GREENBELT, Md. — A former senior adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci proclaimed on Friday he’s “innocent” of criminal charges that he conspired to stop investigations into the origins of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr. David Morens, 78, pleaded “not guilty” to five counts during an arraignment hearing with his defense attorneys Timothy Belevetz and Morgan Taylor and entered the plea in Maryland federal court on Friday before Magistrate Judge Ajmel Ahsen Quereshi.

Morens, who faces up to 51 years in federal prison upon conviction, told The Post, “I’m innocent,” ahead of the hearing while seated in the courthouse lobby — and carried on calmly solving what appeared to be a Sudoku puzzle.

Asked in the hearing whether he had reviewed the indictment, he told the judge: “Yes, I scanned it. I haven’t read it word for word.”

Fauci had disavowed Morens in a June 2024 congressional hearing, saying that he “knew nothing” of his alleged use of a private Gmail account to discuss official government business and claimed he wasn’t even his adviser.

Morens stared straight ahead and declined comment when asked by The Post after the hearing why Fauci had denied knowledge of his underling’s actions at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — before driving away in a white BMW.

An April 16 indictment charged the NIAID official with one count for conspiracy against the US, two counts for concealing government records and two counts for destroying them — with the help of two, as yet, unnamed co-conspirators.

He’s accused of conspiring to conceal or destroy federal logbooks by using a private email account regarding the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Morens and his co-conspirators “concealed, removed, destroyed and caused the concealment, and removal of federal records to evade FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] and FRA [Federal Records Act],” per the indictment.

The scheme helped “suppress alternative theories regarding the origins of COVID-19,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement announcing the indictment on April 28.

The former Fauci adviser also participated in an alleged “kickback” scheme that involved one of the alleged co-conspirators gifting wine bottles and promising meals at Michelin-starred restaurants in Washington, DC, New York City and Paris, in exchange for approving multimillion-dollar grants.

Emails cited in the indictment — which surfaced through past congressional investigations — point to Dr. Peter Daszak, the president of Manhattan-based non-profit EcoHealth Alliance, and Dr. Gerald Keusch, an associate director of Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Disease Laboratory Institute, as the co-conspirators.

Daszak’s EcoHealth took more than $11 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health between 2014 and 2020, prosecutors noted, with a portion of those taxpayer dollars eventually funding gain-of-function research experiments on bat coronaviruses at the now-infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Keusch, another NIH grantee, allegedly collaborated with Daszak and Morens to help reinstate one of those grants when it was cancelled earlier in the pandemic — after having been instrumental in approving the first WIV-related grant back in 2002.

The trio opposed journalists and lawmakers who suggested that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab accident in Wuhan, China, and pushed for the publication of scientific papers that argued for a natural spillover theory of the virus’s origins from animals to humans.

EcoHealth no longer has a public website and attempts to contact Daszak were previously unsuccessful. The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH and NIAID, has barred the nonprofit from receiving any federal funding until 2030.

Fauci, who departed his role as NIAID director in December 2022, is also dubbed “Senior NIAID Official 1” in emails referenced in the indictment — but not named as a co-conspirator to the records evasion scheme.

That’s despite Morens having bragged to his co-conspirators about operating a “secret back channel” with Fauci, sending messages from a private email account related to his boss’s work and getting tips from an NIH employee about “how to make emails disappear after I am FOIA’d,” according to communications first exposed by The Post.

“[T]here is no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private Gmail [sic], or hand it to him at work or at his house,” the NIAID senior adviser wrote in an April 21, 2021, email. “He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

Prosecutors alleged that Morens obstructed Americans’ access to information in “hundreds” of FOIA requests, including from US Right To Know, Science magazine, and the conservative Heritage Foundation.

EcoHealth awarded more than $1.4 million to WIV to conduct “genetic experiments to combine naturally occurring bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS viruses, resulting in hybridized (also known as chimeric) coronavirus strains,” the Government Accountability Office found in a June 2023 report.

The project, titled “Understanding the Risks of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” included gain-of-function experiments on those viruses in mice that made them 10,000 times more infectious, in violation of the grant’s terms, NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak later testified to Congress.

Tabak and other NIH officials have denied that those experiments caused the pandemic, but another unfunded proposal from EcoHealth, known as Project DEFUSE, has been flagged by some scientists and lawmakers for containing the “blueprint” for creating the virus that causes COVID-19.

Ex-CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield, who has supported the so-called “lab leak theory” of the pandemic, noted that even unfunded projects and proposals can be tested under other research grants that got funding, while speaking on a biosecurity panel in October 2024

Assistant US Attorneys Bijon Mostoufi and Joseph Baldwin appeared on behalf of the Department of Justice. The judge set a motions deadline for May 29 in the case.

A jury trial, when scheduled, is expected to last around seven days, both prosecutors and defense lawyers agreed.