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A former key adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci pled guilty to concealing public records related to the origins of COVID-19 in a plea deal reached with federal prosecutors — a development some political figures and analysts suggest could implicate Fauci.
Dr. David Morens pled guilty Tuesday to one count of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. According to The Washington Post, Morens, 78, told a federal judge he attempted to bypass federal recordkeeping laws by using his private email account to discuss research — and a terminated federal grant — related to COVID-19’s origins.
Morens, initially indicted in April on five federal charges, told the judge he intentionally redirected communications to his personal email account to protect Fauci and because the emails might be misinterpreted in the future, if and when they were publicly released.
Court filings show some of the emails were back-channeled to a senior official at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). According to CBS News, the official is likely Fauci, who directed NIAID until December 2022. Morens served as senior adviser in Fauci’s NIAID office between 2006 and 2022.
Morens diverted messages to his personal email while speculation swirled around whether COVID-19 emerged in nature, as Fauci and other Biden administration officials and key virologists publicly asserted at the time, or was developed at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology and leaked from there.
Morens faces up to five years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000 under the terms of the plea deal, though his sentence may be shorter. According to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), “actual sentences for federal crimes are typically less than the maximum penalties.” Sentencing is scheduled for Nov. 12, Politico reported.
“By pleading guilty today, Dr. Morens has taken responsibility for what he did and will continue to do so,” Tim Belevetz, Morens’ attorney, said in a statement cited by the Post.
James Billot, editor of UnHerd, told Australia’s News24 Digital that Morens’ guilty plea represents the “first big scalp” in the COVID-19 origins investigation. “We are going to see a lot more of this thing coming out soon.”
According to Politico, Fauci was not “charged with or accused of wrongdoing in the case against Morens and is not referred to by name in court filings.”
But in a post on X, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who is leading the congressional COVID-19 origins investigation, suggested Fauci may be implicated: “Long-time Fauci ally pleads guilty. Could his plea involve implicating Anthony Fauci?” Paul wrote.
Long-time Fauci ally pleads guilty.
Could his plea involve implicating Anthony Fauci? https://t.co/2UL6zzkcSU
— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) August 18, 2026
Morens boasted about being able to ‘make emails disappear’
During testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives in 2024, Fauci denied he had a close working relationship with Morens, suggesting that Morens did not advise him on “institute policy or other substantive issues.”
However, Morens’ plea deal includes a statement that he often consulted with an outside researcher, Peter Daszak, Ph.D., then-president of the EcoHealth Alliance, to prepare briefings for Fauci that would suggest COVID-19 had natural origins.
In a 2021 email released by the House and cited by The Hill, Morens told Daszak, “I can either send stuff to Tony [Fauci] on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”
In another 2021 email, Morens said he knew how to “make emails disappear after I am FOIA’d” — referring to Freedom of Information Act requests for federal records.
John Leake, vice president of the McCullough Foundation and author of “Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions,” wrote on Substack that Morens’ guilty plea to a single conspiracy charge is “akin to Al Capone being convicted for income tax evasion.” Leake suggested the plea will have minimal impact on the COVID-19 origins probe.
“Though Morens will likely serve time behind bars, his guilty plea and his punishment for this particular act of fraud strike me as a distraction from the elephant in the room,” Leake wrote — referring to “the illegal creation and subsequent illegal concealment of a bio-weapon in a Chinese biosecurity lab.”
But for other analysts and commentators, attention is swirling back to Fauci in the aftermath of Morens’ guilty plea.
Jeffrey Tucker, president and founder of the Brownstone Institute, suggested Morens has likely agreed to testify against other figures in exchange for his plea deal and possibly a more lenient sentence.
“He is now ready to talk in exchange for a lighter sentence. He surely will talk and it will be fascinating to know everything he knows,” Tucker said.
Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright, Ph.D., agreed. Ebright has been a vocal critic of gain-of-function research, which lab-leak theory proponents have suggested likely resulted in the laboratory creation of SARS-CoV-2 and its subsequent leak from the Wuhan lab.
He said Morens “likely” acted “under orders from his boss — Fauci.”
Ebright said:
“Morens’ guilty plea is an important first step in holding accountable the malfeasant U.S. officials who funded the reckless gain-of-function research in Wuhan that caused COVID-19.
“It seems possible, even likely, that Morens has been ‘flipped’ by prosecutors, and that Morens’ guilty plea is the product of a plea bargain in which Morens has agreed to testify against Fauci, Daszak … and others.”
