A former senior adviser to infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci has pleaded guilty to conspiring to conceal government documents related to the COVID-19 pandemic and grant research funding.Dr. David Morens, 78, pleaded guilty in a Maryland federal court on Tuesday to conspiring to defraud the U.S. government. He faces up to five years in prison and will be sentenced on Nov. 12.“By pleading guilty today, Dr. Morens has taken responsibility for what he did, and he will continue to do so,” defense attorney Tim Belevetz said in a statement shared with media outlets.Fauci, who has been demonized by Republicans over his handling of the pandemic, was not charged in the case.Dr. David Morens testified in 2024 about his role as a senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during the COVID-19 pandemic.The Washington Post via Getty ImagesProsecutors said Morens, while working as a senior adviser with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, used his personal email account to intentionally conceal or destroy records of discussions related to COVID-19 research grants and an investigation into the pandemic’s origins.Prosecutors said he did this while receiving gifts from the CEO of a New York-based nonprofit who wanted the National Institutes of Health, which NIAID is part of, to revive a 2014 grant for the nonprofit’s research into the emergence of bat coronaviruses. The CEO’s and nonprofit’s names are redacted in the indictment.“[I] learned from our [Freedom of Information Act] lady here how to make emails disappear after I am FOIA’d but before the search starts, so I think we are all safe. Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail,” Morens wrote in one email to the nonprofit CEO and to a co-investigator of the grant in early 2021, according to his criminal indictment.The nonprofit, identified in a related congressional investigation as the since-defunct EcoHealth Alliance, worked closely with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, which, according to one theory popularized by the White House and Republicans, conducted research that may have allowed the coronavirus to spread to humans. Scientists remain divided on the origins of the pandemic, however.Morens, who resigned from the NIAID in 2022, had denied trying to evade federal transparency laws by using his personal email while testifying before a congressional committee about his actions in 2024. That denial came as House Republicans investigated the coronavirus’ origins and EcoHealth’s ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.