By Lucretia Hughes Klucken
GREENBELT, Md. — A former senior adviser at the federal agency once led by Dr. Anthony Fauci pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiring to defraud the United States by hiding government communications involving coronavirus research grants and evading federal public-records laws.
David Morens, 78, admitted that he and others intentionally used his private Gmail account to conceal official communications from Freedom of Information Act requests and the Federal Records Act, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland.
Morens served as a senior adviser in the Office of the Director at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 2006 through 2022. Fauci directed the agency during that period.
The guilty plea is significant because Morens was not a low-level employee unfamiliar with federal transparency requirements. He was a senior official working near the top of one of the nation’s most influential public-health agencies during the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the plea agreement, Morens and two co-conspirators communicated through his personal email account because they expected their messages would become the subject of public-records requests.
The communications involved the origins of COVID-19, a terminated federal grant involving bat coronaviruses and efforts to counter the theory that the pandemic began with a laboratory incident.
Morens pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit offenses and to defraud the United States. He faces a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison and a fine of as much as $250,000.
His sentencing is scheduled for Nov. 12.
“By pleading guilty today, Dr. Morens has taken responsibility for what he did and will continue to do so,” defense attorney Tim Belevetz said in a statement.
The National Institutes of Health awarded a grant titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” to a New York-based nonprofit organization. That organization provided a subaward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
Although prosecutors did not identify the organization or co-conspirators by name in the plea documents, details in the court record match EcoHealth Alliance and its former president, Peter Daszak. Daszak has not been charged with a crime in connection with the case.
NIH terminated the grant in April 2020 amid allegations that COVID-19 may have emerged from the Wuhan laboratory.
Federal prosecutors said Morens and the others then worked to reverse the grant’s termination and counter claims that the virus had escaped from a laboratory.
They allegedly knew that their communications could be requested under FOIA. Instead of using government accounts, they agreed in writing to communicate through Morens’ personal Gmail account.
This was not an accidental failure to copy an official email address.
It was a deliberate effort to keep public business away from the public.
The conspirators used Morens’ private account to exchange nonpublic NIH information, discuss efforts to influence the agency’s funding decisions and edit letters addressed to NIH leadership, according to the Justice Department.
They also used the account to “back-channel” information to an unnamed senior NIAID official.
Publicly released emails made the intent difficult to misunderstand.
During a 2024 congressional investigation, lawmakers presented messages in which Morens discussed avoiding FOIA requirements and using private email.
“I learned from our FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear after I am FOIA’d but before the search starts,” Morens wrote in one email disclosed by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
In another message, Morens wrote that he would send information to Fauci’s private email or deliver it through Fauci’s personal residence because Fauci was “too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”
Fauci told Congress in 2024 that Morens’ conduct was wrong and said he did not know Morens was attempting to evade federal records laws.
Fauci has not been charged in Morens’ criminal case.
The government should follow the evidence wherever it leads. It should neither implicate Fauci merely because of his position nor shield him from scrutiny because of his reputation.
The public deserves to know who received the back-channel information, what was communicated and whether any other government official knowingly participated in concealing federal records.
Morens also admitted participating in a conspiracy involving illegal gratuities.
One co-conspirator sent Morens two bottles of wine for what was described as his “behind-the-scenes shenanigans,” according to prosecutors.
Morens then identified an official act he could perform to “deserve” the gift: writing a scientific commentary advocating that COVID-19 had natural origins.
The co-conspirator also offered other items of value, including meals at Michelin-starred restaurants in Paris, New York and Washington.
That allegation transforms the case from a bureaucratic records dispute into a deeper question about influence, personal benefits and the integrity of scientific advice provided during a national emergency.
Government scientists and health officials were making decisions that closed churches, shuttered businesses, restricted travel and affected what Americans could say on social media.
Children were removed from classrooms. Families were separated from dying loved ones. Workers lost jobs. Americans were told to trust the science and stop questioning the experts.
Meanwhile, a senior NIAID adviser now admits that he was intentionally moving official communications away from government systems to prevent the public from seeing them.
That is a betrayal of public trust.
The guilty plea does not prove that COVID-19 originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Intelligence agencies, scientists and government officials continue to disagree about whether the virus emerged through natural animal-to-human transmission or a laboratory-related incident.
But the plea does establish something else: Officials involved in the debate conspired to hide government records and evade lawful transparency requirements.
The difference is important.
Americans should not claim the lab-origin question has been conclusively resolved by Morens’ guilty plea. At the same time, defenders of the government’s pandemic response can no longer dismiss every concern about secrecy as a conspiracy theory.
There was a conspiracy.
A senior federal health official admitted it in federal court.
The next question is how far that conspiracy reached.
Who else knew that government business was being conducted through personal accounts? Who received the hidden information? Did anyone assist in deleting or withholding records? Were federal funding decisions influenced by officials protecting their colleagues or outside organizations?
Congress and the Justice Department should continue investigating until those questions are answered.
FOIA is not an inconvenience federal officials may evade when disclosure becomes embarrassing. It is one of the primary tools citizens and journalists use to understand what their government is doing.
Federal records do not belong to the official who created them. They belong to the American people.
Morens’ guilty plea is accountability, but it should not be the end of the investigation.
It should be the beginning of the truth.
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