The U.S. Department of Justice under President Donald J. Trump indicted David M. Morens, 78, a former senior scientific advisor to Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), on Tuesday, April 28, 2026. He faces federal charges including conspiracy against the United States and destruction or concealment of records.

Prosecutors allege Morens conspired with two others — identified in media reports as Dr. Peter Daszak and Dr. Gerald Keusch — to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by using his personal Gmail account instead of his official NIH email. The communications they allegedly sought to conceal involved the virus’s origins, risky research grants tied to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and efforts to shape the public narrative.

The identification of Daszak and Keusch as the two unindicted co-conspirators comes from matching the indictment’s descriptions with records previously released by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Politico and multiple other outlets (including CBS and the New York Post) reported the connection based on those public congressional documents.

Morens and his associates are accused of deliberately moving sensitive conversations off official NIH systems onto private email accounts to dodge FOIA requests and shield their discussions from public and congressional scrutiny during the deadliest public health crisis in a century.

According to the indictment, Morens allegedly received illegal gratuities from Co-Conspirator 1, identified by Politico as Dr. Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance. In June 2020, Daszak sent him two bottles of The Prisoner Red Napa Valley wine delivered to his home, along with a note thanking him for his “advice, support, and behind-the-scenes shenanigans.”

Morens later joked in an email, “Ahem … do I get a kickback????” after EcoHealth received another multimillion-dollar NIH grant. Prosecutors say these exchanges were part of a broader scheme in which Morens used his senior position to provide favorable treatment while helping conceal official records.

At the heart of the alleged conspiracy lies the controversial coronavirus research grant involving collaboration with China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab many independent experts and U.S. intelligence agencies now regard as the most likely origin of the pandemic.

Morens allegedly worked behind the scenes to influence funding decisions and messaging on the virus’s origins, even as mounting evidence pointed to a lab leak rather than a natural spillover. This case builds directly on explosive revelations from House Oversight Committee investigations. 

During his public testimony on May 22, 2024, Morens downplayed the incendiary emails as “black humor” and expressed regret over their tone.

In one particularly revealing February 2021 email, Morens boasted: “I learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d but before the search starts, so I think we are all safe. Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to Gmail.” This message, sent from his personal Gmail account, is now central to the indictment.

These emails show that Dr. Fauci’s inner circle operated with a culture in which public records laws were treated as optional and alternative theories about the pandemic’s origins were viewed as threats that needed to be suppressed.

This indictment arrives at a critical time, six years after the COVID-19 pandemic began. The Trump administration’s Justice Department is delivering the accountability that was shamefully absent under the prior administration. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche rightly called it “a profound abuse of trust at a time when the American people needed it most.”

The fallout from this case extends well beyond Morens. It points to a culture of record concealment within America’s premier public health institutions, while Fauci faces ongoing criticism for his repeated shifts on masks, lockdowns, and the Wuhan lab-leak theory.

Although Fauci is not named in the charges and received a preemptive pardon from former President Biden, the indictment casts a harsh light on the public health institutions he led — an agency that directed taxpayer money into high-risk research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology and then worked to defend the official narrative on the pandemic’s origins.

On Daszak and Keusch: Politico and congressional records identify Dr. Peter Daszak, former president of EcoHealth Alliance, as Co-Conspirator 1 and Dr. Gerald T. Keusch, retired Boston University professor and former senior NIH official, as Co-Conspirator 2 in the federal indictment of David Morens. Daszak has not publicly commented on the indictment, and EcoHealth Alliance (along with Daszak) has been formally debarred from receiving federal funding.

For millions of families still dealing with the economic and emotional scars of the pandemic, including skyrocketing inflation, learning loss, and divisive vaccine mandates, this indictment feels like justice long denied.

As more details emerge, Americans are right to demand a full accounting: not just for Morens, but for the entire chain of command that prioritized narrative control over open scientific debate.

The American people deserve straight answers about whether their government lied to them regarding the virus’s origins and how the pandemic was handled. This indictment is more than a legal case, it is a stark reminder that when elites conceal the truth, everyday Americans bear the cost.

