Anthony Fauci’s reach into the American press corps just got a lot harder to dismiss.

A veteran network correspondent is now saying ABC News handed Fauci a look at a COVID lab leak investigation before it ever reached viewers, and what came back was unrecognizable.

And the man who reported that story is furious about what happened to it.

What Terry Moran Says ABC Did to His Investigation

Former ABC News correspondent Terry Moran claims the network gutted his investigation into the COVID-19 lab leak theory just hours before it was set to air in 2021, after the report was reviewed by lawyers, standards officials and, he was told, Dr Anthony Fauci.

Moran, speaking on *The Fifth Column* podcast, described it as the moment he felt the “heavy hand of censorship” at the Disney-owned network. He said it started in early 2021 when he noticed discussions from “smart and serious” people online raising the possibility that COVID had leaked from a lab, and that ABC’s *Nightline* gave him the green light to pursue it.

Moran pitched the story to *Nightline*, which producers accepted enthusiastically, and the resulting investigation included interviews with molecular virologists and former Trump administration officials.

Among the findings: “We broke a little news that that lab had been funded by the Chinese military, despite the ‘Bat Lady’ [Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli] saying no, it hadn’t… And we kind of laid it out,” Moran said.

He was careful to note his own uncertainty about the origin. “And at the end of the day, my own personal feeling was, you know, it’s probably a little bit more likely it’s natural. But if you told me it had leaked from the lab, fine. It’s probably not cooked up.” Then the piece got reviewed. “And the day that it’s supposed to air, it gets reviewed, and it comes back to me, and it is incomprehensible,” Moran said.

He said he had never been angrier. “I have never watched that story and never want to, because it wasn’t mine, I didn’t think, and most importantly because it was incomprehensible.”

“They had put so many caveats in there, and it was so legalized,” Moran said.

When podcast co-host Michael Moynihan asked who had reviewed the piece, Moran’s answer was short and pointed.

“Lawyers, standards and, I was told, Fauci,” Moran responded. “And I said, ‘I can’t do this.’ And they’re going to air and it’s a 15-minute piece or whatever. And I’m cursing and screaming in the booth.”

Pressed on whether ABC had actually sent the script to Fauci, Moran stressed that he did not have firsthand knowledge. “It would have been the script, that’s what I was told. I don’t know that that’s true personally, but I was told that,” he said.

So he does not claim to have seen the exchange himself. But he clearly believes what he was told, and the picture he paints is of a newsroom that knew exactly who it was deferring to.

The Organized Campaign Moran Says Killed the Story

Moran did not stop at describing what happened to his piece. He also described the broader environment that made it possible.

When Moynihan asked whether simply suggesting a lab leak was dangerous, Moran replied: “Well, if you know the whole story, right? There was an organized campaign by one of the guys who was funding the research, what was his name, [Peter] Daszak or whatever, to get scientists to sign on and say there’s no way there’s a lab leak and anybody says that this came from the lab is, you know, participating in racism or something.”

That campaign worked. For much of 2021, any serious news organization that touched the lab leak question did so at its professional peril. Reporters who raised it were dismissed. Scientists who questioned the natural-origin story found themselves frozen out. And somewhere in that process, according to Moran, a finished *Nightline* investigation got handed to the man whose agency had funded the research in question.

Neither Moran, Fauci, nor ABC News responded to requests for comment from Fox News Digital on the matter.

Fauci’s Diary and What the Press Already Knew

The timing of Moran’s account matters. Fauci has resurfaced in recent weeks following revelations from his diary published by US Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), which put a spotlight on how his private thoughts about COVID often contradicted what he said publicly, including about public health guidelines.

CNN anchor Jake Tapper was mentioned 41 times in Fauci’s diary entries. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos texted, “Thank you, Tony, so impressive” after one interview. Fauci also wrote that he “gave Jake some questions to ask” pediatrician Brett Giroir during a hostile interview on CNN’s *State of the Union*.

CNN’s Dana Bash sent Fauci a text message in April 2021 after a contentious House Select Subcommittee hearing on COVID-19. The CNN anchor complimented Fauci and informed him that her CNN colleague had also taken his side.

And then there is the Senate hearing. After a brief opening statement before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Fauci repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and declined to answer more than 100 questions. Senator Rand Paul said the committee would vote on a contempt resolution against Fauci.

A man who allegedly reviewed a network news script before it aired, who dined with anchors and fed them interview questions, who cultivated a press corps that treated him as untouchable, now refuses to answer questions under oath. That sequence is not subtle.

And Moran himself has a complicated recent history with ABC. He left ABC in 2025 after being suspended for calling Stephen Miller and President Donald Trump “world-class” haters on social media, describing the lab leak episode as the only time he felt “the heavy hand of censorship” during his career at the network.

That last detail is worth sitting with. By his own account, the only time censorship felt real to him at ABC was when a story touched Anthony Fauci’s professional interests. Not any of the other controversies he covered across nearly three decades. That one.

What This Tells You About How COVID Was Covered

The COVID lab leak question is no longer fringe. Multiple US intelligence agencies have assessed a lab origin as plausible, and the FBI concluded it was the most likely explanation. The Senate has held hearings. Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, the organization Moran mentioned, lost its federal funding. The scientific consensus that once treated the lab leak hypothesis as racist fantasy has quietly crumbled.

But in early 2021, when it still mattered most, a correspondent at one of the country’s biggest broadcast networks says he put together a fair, documented investigation, and it came back to him unrecognizable after someone passed it to the very official whose decisions were at the center of the story.

That is not how journalism is supposed to work. You do not hand your script to the subject of the story and then broadcast whatever survives the review. The whole premise of independent reporting collapses the moment you do that.

But the Fauci diary makes clear this was not an isolated incident. It was a system. Anchors texting encouragement after difficult hearings. A government official dictating interview questions to reporters. A press corps that had decided, collectively, that its job was to protect a narrative rather than interrogate one.

Moran’s account fits that picture exactly. And the fact that he is only saying this now, years after the story aired, raises its own questions. He felt the censorship in real time. He was furious. He never watched the finished piece. But he stayed at ABC for years after, and it took a social media post about Trump and Miller to finally end his tenure there.

None of that makes his account wrong. It just means the story of what happened to that *Nightline* investigation is probably bigger than one angry correspondent and one overlawyered script. The question is who else at ABC knew, and whether anyone there is willing to say so.

Sources: Fox News Digital; Mediaite; The Fifth Column podcast; Fox News, “Fauci’s Diary Shows He Fed Questions to Journalists”; Al Jazeera, “Why Did Anthony Fauci Invoke the Fifth Amendment?”; Axios; NPR; CNBC; Associated Press