Morens’ plea deal included a sealed file, which Ebright suggested indicates Morens has agreed to testify against others — a view supported by research scientist and author James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., who wrote on Substack:
“Finally, because the plea agreement incorporates a sealed supplement and a separate factual stipulation, the currently public record is incomplete. That gap matters especially to speculation that Morens is cooperating against others. Such cooperation is possible in the abstract but cannot responsibly be asserted from the sealed filing’s existence alone. …
“ … We predicted that [Morens] would be offered a plea deal and specific charges dropped in exchange for testimony against Fauci and others.”
Morens received gifts for ‘behind-the-scenes shenanigans’
The indictment against Morens extensively referenced two co-conspirators, referred to as “Co-Conspirator 1” and “Co-Conspirator 2.”
According to the Post, documents released as part of the congressional investigation indicate the two people in question are Daszak and Dr. Gerald Keusch, former director of the NIH Fogarty International Center, which funded foreign scientists.
Morens, Daszak and Keusch “repeatedly discussed limiting their conversations to private email,” the Post reported.
Under Daszak’s leadership, the EcoHealth Alliance received a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — NIAID’s parent agency — for a study titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” The Wuhan lab later received a subaward from EcoHealth Alliance funded by the grant.
As part of his plea deal, Morens acknowledged that he received “illegal gratuities” from Daszak — including meals at Michelin-starred restaurants and bottles of wine — to thank him for his “advice, support, and behind-the-scenes shenanigans” in helping Daszak “restore the termination of the bat coronavirus grant and counter the narrative that COVID-19 leaked from a lab.”
According to the DOJ, “Morens then allegedly identified an official act that he could perform to ‘deserve’ the gift, which was to author a scientific commentary in a prominent medical journal advocating that COVID-19 had natural origins.”
In April, the New York Post reported that the commentary is likely a July 2020 paper Morens co-authored that was published in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
Tucker said Morens was “once a promising intellectual” who “turned to the dark side” by acting on “Fauci’s orders” — including publishing journal articles supporting the establishment COVID-19 narrative.
Tucker cited a September 2020 article Morens co-authored with Fauci and published in the journal Cell, calling for “rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence.”
“It was dystopian to the extreme and he knew it,” Tucker said. “It reflected his mood — absurdity in the service of power.”
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Will other Fauci aides vie to ‘rat each other out’ in exchange for plea deals?
Morens’ guilty plea is the latest development in the ongoing congressional investigation into COVID-19’s origins. In 2024, when he testified before Congress as part of the investigation, Morens denied trying to bypass federal law by routing communications through his personal email account.
Earlier this month, Paul referred Fauci for prosecution on contempt of Congress charges for refusing to answer questions during last month’s hearing. According to the Post, the DOJ is reviewing the request. It’s the third time Paul has referred Fauci to the DOJ for possible criminal charges.
Last week, Fauci declined a request to voluntarily appear before another Senate panel.
In the waning moments of his administration last year, then-President Joe Biden preemptively pardoned Fauci for all of his official acts dating back to 2014 — the year that the NIH approved a grant for Daszak’s bat coronavirus research.
Legal experts previously told The Defender that while the pardon shields Fauci from federal prosecution for his official acts, it does not prevent states from filing charges against Fauci. And it does not shield him from contempt of Congress charges or perjury in subsequent testimony.
In 2024, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services suspended all funding for EcoHealth Alliance after finding the organization had failed to properly monitor coronavirus experiments.
In April, the NIH reportedly pulled all grants issued to virologist Ralph Baric, Ph.D., who worked with Fauci and researchers at the Wuhan lab before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In June, the FBI charged two NIH researchers, including the Fauci-linked Vincent Munster, Ph.D., with allegedly smuggling mpox and other dangerous pathogens into the U.S. earlier this year.
Documents released last month suggest that in 2021, the FBI pressured U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents not to question Daszak on his return to the U.S. from China, where he had traveled as part of a World Health Organization investigation into COVID-19’s origins.
Last year, Daszak became president of Nature.Health.Global — a nonprofit that performs research on public health and pandemic prevention. Morens works for the nonprofit.
Ebright suggested that the “rat race now is on” for Fauci’s former close aides and allies to “rat each other out.”
“Morens, Daszak, Keusch and the others likely already are vying to be first to flip and thereby to snag the best plea deals.”
Related articles in The Defender
- ‘Profound Abuse of Trust’: Former Fauci Aide Indicted for Conspiracy to Hide Government Records on COVID Origins
- Congress Asked Fauci at Least 111 Questions — Fauci Refused to Answer at Least 111 Times
- House Committee Grills FDA, CDC, NIH Officials Over Handling of COVID Pandemic
- Top Fauci Aide Under Investigation for Evading FOIA Requests for Emails on COVID Origins
- FBI Pressured U.S. Customs to Ditch Plan to Question Key Fauci Ally on Return Trip From Wuhan
- ‘Let That Sink In’: Feds Charge Two NIH Researchers With Smuggling Mpox Into U.S.
