Dr. David Morens, a former adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health, pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiring to hide federal records related to the origins of the coronavirus outbreak in China.

The plea comes as Fauci faces mounting pressure from Republican lawmakers over accusations that he sought to cover up knowledge that COVID had leaked from a lab in China.

Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, told a House panel in 2024 that Morens’ conduct was “wrong and inappropriate” and that he was not aware of government scientists trying to conceal official emails.

In pleading guilty at U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, Maryland, Morens admitted to working in concert with scientists outside the federal government to protect their federal funding for virus research amid allegations that the scientists had worked on dangerous experiments with collaborators in Wuhan, China, where the COVID pandemic began.

A statement of facts that Morens agreed to as part of a plea agreement said that he had moved discussions of those experiments onto a personal email account to protect them from being publicly released. He has said that he was trying to protect scientists from baseless charges connected to allegations of a lab leak.

Timothy Belevetz, a lawyer for Morens, said in a statement, “By pleading guilty today, Morens has taken responsibility for what he did and will continue to do so.” A federal judge set sentencing for November. Morens faces a maximum of five years in prison.

‘How to Make Emails Disappear’

In emails from 2020 and 2021, released by a House panel, Morens described plans to evade federal records laws, including by learning how to “make emails disappear.”

In many of those emails, Morens was consulting with Peter Daszak, then the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a research nonprofit that lost NIH funding over collaborations with a Chinese virology lab that the Trump administration has suggested conducted research that may have led to the pandemic.

In exchange for helping Daszak, Morens said that he had received illegal gratuities, including two bottles of wine and a promise of a future meal at a “Michelin starred” restaurant.

Morens admitted to working with Daszak and another scientist to prepare information to relay to Fauci, who is referred to in the statement of facts as an unnamed NIAID official. The statement does not accuse Fauci of wrongdoing.

In congressional testimony in 2024, Fauci told lawmakers that he was not aware of government scientists who worked for him doing official work on personal email accounts or inappropriately assisting recipients of federal funding.

“What you saw, I believe, with Dr. Morens was an aberrancy and an outlier,” Fauci said at the time.

Fauci Refused to Questions at Recent Senate Panel

Fauci refused to answer questions last month before a Senate panel, which later voted along party lines to hold him in contempt of Congress. He received a preemptive pardon from President Joe Biden, which covered his official conduct from 2014 to 2025.

Morens’ guilty plea followed a yearslong effort by Republican lawmakers to link Morens, Fauci, and the country’s premier medical research agency to the beginnings of the coronavirus pandemic.

The investigation of Morens has so far produced no direct evidence that scientists or health officials were involved in research that started or spread the coronavirus outbreak.

The question of the coronavirus’s origins has divided U.S. intelligence bodies. The FBI, the CIA and the Energy Department have favored the idea that a lab leak may have caused the pandemic. Five other intelligence bodies have considered it more likely that the coronavirus had a nonlaboratory origin, meaning that it spread among animals in nature, and then jumped to people at a wild animal market or another location.

In recent years, some scientific papers have looked at where early COVID patients lived and worked, as well as at genetic clues from an illegal wild-animal market in Wuhan. They found that those details pointed to the virus having spilled from animals into people at the Wuhan market.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Benjamin Mueller

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