In Greenbelt federal court on Tuesday, Dr. David Morens, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, confessed to conspiring to defraud the US (18 U.S.C. § 371). This guilty plea ends the records saga that began with his emails bragging about destroying government documents.
According to the Department of Justice, Morens and a third conspirator swore to help the bat coronavirus grant’s beneficiary recover NIH-terminated funding and “counter the narrative that COVID-19 leaked from a lab.”
After the 78-year-old from Chester, Maryland, accepted the deal, the remaining charges in an April five-count indictment were withdrawn. Federal investigations into record destruction, alteration, or falsification, concealment, removal, or mutilation, and aiding and abetting were withdrawn. Each felony had a 20-year maximum punishment. His attorney Tim Belevetz said Dr. Morens pled guilty today and “taken responsibility for what he did and will continue to do so”.
A conviction could result in $250,000 in fines, three years on supervised release, and five years in federal prison for Morens. U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis will sentence on November 12 in Maryland. A plea bargain addition, which addresses collaboration, was submitted under seal.
Conspiracy Structure
NIH terminated “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” funding, starting the conspiracy. According to the plea bargain and stipulation of facts, it lasted from April 2020 to June 2023.
This donation went to EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Wuhan Institute of Virology received US government funding. The Justice Department says the NIH closed it in 2020 “based on allegations that COVID-19 emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
According to the petition, what followed was not spontaneous. By diverting government business to Morens’s personal Gmail account instead of his official NIH email, the conspirators “agreed in writing to intentionally hide their communications from public view”—they expected the Freedom of Information Act to be used.
That channel carried confidential NIH documents, plans to reinstate canceled funding, revised EcoHealth letters to NIH leadership, and “back-channel” material sent to Senior NIAID Official 1, who CBS’s analysis of court records suggests is Fauci. The government says Morens was authorized to handle all of those materials and that they were federal records that had to be prepared and stored on government computers.
Illegal Tips and “Behind-the-Scenes Shenanigans”
Morens also admitted to meeting with “Co-Conspirator 1,” a moniker often associated with EcoHealth Alliance leaders, to plan unlawful gratuities. The conspirator gave Morens’ Maryland home two bottles of wine in June 2020 for his “behind-the-scenes shenanigans.”
The DOJ claims Morens wrote a scholarly editorial supporting COVID-19’s natural origins and published it in a respected medical journal to “deserve” the gift. “Secret Back Channels” : Email Trail No inferences were needed concerning this layout. The co-conspirator suggested Michelin-starred dinners in Paris, New York, and Washington, D.C. The criminal case began with the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic finding many emails in which Morens recorded the information. “As you know, I try to always communicate on gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly,” he told correspondents, adding that he would “delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”
The process was detailed in February 2021:
I think we’re good because our foia taught me how to delete my emails after the foia but before the search. I also deleted most of the emails after sending them to Gmail.
“I have retained very few emails or documents on these matters,” he told his coworkers in June 2021, requesting that important emails be transmitted to Gmail. In April 2021, he described how the shield was raised:
Do not fear Freedom of Information Acts. I can send items to Tony [Fauci] via his private Gmail or drop them off at his office or home. Intelligent, he refuses possibly problematic materials from coworkers.
The paper trail prompted a criminal referral before the indictment: In May 2024, Senator Rand Paul asked the Department of Justice to investigate Morens and the National Institutes of Health FOIA office he said managed him. A grand jury indicted Morens in April. In “a profound abuse of trust,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Morens and his collaborators “deliberately concealed information and falsified records in an effort to suppress alternative theories regarding the origins of COVID-19.”
Morens worked in NIAID’s Office of the Director from 2006 to 2022, when Fauci retired. Fauci distanced himself from the emails in 2024 congressional testimony. He denied Morens’s advisory role on institute policy or other important matters, denied knowledge of his private email activities, and maintained that he did not use his personal email for official business, even though he admitted Morens’s actions were against agency policy.
The proposal came during the COVID-19 blame and cover-up debate. The Justice Department has not replied to Senate committee findings that Fauci was in contempt of Congress for evading pandemic questions. Last month, the committee found Fauci in contempt of Congress. Fauci’s counsel argue that he was entitled to use the Fifth Amendment because former president Joe Biden pardoned him from January 1, 2014, to January 19, 2025.
