Dr. David Morens, a former senior adviser to Dr. Anthony S. Fauci at the National Institutes of Health, has been indicted on charges of skirting federal record-keeping laws and concealing emails related to the origins of the coronavirus outbreak in China.
The indictment, unsealed on Monday by the district court in Maryland, represents a victory for the Trump administration, which has blamed American research groups and the country’s premier medical research agency for obfuscating the origins of the Covid pandemic.
Federal prosecutors have not accused Dr. Morens or other American scientists or health officials of being involved in the origins of the pandemic or its spread.
The question of Covid’s origins has divided American intelligence bodies, with some, like the Energy Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, favoring the idea that a lab leak may have caused the pandemic. The C.I.A. shifted its assessment in that direction with “low confidence” at the start of the second Trump administration.
A number of scientific findings in recent years have indicated that the virus jumped from animals to people at an illegal wild-animal market in China. Five intelligence bodies consider theories of a non-laboratory origin more likely.
Dr. Morens has faced intense criticism from lawmakers over revelations by a House panel in 2024 that he tried to skirt the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, which gives people the right to obtain copies of federal records, in the face of scrutiny over the pandemic.
Timothy Belevetz, a lawyer for Dr. Morens, declined to comment on Tuesday.
At a hearing of the House panel in 2024, Dr. Morens denied that the agency had instructed him on how to avoid records laws and apologized for some of his emails, saying that he thought they were private comments to friends.
In one email, in February 2021, Dr. Morens wrote, “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.”
That email chain included Dr. Gerald Keusch, a scientist and former N.I.H. official, and Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a virus-hunting nonprofit group whose work with Chinese scientists has drawn scrutiny from lawmakers.
“Plus i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail,” Dr. Morens added, referring to his personal Gmail account.
In another email, about an editorial he was helping to prepare in July 2020, Dr. Morens reassured his collaborators that sending notes about a sensitive government grant to his official email account was OK because “I have spoken to our FOIA folks” and “I should be safe from future FOIAs.” He added: “Don’t ask how….”
Seamus Hughes contributed reporting.
Benjamin Mueller reports on health and medicine. He was previously a U.K. correspondent in London and a police reporter in New York.
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