Fauci Adviser Pleads Guilty in Records Case
A longtime senior adviser to former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci pleaded guilty on Tuesday to a federal conspiracy charge for using personal email to conceal official communications about coronavirus research grants during the COVID-19 pandemic.
David M. Morens, 78, of Chester, Maryland, entered the plea in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt to one count of conspiracy to commit offenses and to defraud the United States. He faces a maximum of five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000, with sentencing scheduled for 12 November. Prosecutors dropped four related felony counts as part of the agreement.
Morens served as a senior adviser in NIAID’s Office of the Director from 2006 to 2022. According to the statement of facts he accepted, he and two co-conspirators sought to evade Freedom of Information Act requests and the Federal Records Act after the National Institutes of Health terminated a grant titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” The grant had been awarded to a New York-based nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance, and included a subaward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. NIH ended the funding in 2020 amid questions about the laboratory’s possible connection to the emergence of COVID-19.
Prosecutors said Morens and the others agreed to conduct their communications exclusively through his personal Gmail account rather than official NIH email so the messages would remain outside government systems and beyond the reach of FOIA requests that began arriving in April 2020. The private exchanges included non-public NIH information, strategies to restore the terminated grant, edits to draft letters seeking reinstatement of funding, discussions of COVID-19 origins, and back-channel briefings directed toward a senior NIAID official identified in congressional records as Fauci. The group sought to support a natural-origin explanation for the virus.
As part of the same plea, Morens admitted that he and EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak also discussed illegal gratuities. In June 2020 Daszak sent two bottles of wine to Morens’s home as thanks for “behind-the-scenes shenanigans.” Court documents state that Morens later identified an official act he could perform in return—authoring a scientific commentary in a prominent medical journal supporting a natural origin for the virus. Daszak also discussed the possibility of further gifts. Neither Daszak nor the second co-conspirator has been charged. Fauci is not accused of wrongdoing; in prior testimony he described some of Morens’s conduct as wrong and inappropriate while stating that he himself did not participate.
The case grew in part from a multi-year House investigation that released emails in which Morens discussed making emails “disappear” after FOIA requests and instructed colleagues to use his personal account. U.S. Attorney Kelly O. Hayes announced the plea together with the FBI and the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General. Morens’s attorney said his client had taken responsibility for his actions.
The guilty plea is one of the more significant criminal outcomes to emerge from scrutiny of NIH grant management, FOIA compliance and questions surrounding the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The court will determine the sentence after reviewing a presentence report and arguments from both sides.
