Daszak’s project has been at the heart of the debate regarding whether SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was created at the Wuhan lab or spread via animal-to-human transmission.

Morens’s guilty plea, which included admitting to deleting sensitive government files and using personal email addresses for government business, has led some to question the depth to which Fauci himself was involved in or had knowledge of the scandal.

After the indictment announcement, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) questioned on X whether the plea could “involve implicating Anthony Fauci” as part of the criminal conspiracy.

“For years we were told the possibility of a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a conspiracy theory,” Paul wrote on X on Wednesday. “Now Anthony Fauci’s former senior advisor, David Morens, has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States by concealing COVID origins records.”

Paul, as chairman of the Senate homeland security committee, has intensified his investigation into Fauci’s role in the pandemic, culminating in Fauci invoking his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent when he appeared before Paul’s committee on July 29.

During the hearing, Fauci, 85, declined to answer questions from multiple Republican senators regarding his relationship with Morens.

Legal counsel for Morens declined to answer specific questions from the Washington Examiner about the nature of the relationship between his client and Fauci and how the scandal might have implications for the congressional COVID-19 origins investigation.

“By pleading guilty, Dr. Morens has taken responsibility for what he did, and he will continue to do so,” Morens’s attorney told the Washington Examiner.

Who are David Morens and Peter Daszak?

Morens and Daszak are central figures in the long-running debate over the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

Morens had the official title of Fauci’s senior science adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Fauci ran for 43 years until his retirement in December 2022.

According to the indictment against Morens, his duties included providing scientific expertise to senior staff members on “studies and issues related to infectious disease planning and management” and briefing Fauci for “meetings with officials from Congress, the White House,” and federal agencies.

While Morens was intimately involved in advising Fauci, he was also advising Daszak and other EcoHealth Alliance employees on how to handle intense scrutiny of the organization’s research at the Wuhan lab.

Daszak’s multimillion-dollar NIH grant project, “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” was paused by the Trump administration on April 24, 2020, due to possible concerns that the research in Wuhan could have created SARS-CoV-2.

Records first uncovered by the House oversight committee in 2023 show Morens helped write official EcoHealth documents on multiple occasions in response to NIH inquiries about Daszak’s project.

Morens also told Daszak on multiple occasions that he was advocating on EcoHealth Alliance’s behalf to Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins, both of whom Morens reported as being supportive of “protecting” Daszak, including by deleting records and sensitive communications.

Meanwhile, Daszak was a strong public opponent of the lab-leak theory and was actively involved in the scientific community, advising public officials about the virus.

In March 2020, he led a group of scientists to publish an open letter in the journal the Lancet to “strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”

Daszak was also the only U.S. representative with the World Health Organization’s fact-finding mission to Wuhan in early 2021. The mission’s report, published in March 2021, concluded the virus likely did not come from a lab accident.

Emails released earlier this year from Paul’s office show that Fauci, in June 2021, recommended that the National Security Council consult with Daszak in the drafting of the intelligence community report on the origins of the virus.

During the first two years of the pandemic, Morens and Fauci co-authored 25 scientific papers together about various aspects of the pandemic and corresponding public health policy, several of which cited Daszak’s bat coronavirus research.

Both EcoHealth Alliance and Daszak were debarred from receiving federal funding from any government agency in 2025 after a Department of Health and Human Services investigation found they did not comply with reporting requirements for federal grantees.

What has Morens said about Fauci?

Morens’s emails from the height of the pandemic are highly suggestive that Fauci may have been involved in destroying government records or using untraceable mechanisms of communication to avoid public scrutiny.

Morens, on multiple occasions, instructed those in his circle to only contact him via his personal Gmail account to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests regarding COVID-19 origins.

In June 2020, Morens wrote to Daszak and others at EcoHealth Alliance that FOIA requests “are dreadful and paranoia-inducing” but usually turn up nothing.

“We are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns,” Morens wrote. “And if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails. And if we found them we would delete them.”

Morens explicitly said in a June 2021 email that he did “delete all of Peter’s emails and others relating to origin.” He said in the same email that he took steps to erase the collection of emails from Daszak and felt “pretty sure Tony’s was too.”

A few months prior, Morens told Daszak and others that “there is no worry about FOIAs” with respect to getting messages to Fauci or other communications.

“I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail or hand it to him at work or at his house,” Morens wrote. “He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

What has Fauci said about Morens and Daszak?

Although Fauci did not respond to questions from senators about the situation during his July 29 hearing, Fauci repeatedly attempted to distance himself from both Morens and Daszak during his voluntary appearance before the House oversight committee in June 2024.

During the high-profile event two years ago, Rep. James Comer (R-KY), the committee chairman, asked Fauci whether he worked with Morens to shield Daszak from public scrutiny and restore his grant funding.

Fauci affirmed that he had conversations with Morens about Daszak but said it was “untrue” that he and other NIH leadership worked behind the scenes to protect him or EcoHealth Alliance.

“I never spoke about protecting him,” Fauci told Comer. “I mean, obviously, we knew that Daszak was a grantee, so I may have mentioned and discussed Dr. Daszak because he’s a grantee.”

Fauci told Republican committee staff during the hearing that Morens’s behavior was “inappropriate,” calling him “an aberrancy and an outlier” among NIH employees.

The former NIAID director said Morens “definitely had a conflict” of interest when dealing with the EcoHealth Alliance grant, but he also said he was not entirely aware of how Morens was helping Daszak at the time.

“I didn’t know exactly what he was doing, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to be communicating and helping a grantee in a response,” Fauci said.

Fauci has not spoken publicly about Daszak or Morens since the House oversight committee hearing in 2024. David Schertler, Fauci’s attorney, did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment about his client’s relationship with Morens and Daszak.

What are the next steps for Fauci?

Fauci’s relationship with Morens and Daszak is likely to be a greater point of interest for Paul and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), the chairman of the investigations subcommittee.

Johnson has made public a limited number of text messages from Fauci’s government-issued cellphone, obtained by his subcommittee staff. He told Benny Johnson that the bulk of the text messages on the phone will take time to be released because the contacts associated with them have been deleted, which he said is indicative of a cover-up or conspiracy.

Schertler did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment on the contents of the cellphone or whether Fauci corresponded with Morens via text.

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HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on X characterized Morens as “a leading member of this dangerous cabal,” saying that “no one is above the law.”

“Accountability is not optional,” Kennedy said. “The American people have a right to know what their government did, why it did it, and whether public officials deliberately hid the truth from them.”