Agency Capture
‘Profound Abuse of Trust’: Former Fauci Aide Indicted for Conspiracy to Hide Government Records on COVID Origins
Dr. David Morens, who served in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Office of the Director between 2005 and 2025, faces five charges, including conspiracy, destruction of records in federal investigations and concealment of records. Dr. Anthony Fauci led the NIAID until his departure in December 2022.
A federal grand jury today indicted a former senior adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci for allegedly using his personal email account to hide communications about the origins of COVID-19 while shaping the public narrative that the virus emerged from nature instead of from a lab.
Dr. David Morens, 78, who served in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Office of the Director between 2006 and 2022, faces five charges, including conspiracy, destruction of records in federal investigations and concealment of records. Fauci led the NIAID until his departure in December 2022.
Each charge carries a maximum sentence of 5 to 20 years in prison.
According to the indictment, dated April 16 and unsealed Monday in federal court in Maryland, Morens used his personal email account to shield communications from federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
The indictment also lists two unidentified co-conspirators who allegedly collaborated with Morens to conceal and destroy federal records.
According to Fox News, the emails between Morens and other government officials allegedly included “discussions about COVID research, efforts to influence funding decisions, and exchanges related to messaging on the virus’s origins.”
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the allegations “represent a profound abuse of trust at a time when the American people needed it most — during the height of a global pandemic.”
“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,” Blanche said.
Indictment presents ‘compelling’ evidence
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) alleges that Morens collaborated with the co-conspirators to restore funding for the bat coronavirus research they were conducting at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) had terminated the funding over safety concerns.
One of the co-conspirators is likely Peter Daszak, Ph.D., former president of EcoHealth Alliance, which received NIH grants for coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab.
In 2024, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services suspended all funding for EcoHealth Alliance after finding the organization had failed to properly monitor risky coronavirus experiments.
The DOJ also alleges that Morens received gifts from one of the collaborators, who worked with Morens on a scientific paper suggesting the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic had a zoonotic — or natural — origin.
Morens also allegedly relayed information from his communications with the collaborators to senior NIAID leadership, who then briefed the White House, Congress and the public during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Circumventing records protocols with the intention of avoiding transparency is something that will not be tolerated by this FBI,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in a statement. “Not only did Morens allegedly engage in the illegal obfuscation of his communications, but he received kickbacks for doing so.”
Investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker, who has extensively reported on Morens, called the indictment “a great initial move” — but questioned whether the unidentified co-conspirators will be publicly named and whether the indictment will result in charges against other people.
Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright, Ph.D., said the facts indicate that the two unnamed co-conspirators are Daszak and Dr. Gerald Keusch, former director of the NIH Fogarty International Center, which funded foreign scientists.
“The evidence against the three is compelling,” Ebright said, referring to Morens, Daszak and Keusch. Ebright said that “unless one or more flips and provides evidence against Fauci and others in exchange for immunity, all three should be, and likely will be, convicted.”
Christopher Dreisbach, legal affairs director for React19, an advocacy group for COVID-19 vaccine injury victims, some of whom had unsuccessfully sought help from Fauci and NIH regarding their injuries, said the indictment “strikes at the core obligation of government officials to be transparent.”
“For the COVID vaccine-injured community, this is not just about one individual or one theory. It is about a pattern, where information challenging prevailing narratives was hidden from public scrutiny while those same narratives were presented as settled fact,” Dreisbach said.
Attorney Greg Glaser said that, for families who were “dismissed or gaslit for questioning the official COVID narrative,” the indictment “is a massive crack in the dam.” However, he said it’s not “nearly enough,” and called for an investigation into the “entire apparatus.”
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — parent agency of the NIH and NIAID — referred The Defender to the DOJ for comment. A DOJ spokesperson declined to comment on the case while it is still ongoing.
Morens played key role in COVID response, public messaging during pandemic
The New York Post reported that Morens oversaw NIH’s grant to EcoHealth Alliance “beginning in 2014.” The grant “ended up funneling US taxpayer dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) for bat coronavirus research.”
During a 2024 congressional hearing, Morens testified that he had discussions with Fauci about NIAID grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
According to the indictment, these discussions were significant, as Morens played a key role in the government’s COVID-19 response and its public messaging during the pandemic. The DOJ states:
“Morens gathered information from grantees and others in the scientific community to establish facts about the nature of COVID-19. This enabled Morens to understand NIH and NIAID’s historical activities in coronavirus research, assist in formulating policy and procedures, and brief Senior NIAID Official 1 [Fauci] so he could then relay information to the President of the United States, Congress, and the public.”
The DOJ said that the EcoHealth grant in question, “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” was withdrawn “based on allegations that COVID-19 emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
The grant’s termination led Morens and the co-conspirators to try to “restore the termination of the bat coronavirus grant and counter the narrative that COVID-19 leaked from a lab.”
