A longtime adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci has been indicted on federal charges in a case tied to the origins of COVID-19 — and to what prosecutors describe as a deliberate effort to keep key records out of public view.
The Justice Department has charged David Morens, a former senior adviser at the National Institutes of Health, with multiple felonies, including conspiracy against the United States and destruction of federal records.
The indictment, unsealed Monday in federal court in Maryland, alleges Morens worked with two unnamed co-conspirators to evade transparency laws during ongoing investigations into the pandemic’s origins.
Prosecutors say the group “concealed, removed, destroyed and caused the concealment, and removal of federal records to evade FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] and FRA [Federal Records Act].”
Morens, 78, served as a senior adviser to Fauci from 2006 through 2022. He was deeply involved in NIH communications during the early days of the pandemic — the days that mattered most.
According to the indictment, he conducted official business through private email accounts and actively sought ways to dodge federal records requests.
“[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,” Morens wrote in an April 21, 2021 email. “He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”
In another exchange, dated Feb. 24, 2021, Morens described learning the tradecraft of avoidance.
“[I] learned from our foia [sic] 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 [sic],” he added.
Months later, in a Sept. 9, 2021 message, Morens doubled down.
“I would always communicate on gmail [sic] because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly,” he wrote, adding that he would “delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”
The case also touches on Morens’ role overseeing a controversial 2014 NIH grant to EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit that later subcontracted research to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
That funding stream has long sat at the center of the debate over whether American taxpayer dollars indirectly supported research tied to the emergence of COVID-19.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche released a statement on the indictment.
“These allegations represent a profound abuse of trust at a time when the American people needed it most — during the height of a global pandemic,” Blanche said.
“As alleged in the indictment, Dr. Morens and his co-conspirators deliberately concealed information and falsified records in an effort to suppress alternative theories regarding the origins of COVID-19. 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.”
The charges mark one of the most significant legal developments yet tied to the government’s handling of pandemic-era communications. They are likely to sharpen the questions already being asked — about how decisions were made, how they were documented, and how much the public was ever meant to see.
