David Morens — 78-year-old former senior advisor in NIAID’s Office of the Director and Anthony Fauci’s closest professional ally for decades — pleaded guilty Monday to conspiracy to commit offenses and to defraud the United States. The charge stems from a deliberate scheme to evade FOIA requests and the Federal Records Act in connection with communications about bat coronavirus research grants — specifically including the grant that funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
This is not a peripheral figure in the COVID origins story. This is the man at the center of it. According to his guilty plea, Morens and his co-conspirators conspired after NIH terminated a bat coronavirus grant — following allegations that COVID-19 emerged from the Wuhan lab — to help restore the grant and counter the narrative that COVID-19 leaked from a lab.
To conceal these communications from FOIA requests, they deliberately used Morens’s personal Gmail account rather than his official NIH email. This was not an accident. This was a documented, coordinated conspiracy to hide information about the origins of a pandemic that killed millions of Americans.
The question that now hangs over everything is what Morens told prosecutors. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy. Conspiracy requires co-conspirators. The plea agreement almost certainly includes cooperation terms. And the most prominent potential co-conspirator with a documented record of email deletions and FOIA evasion is the man who ran NIAID for 38 years.
Fauci himself was asked during his June 2024 House testimony whether he had ever deleted records. He answered: “No.” He was asked whether he had ever attempted to obstruct FOIA or the release of public documents. He answered: “No.” He was then asked specifically about deleted emails related to the Wuhan lab or COVID origins. He answered: “No.” Three times, under oath, he denied it. Then Sen. Rand Paul released an email dated February 2, 2020, in which Fauci directed NIH Director Francis Collins to “please delete this e-mail after you read it.”
That’s the case Rand Paul’s committee built. That’s the contempt referral sitting at the DOJ. That’s why Fauci pleaded the Fifth 111 times before the Senate rather than answer questions about any of it.
Five states have now opened criminal investigations into Fauci on state law grounds that Biden’s federal pardon cannot touch: Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. Ron Johnson’s committee has Fauci’s COVID-era iPhone with 34,000 texts and three stored contacts. The contempt referral is with AG Todd Blanche.
Morens just pleaded guilty to the conspiracy that Fauci was at the center of. The question is whether the man who pleaded the Fifth 111 times did so because he understood exactly what his closest aide had already told prosecutors.
The accountability is coming. Monday’s guilty plea just made it considerably closer.