“Each of these matters fell within Morens’s role as senior advisor and constituted federal records that needed to be created, maintained, and exchanged on government systems,” the DOJ stated.
According to the DOJ, one of the co-conspirators gave Morens wine as a gift for his “behind-the-scenes shenanigans.” Morens then “allegedly identified an official act that he could perform to ‘deserve’ the gift, which was a scientific commentary in a prominent medical journal advocating that COVID-19 had natural origins.”
Email communications involving Morens that were released in 2024 indicated multiple instances of Morens appearing to brag about his ability to bypass federal law and delete potential “smoking guns” from his inbox.
“[T]here is no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony [Fauci] on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house.” Morens wrote in an April 21, 2021, email cited by the Post. “He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”
In a Feb. 24, 2021, email, Morens wrote, “[I] learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d [sic] but before the search starts. Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”
In a Sept. 9, 2021, email, Morens wrote that he would “always communicate on gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly.” Morens wrote that he would “delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”
The documents also indicated that Morens played a central role at NIAID in early debates about gain-of-function experiments — specifically, controversial experiments on “highly pathogenic” bird flu in 2011 — and that he privately criticized scientists who favored stronger biosafety regulations.
Gain-of-function research, which increases the transmissibility or virulence of viruses, may have created the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It is also commonly used in vaccine development. The federal government implemented a funding pause on gain-of-function research between 2014 and 2017.
In a September 2021 email to Daszak after his NIH grant was restored, Morens asked if he, Morens, would be getting a “kickback.” Fox News reported that Morens described these messages as “black humor” during his 2024 congressional testimony, and said he regretted the tone of certain emails he sent.
Indictment might be a step toward revealing ‘a huge closet of skeletons’
On his way out of office in January 2025, former President Joe Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci for any official acts he carried out dating back to 2014.
Despite the pardon, legal experts have suggested that Fauci could still face state-level charges and could still be subpoenaed to testify before Congress.
In July 2025, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) suggested Fauci could be forced to testify under oath, as part of the senator’s congressional investigation into the origins of COVID-19.
In September 2025, Paul invited Fauci to testify before Congress after releasing several 2020 emails showing Fauci instructed colleagues to delete messages. The emails also showed that Fauci and other public health officials sought to get ahead of the science and the narrative” early during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Last year, the Trump administration launched an investigation into the publisher of the journal Nature Medicine. In March 2020, the journal published “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” an article co-authored by several virologists — with input from Fauci — which concluded that COVID-19 evolved from nature.
The “Proximal Origin” paper — possibly the one referenced in today’s indictment — helped discredit proponents of the theory that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab. Scientists, government officials and media outlets widely cited the paper to characterize proponents of the lab-leak theory as conspiracy theorists.
Jeffrey Tucker, founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, said that in 2020, Morens and Fauci co-authored another paper, which identified SARS-CoV-2 as the latest in a series of pandemics with a natural origin. The paper, published in the journal Cell, suggested that several human behaviors and activities acted as contributing factors for the spread of COVID-19.
“They wanted a reconstruction of the infrastructure of society to make social distancing a permanent feature of life,” Tucker said. “In short, this article is insane, and reveals just how much was going wrong at the NIH/NIAID during those years. There is a huge closet of skeletons. This is just one small bone.”
Last year, the Trump administration launched a new version of the government’s official COVID-19 website, presenting evidence that COVID-19 emerged due to a leak at the Wuhan lab.
The CIA, FBI, U.S. Department of Energy, Congress and some foreign intelligence agencies have endorsed the lab-leak theory.
“Morens was a gatekeeper,” Glaser said. “Real accountability means looking at the architects of these policies, such as public enemy No. 1: Fauci. The timing of Senate investigations is important, so this indictment should provide good support for Sen. Paul’s work to expose the upper echelons at NIAID.”
“Indictments, prosecutions and convictions of the persons who caused COVID and covered up the cause of COVID will move the needle,” Ebright said. “Without accountability, the recklessness and the lies will continue.”
Related articles in The Defender
- Fauci Aide Destroyed Sensitive Emails, Used Private Gmail Account to Hide NIAID Ties to Wuhan
- Fauci Aide Bragged That He Could ‘Make Emails Disappear’ — Including ‘Smoking Guns’
- Top Fauci Adviser Subpoenaed Amid New Whistleblower Allegations of COVID Origins Cover-Up
- Top Fauci Aide Under Investigation for Evading FOIA Requests for Emails on COVID Origins
- Sen. Rand Paul Demands U.S. Intelligence Records on Fauci, Baric and COVID Origins
- ‘For Safety of Citizens Worldwide’: HHS Suspends Government Funding for EcoHealth Alliance
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