David Morens pleaded guilty on August 18, 2026, to one count of conspiracy to commit offenses and to defraud the United States, closing one chapter in a federal case over efforts to hide COVID-19-related records. The 78-year-old former senior adviser at NIAID’s Office of the Director admitted to the charge in Maryland, where prosecutors said he took part in a scheme built around keeping records away from the public.
Morens faces up to five years in prison. His lawyer, Tim Belevetz, said he had taken responsibility for what he did and would continue to do so. For the people who filed records requests and for investigators trying to trace how decisions were handled during the COVID-19 pandemic, the plea is the first hard admission in a case that had already put a senior NIH insider under scrutiny.
The conduct at the center of the case was not a stray email mistake. Prosecutors said Morens and two co-conspirators agreed to move emails about COVID-19 and its origins, and about a terminated coronavirus grant, to his personal Gmail account instead of his official NIH account. The point, prosecutors said, was to hide federal records and evade public records laws. That same account was used to share nonpublic NIH information about COVID-19 and to pass back-channel information to a senior NIAID official who appears to be Anthony Fauci.
One of the co-conspirators was identified in public emails as Peter Daszak, the president and CEO of a New York-based nonprofit tied to a 2014 grant titled Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence. The group received a subaward from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the National Institutes of Health later terminated the award in April 2020 after allegations that COVID-19 emerged from the lab. The second co-conspirator was described as a physician, scientist and professor at an academic institute that received federal grants.
The record-saving effort also came with a personal thread. Court records show Morens received two bottles of wine in June 2020 at his Maryland house from Daszak, and Daszak emailed that he could provide more, including a meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant. That detail matters because it shows how the conspiracy prosecutors described overlapped with a narrower allegation that Morens and Daszak conspired to pay illegal gratuities.
Morens was indicted in April on five counts, and prosecutors said the case grew out of several Freedom of Information Act requests NIAID received between April 2020 and December 2022. Those requests sought communications between Morens, the New York-based nonprofit and its president. Fauci and Morens each appeared before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in 2024, but the guilty plea now leaves sentencing as the next question. The plea itself answers the charge; the unresolved issue is how much time Morens will actually serve.