Laura Loomer is spiraling again — unleashing a frenzied torrent of tweets blaming the likes of Candace Owens, Joe Kent, and Tucker Carlson for recent acts of leftist and Islamic terrorism. While I do not support the anti-Trump comments of these three people by any means, the notion that deranged leftists are being radicalized by those three is completely and utterly absurd.

Loomer is posting deranged propaganda, not serious analysis. It is leftist radicals—Antifa thugs, pro-Hamas encampment militants, and deranged Democrats radicalized by the fake news media—who are drawing inspiration from their own side’s fever swamps. They are on platforms like Reddit and Bluesky in an echo chamber of bile. These are the enemy combatants we must be focusing on.

Blaming conservative dissenters putting out provocative takes for clicks for leftist terror is a grotesque inversion that lets the real culprits off the hook. Loomer is no longer fighting legitimate enemies of the MAGA movement. She’s hunting personal foes while handing the Left a free pass. Her obsession with settling scores—family dirt, invented conspiracies, endless feuds—has eclipsed her once laudable truth-seeking pursuits.

Loomer’s well-documented history of mental instability, including involuntary psychiatric holds and public breakdownsand her inability to own guns because she is such a danger to herself and to others, makes her conduct especially alarming. For the sake of the conservative movement and the country, it is time she checks back into the looney bin once again for the good of America and before she gets even more gruesome plastic surgery as she morphs from Jigsaw into the Elephant Man before our very eyes.

This infighting distracts from the true engines of radicalization: Democrat leaders like Hakeem Jeffries and Chris Murphy. Jeffries has branded Trump a racist dictator whose agenda threatens democracy and minorities. Murphy has escalated, painting Trump as mentally unstable and invoking the 25th Amendment while framing him as an existential danger. This is eliminationist rhetoric. When congressional leaders cast the President as a threat to the Republic’s survival, unbalanced followers hear a permission slip for violence. “By any means necessary” stops being a metaphor and becomes a mission. Such inflammatory garbage directly fuels incidents like the attack on President Trump at this past weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The same toxic atmosphere preceded Butler, Pennsylvania. Democrat words have body counts.

Yet the Secret Service’s catastrophic failures compound the peril. The lapses at the Correspondents’ Dinner were unforgivable—another embarrassing breach that allowed violence to reach the President. This wasn’t a one-off. It was a chilling repeat of the near-assassination in Butler, where unsecured rooftops, ignored warnings, and operational breakdowns nearly ended Trump’s life. Under Director Sean M. Curran, the agency continues to fumble basic protective duties. Curran, a 23-year veteran Trump tapped in January 2025 after leading his personal detail, was supposed to restore competence. Instead, these repeated failures expose either shocking incompetence or deeper institutional rot that even a loyal appointee cannot fix.

Why does the Secret Service still suck at its one job—keeping the President getting threatened more than any other Chief Executive in history alive? Communication blackouts, inadequate perimeters, resource mismanagement, and a culture of complacency persist. Butler should have triggered a total overhaul. Instead, we get more of the same. President Trump must fire Curran immediately. Loyalty to Trump doesn’t excuse presiding over “no-fail” missions that repeatedly fail. The agency needs immediate sweeping reform with new leadership, depoliticization, and accountability that actually means something. Half-measures and excuses are no longer tolerable when lives—and the Republic—are on the line.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune should resign as well. His tepid approach—learned from a lifetime of serving the establishment—completely undermines the aggressive mandate Trump voters delivered. When deep-state resistance, border chaos, and security breakdowns demand a street fighter, Thune wilts under the pressure. Republicans need spine in leadership, not another ballless wonder. We can no longer tolerate Laura Loomer’s sideshows, Democrat incitement, Secret Service malpractice, or weak GOP stewardship. Conservatives must zero in on real threats. President Trump survived Butler by providence. He deserves absolute protection, ironclad unity, and heads on pikes over every failure that endangers him. It is time to get serious about protecting the man who is saving our country.

Part 2: The Case

Part 1 made the geopolitical argument. President Juan Orlando Hernández was an ally of the United States.

The Biden DOJ indicted him the day a Chinese-aligned Honduran government took his place. Trump’s pardon was part of a multi-pronged intervention in the November 2025 Honduran election — the endorsement, the threat to cut aid, and the pardon itself. 

