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, accuses Dr. Morens of working in concert with scientists outside the federal government to protect their funding for virus research.
In return, the indictment says, one of those scientists supplied Dr. Morens with “illegal gratuities,” including two bottles of wine and a promise of a future meal at a “Michelin starred” restaurant.
The allegations against Dr. Morens follow a yearslong effort by Republican lawmakers to link Dr. Morens, Dr. Fauci and the country’s premier medical research agency to the beginnings of the coronavirus pandemic.
Soon after President Trump returned to office last year, his administration accused Dr. Morens of deleting federal records on a website it had created to argue that “the true origins of Covid-19” had been a lab leak.
That investigation of Dr. Morens has so far yielded no evidence that scientists or health officials were involved in research that started or spread the coronavirus outbreak. The private emails of Dr. Morens’s cited in the indictment also do not show him trying to conceal evidence of a lab leak.
But they do reveal a concerted effort by Dr. Morens to prevent journalists and investigators from gaining access to emails that show him trying to insulate scientists from what he described as baseless “political charges” that the coronavirus had leaked from a lab.
The most prominent of those scientists was Peter Daszak, the former president of EcoHealth Alliance, a virus-hunting nonprofit that lost N.I.H. funding over collaborations with a Chinese virology lab that the Trump administration has suggested conducted research that may have led to the pandemic.
Dr. Daszak has not been charged with a crime. The indictment refers to someone matching his description as a “co-conspirator.”
In an April 2020 email to Dr. Daszak about EcoHealth’s research, Dr. Morens wrote, referring to Dr. Fauci: “There are things I can’t say except Tony is aware and I have learned that there are ongoing efforts within NIH to steer through this with minimal damage to you, Peter, and colleagues, and to nih and niaid.”
Dr. Fauci long directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID.
The email opened with the sort of plea that appeared throughout Dr. Morens’s correspondence, one that the indictment said was intended to shield his emails from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, which gives people the right to obtain copies of federal records: “This is sent from my gmail account. Please send all replies here To gmail.”
Timothy Belevetz, a lawyer for Dr. Morens, declined to comment on Tuesday. Court records indicate that Dr. Morens made a brief appearance in court on Monday and that he was released on his own recognizance.
In testimony in 2024 before a House panel that was investigating his record-keeping conduct, Dr. Morens denied using his personal email for “anything that I thought was official business,” though he conceded that “I understand now that there is some discrepancy between what I thought and what you all may think about what is official business.”
The question of the coronavirus’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.
Five intelligence bodies considered the theory of a nonlaboratory origin — that the coronavirus spread among animals in nature, then jumped to people at a wild animal market or another location — more likely.
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, China. They found that those details pointed to the virus having spilled from animals into people at the Wuhan market.
The emails cited in the indictment show Dr. Morens going so far as to describe plans to “make emails disappear,” and fretting over attacks on Dr. Daszak, which he analogizes in one email to the “Salem Witch Trials.”
Dr. Morens lamented in an email released by the House panel investigating him in 2024 that the news media had elevated the lab leak theory, writing that most scientists willing to push back on the idea “don’t speak out for fear they will be attacked too.”
Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, said in a statement: “As alleged in the indictment, Dr. Morens and his co-conspirators deliberately concealed information and falsified records in an effort to suppress alternative theories regarding the origins of Covid-19.”
The indictment does not name Dr. Fauci, but it refers to him as an unnamed NIAID official. In congressional testimony in 2024, he 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,” Dr. Fauci said at the time.
Scott Amey, the general counsel at the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight, said the indictment revealed the types of “cozy relationships” that develop between federal officials and recipients of federal funding, offering an example of “the kind of public service we don’t want.”
But he noted that senior members of the Trump administration have themselves been accused of trying to evade federal record-keeping laws.
The Washington Post reported last year that national security officials have conducted government business on private email accounts, and a lawsuit accused members of the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency of using Signal, the encrypted messaging app.
“The allegations are quite concerning,” Mr. Amey said of Dr. Morens’s indictment. “At the same time, it fits Trump’s rhetoric of wanting the public to accept his theories on Covid and why the final year of his first administration crumbled.”
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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