Dr. David Morens, who spent years as chief of staff to Dr. Anthony Fauci, pleaded guilty Tuesday to trying to hide critical documents about the origin of the coronavirus pandemic and his attempts to restore funding to a firm that was siphoning U.S. cash to a Chinese virus lab.
That company, EcoHealth Alliance, was paying for what U.S. investigators say was risky bat coronavirus research in Wuhan, using money from the National Institutes of Health’s infectious diseases division, where Dr. Fauci and Morens worked.
Morens admitted in court to conspiring with EcoHealth researcher Peter Daszak to hide their communications about efforts to restore funding for EcoHealth after President Trump cut it off early in the COVID-19 pandemic.
He “concealed” and “destroyed” some of the records to keep them from being made public under open-records laws, according to his plea.
“I need to keep this off of govt email and govt phone text,” Morens said in one message as he and Dr. Daszak were working on a draft of an article to defend EcoHealth Alliance.
Morens also admitted to taking gratuities from Dr. Daszak, including bottles of wine, in exchange for defending EcoHealth.
Morens faces a maximum of five years in prison for one count of conspiracy to defraud the U.S.
His plea comes as attention focuses on Dr. Fauci, who refused to testify to the Senate late last month.
He invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
The Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has voted to hold him in contempt of Congress. That matter now awaits action in the full Senate.
Dr. Fauci has received a full pardon from President Biden for any federal crimes he may have committed for activities during the pandemic.
In past testimony to Congress he distanced himself from Morens’ behavior, saying his aide’s actions in shielding and deleting documents were against agency policy and “wrong.”
The guilty plea didn’t identify EcoHealth or Dr. Daszak by name, but it did specify the NIH grant, making clear that’s who it identified as “Company #1” and “Co-Conspirator 1.”
The plea also refers to “Co-Conspirator 2,” who, based on the communications described, is Gerald Keusch, who was at Boston University at the time.
EcoHealth has been barred from federal funding and the government has also now placed restrictions on foreign labs conducting risky research.
Congressional Republicans had pushed for prosecution of Morens.
In 2024, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released an email from Morens talking about communicating with Dr. Fauci using Dr. Fauci’s “private Gmail.”
“He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble,” Morens said.
Morens, 78, in a 2021 message, said he learned “tricks” to avoid open-records laws from Margaret Moore, who was head of NIH’s Freedom of Information Act office. Morens said Ms. Moore “hates FOIAs.” FOIA is commonly used as a shorthand for a request for information under the law.
In a 2020 message, Morens asked Dr. Daszak, in a message also sent to Dr. Keusch, if Morens was getting a “kickback” after EcoHealth got a new grant from NIH.
EcoHealth used taxpayer money to fund research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
It has denied that the money went to gain-of-function research — the name given to attempts to artificially enhance viruses to test how they might evolve.
One of the theories on the origin of the pandemic is that the virus leaked from the lab.
Morens was at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for nearly three decades, ending last year.
He was indicted in April. He is scheduled to be sentenced in November.
Prosecutions under open-records laws are rare, but it’s also rare to have so many statements of intent to foil FOIA.
In the plea, Morens admitted to drafting and editing statements on behalf of EcoHealth to submit to NIH. Those communications were done on his private email, though they were government work.
“In sum, Morens knowingly and willfully conspired to Co-Conspirator 1, Co-Conspirator 2 and others to evade FOIA and violate the [Federal Records Act] by concealing, destroying and attempting to destroy federal records used to facilitate his work as a public official and as senior advisor to Senior NIAID official 1,” the plea agreement says.
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