Anthony Fauci adviser indicted by DOJ on charges of concealing COVID records
WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice indicted a former senior adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday for allegedly concealing records amid probes into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
David Morens, 78, has been charged with conspiracy against the United States; destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations; concealment, removal, or mutilation of records; and aiding and abetting.
The indictment, unsealed Monday in Maryland federal court, also lists two unnamed co-conspirators who “concealed, removed, destroyed and caused the concealment, and removal of federal records to evade FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] and FRA [Federal Records Act].”
Morens, who served as a senior advisor to Fauci from 2006 to 2022, conducted official government business from a private email account and asked the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) FOIA liaison for tips on how to evade records requests, according to communications first exposed by The Post in May 2024.
“[T]here is no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail [sic], or hand it to him at work or at his house,” Morens wrote in one April 21, 2021, email. “He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”
Two months prior, Morens said in a Feb. 24 email: “[I] learned from our foia [sic] lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d [sic] but before the search starts.”
“Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail [sic],” he noted.
On Sept. 9, 2021, Morens wrote that he would “always communicate on gmail [sic] because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly” and “delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”
Morens oversaw a now-infamous grant from NIH to the Manhattan-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliancebeginning in 2014 that ended up funneling US taxpayer dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for bat coronavirus research.
“These allegations represent a profound abuse of trust at a time when the American people needed it most — during the height of a global pandemic,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche 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. Government officials have a solemn duty to provide honest, well-grounded facts and advice in service of the public interest — not to advance their own personal or ideological agendas.”
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