journals, and their networks line up behind a story that was not true, while the people telling the truth were ridiculed, fact-checked, and de-platformed. A 78-year-old man is finally facing a federal grand jury for a piece of it. The rest of the bill is still unpaid.
Tippecanoe and Tyler Too, Click Click, Later, I’m out of here.
Due to our extensive holdings and our clients, you should assume that we have a position in all companies discussed and that a conflict of interest exists. The information presented is provided for informational purposes only. The future performance of a security is not guaranteed. This conversation does not involve securities.
Truesdell Wealth, Inc.
A Registered Investment Advisor
The Truesdell Professional Building
200 NW 52nd Avenue Ocala, Florida 34481
352-612-1000 or
212-433-2525
Paul Grant Truesdell, The Elder
J.D., AIF, CLU, ChFC, RFC
Founder