Former Top Fauci Advisor Indicted by DOJ

The Department of Justice (DOJ) charged David Morens, MD — a top aide to Anthony Fauci, MD, during the pandemic — with multiple federal crimes, accusing the former career scientist of using his private email to evade Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests related to discussions on bat coronavirus research grants.

Morens, who served as a senior advisor to Fauci at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 2006 to 2022, and his “co-conspirators deliberately concealed information and falsified records in an effort to suppress alternative theories regarding the origins of COVID-19,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement.

The case centers around emails related to a grant for bat coronavirus research that the NIH terminated based on allegations that COVID emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, which received a subaward from the main grant, prosecutors said.

Morens and others pledged to help restore the grant and “counter the narrative that COVID-19 leaked from a lab,” according to prosecutors. They further alleged that Morens and others anticipated their communications would be requested through a FOIA request, so they agreed to hide them by using Morens’ personal email account instead of his NIH email.

“I learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia’d but before the search starts, so i think we are all safe,” Morens wrote in a Feb. 24, 2021 email. “Plus i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”

A co-conspirator, who appears to be EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak, PhD, allegedly gifted Morens wine for his help. In their communications, Morens allegedly also mentioned being deserving of the gift for “a scientific commentary in a prominent medical journal advocating that COVID-19 had natural origins.” That is likely the “proximal origins of COVID” paper published in Nature Medicine that has become a lightning rod in the COVID origins debate.

Morens’ communications were in the spotlight during a May 2024 hearing and accompanying report by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which initially revealed his use of private email to discuss the grant.

During the hearing, ranking member Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) said Morens’ behavior was “deeply troubling” — but noted the emails were “not a breakthrough moment in actually understanding the actual origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

“It is not anti-science to hold you accountable for defying the public’s trust and misusing official resources,” Ruiz said at the time.

HHS temporarily suspended federal funding for EcoHealth Alliance around that time and formally debarred the company in January 2025, just days before President Trump took office.

Morens was charged with conspiracy against the U.S.; destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations; concealment, removal, or mutilation of records; and aiding and abetting. He faces a maximum penalty of 5 years in prison for the conspiracy charge; a max of 20 years for each count of destruction, alteration, or falsification of records; and a max 3 years for each count of concealment, removal, or mutilation of records.

“We caught Dr. Morens red-handed as he boasted in emails about how the ‘FOIA lady’ coached him on how to hide records and cover-up information,” said Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which oversees the select subcommittee, following the DOJ announcement. “No one is above the law and under the Trump Administration, overdue accountability is finally here.”

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