Nasry Asfura won by 0.74 percent. By the admission of supporters and critics alike, that intervention changed the result. 

Asfura took office and is pulling Honduras back toward the United States and away from China. Whatever else it was, Trump’s pardon was a strategic act in the United States’ interests.

Two Questions, Separately Asked

Geopolitics is one question. The US Attorney for the Southern District of NY’s conviction of Hernandez is another.

The pardoning of a man can be useful to American foreign policy and that man can still be guilty of what a jury said he was guilty of. A pardon can serve American interests and still let a criminal walk. The two questions are separate and must be answered separately.

This installment looks at the case the Biden DOJ actually prosecuted in their conviction of Hernandez, the former president of Honduras. 

A Conspiracy Measured in Tons

The Biden DOJ said Hernández was a bad man whose alliance with America did not change what he was. They placed him at the center of a cocaine conspiracy.

Federal prosecutors said the conspiracy Hernandez was a part of moved more than 400 tons of cocaine through Honduras to the United States between 2004 and 2022. Spread out over 18 years, that comes to about 22 tons a year.

According to US government estimates, the conspiracy Hernandez was accused of being part of accounted for roughly 10 percent of all cocaine Americans consume annually. 

The prosecutors said that Hernandez was a part of a larger system that moved drugs and money. A network, they said, that passed through Honduras.

El Chapo

The prosecutors charged him with using machine guns in furtherance of the conspiracy and with conspiring to use them. Those charges carried a 30-year mandatory minimum.

The machine guns were never used in the United States. They were never in the United States. The prosecution’s theory was that they were used by Hondurans in Honduras. The connection to the United States was that the cocaine they allegedly protected was bound for American consumers.

Two of the three charges prosecutors convicted Hernandez of were based on machine guns and a single alleged event in 2013. 

At that time, Hernández was a candidate. He was not yet president.

The prosecution alleged that Hernández’s brother and an associate, armed with machine guns, collected a million-dollar bribe from Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán — payment in advance for favors not yet rendered.

A Question of Distance

The complication was geography.

According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, El Chapo — the man allegedly handing over the million in cash — was at that same moment 1200 miles away, in the mountains of Sinaloa.

The DEA agent who led the operation that captured him, Andrew Hogan, has documented in a published book and in court records that Chapo was under continuous BlackBerry surveillance during that period. The agency was reading his texts in real time.

They could see a single text message.

They would have seen him cross two international borders with a million dollars in cash.

Hogan was not called as a witness at Hernández’s trial. The man with the most detailed knowledge of Chapo’s whereabouts at the time— who would know whether the meeting could have happened at all — never took the stand.

What the Chapo Trial Did Not Say

There was also the matter of the El Chapo trial itself.

It was in the Eastern District of New York. 2018 to 2019. The most thoroughly documented prosecution of a drug trafficker in modern American history. Cooperator after cooperator, bribe after bribe, name after name. Mexican governors. Police chiefs. The former public security minister of Mexico. A public ledger of Sinaloa Cartel corruption.

Juan Orlando Hernández’s name does not appear in it. 

The Department of Justice tried Chapo for everything. They did not mention – not even once – Hernandez, the man they would, three years later, prosecute as one of his most important political allies.

The Witness From Copán

How did the government prove El Chapo bribed Hernandez? The government called Alexander Ardón. 

Ardón had been the mayor of El Paraíso, Copán, a Honduran border town on the Guatemala line. While serving as mayor, he ran a cocaine trafficking organization. Under oath, Ardón said he was responsible for 56 murders.

Because of his cooperation in testifying against Hernandez, Ardón’s sentence for 56 murders was less than six years.

Ardón named three eyewitnesses to the El Chapo meeting — the Salguero cousins and Mauricio Hernández Pineda. All three were in U.S. custody. All three had pleaded guilty.

The prosecution called none of them.

Two Tellings of the Same Bribe

Ardón had also told a different jury a different story.

In 2019, testifying against Juan Orlando’s brother Tony, Ardón told the Manhattan jury that El Chapo delivered his bribe at El Espíritu, Copán, at a property owned by the Valle Valle brothers.

In 2024, testifying against Juan Orlando Hernandez, Ardón changed the location. He told a different Manhattan jury — in the same courthouse, with the same prosecutors — that El Chapo delivered the $1 million bribe at Ardón’s mother’s house.

The same bribe, the same witness said occurred at two different locations, both under oath.

He had to change the location. The Valle Valle organization had been dismantled by the Hernández administration in 2014, immediately after the alleged “protection pact” was supposedly made at one of their properties. If Hernandez took a bribe from El Chapo at the Valle Valles property, a jury might wonder why he extradited them within months of taking office. 

Ardon’s original story had a risk. Ardón’s memory was “refreshed.”

The new story was that El Chapo came to his mother’s house.

Alexander Ardón, with 56 murders, was the witness for two of the three charges – that Hernandez took a bribe from El Chapo, with guns involved.

A man who would switch the locale of the bribe from one address to another to fit the second trial had a motive to move it. He also had a motive to invent it. He was facing life in prison. The prosecutors who decided whether he would walk were the same prosecutors who needed him to place El Chapo in Honduras. 

Ardón gave them what they needed. 

The Question Beyond the Bribe

Even if the El Chapo meeting was a fiction, the larger question remained. Was Hernández actually a major player in moving cocaine into the United States?

On that question, the case was thin on physical evidence.

The prosecutors had no wiretaps, no recorded phone call of Hernández talking about cocaine — even though the DEA was recording the phones of El Chapo, the Cachiros, and the traffickers who claimed to have bribed him.

There was nothing on paper: no ledger, no receipt, no written record whatsoever connecting him to the conspiracy – even though the same investigation produced ledgers, receipts, and written records in other cases.

No surveillance photo. No drug shipment tied to him by physical evidence.

It had one thing for evidence: cooperators. Three of them.

The Cooperating Witnesses

Three men were the case.  Ardón, the former mayor who admitted to 56 murders. 

Another equally motivated witness: Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga — “El Cachiro” — who admitted to 78 murders. 

And Geovanny Fuentes Ramírez, a convicted trafficker serving life. He was a distant third in murders with only five under his belt.

Fuentes Ramírez was the one who told the jury the most memorable line. He told the jury that Hernández said: “we’re going to shove the drugs right up the gringos’ noses.”

Three men with 139 murders between them. 

All three were cooperators. All three had signed cooperation agreements with the same prosecutors who were trying Hernández — written contracts in which the cooperators agreed to testify, and the prosecutors agreed, in exchange, to ask the judge for a reduced sentence if they were satisfied with the testimony.

The prosecutors were evidently satisfied.

Ardón, who confessed to 56 murders, served less than six years before being sent back to Honduras. Fuentes Ramírez is serving a life sentence with the door open to reduction. 

Maradiaga admitted to orchestrating 78 murders. He surrendered to the DEA in January 2015. He has been a cooperating witness in five major SDNY prosecutions over the past eleven years. His final sentence has not been imposed. His current custody status is not in the public record. 

Three witnesses. A structure of incentives in which what happened to them next depended on what they said about Juan Orlando Hernández.

That was the case.

The Sentence and the Reaction

Judge Kevin Castel handed down the sentence in June 2024: 45 years in federal prison plus an $8 million fine.

Trump pardoned Hernandez at the end of 2025.

The reaction was immediate. Democrats and Republicans condemned the pardon. Editorial pages said Trump had freed a drug lord. They asked how any American president could pardon him.

Nobody asked these questions.

Whether the trial was political. Whether the witnesses lied. Whether the prosecution hid evidence. Whether Judge Castel allowed Hernández an adequate defense.

Whatever the prosecutors thought they were doing, the result was this. The man who kept Honduras with the United States went to prison. The country went to China. The Biden administration produced both outcomes and prevented neither.

This series will examine the trial. The cooperating witnesses who admitted to ordering the deaths of 139 people. The State Department cables that praised Hernández as the most effective drug-fighting partner in Honduran history, until the moment he stopped being politically useful. 

Whether the story the jury decided was the whole story. You can decide. But you should know what the jury heard — and what it didn’t.

A lot of effort went into the latter.

Part 3 coming next

See also:

The Framing of Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez by Biden’s DOJ: Part #1