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Commentary: Resurrecting a discredited theory on COVID’s origin, DOJ indicts an ex-Fauci aide over old emails
David Morens tried to keep a scientific discussion under wraps. Trump’s anti-science attacks explain why
According to Department of Justice officials including FBI Director Kash Patel, the indictment of David M. Morens for using his personal email account on official business is all about protecting the sanctity of government communications and upholding the federal Freedom of Information Act.
“Circumventing records protocols with the intention of avoiding transparency is something that will not be tolerated by this FBI,” Patel said in the announcement of Morens’ indictment Tuesday.
Many news reports of the indictment, which was unsealed Monday in Maryland federal court, took the DOJ at its word. That’s an error. In reality, the indictment has nothing to do with government email rules.
Scientists rely on open communication and collaboration…. So everybody’s connected, and that’s what’s exploited in these conspiracy stories. It’s made to look nefarious.
— Zoologist Peter Daszak
Rather, it’s a transparent effort to revive the largely discredited hypothesis that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese laboratory through experiments there that were funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, headed at the time by Anthony Fauci. (Timothy Belevetz, a lawyer for Morens, declined to comment on the indictment.)
A few points about this.
First, there has never been and still isn’t any evidence that COVID originated in a Chinese lab, much less that Fauci, a revered epidemiologist, was complicit in the pandemic. The overwhelming weight of scientific opinion in the epidemiological and virological communities is that the virus reached humans via naturally infected wildlife, a process known as zoonosis.
Nor is that only a consensus among virologists and epidemiologists: In a declassified 2023 assessment, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all the government’s intelligence services including the FBI, exploded the most common claims made for a lab leak.
As for the Trump White House’s ostensible devotion to “transparency,” New York University’s litigation tracker finds that the roster of pending lawsuits in federal courts coast to coast from nonprofit organizations, state agencies and individuals complaining that the administration has ignored or slow-walked FOIA requests now numbers an astonishing 110.
News about the Morens indictment was drowned out over the last few days by administration attacks on other Trump targets, such as a new indictment of former FBI Director James Comey over a photo of sea shells that the DOJ argues, absurdly, was a subtle call for Trump’s assassination; and an effort by the Federal Communications Commission to terminate ABC’s broadcast licenses, amid late-night show host Jimmy Kimmel’s criticism of Trump.
As I’ve written before, however, the Trumpian attacks on science may have more lasting and profound effects than those cases on public health and the U.S. economy. The anti-science campaign doesn’t merely undermine public confidence in expert judgments; it also poses a generational threat to public health and to America’s economic stature in the world discouraging promising students from entering important research fields.
Those are the long-term consequences; in the short run, Trump’s anti-science campaign has cost U.S. taxpayers a mint. According to the “Bethesda Declaration,” an open letter to National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya published in June 2025 and signed by some 500 NIH employees, the agency had terminated 2,100 research grants totaling $9.5 billion since Trump’s inauguration.
The terminations “throw away years of hard work and millions of dollars,” the declaration observed: “Ending a $5 million research study when it is 80% complete does not save $1 million, it wastes $4 million.”
Between the lines, the Morens indictment looks like a proxy salvo in the GOP attack on Fauci, who has been a target of Republicans and the far right since the pandemic.
Charging Fauci directly may be a tough lift, because President Biden, aware of Trump’s inclination to punish his perceived adversaries, preemptively pardoned him for any supposed offenses stemming from his service at NIAID and as a pandemic-era advisor to the Trump White House.
Morens served as a senior advisor to Fauci (who is identified in the indictment as “Senior NIAID Official 1”) from 2006 through Fauci’s retirement in December 2022. Among other counts, he’s charged with conspiracy and “destruction, alteration, or falsification” of government documents. The maximum prison term for the five counts in the indictment comes to 51 years. Morens is 78.
The indictment stems from the earliest days of the pandemic in the first months of 2020, when scientists were trying to get their arms around the novel coronavirus and delve into its features and origins.
Morens corresponded with scientists researching the question. Among them was zoologist Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that managed government grants concerned with potential global pandemic threats. He and his organization sounded an early alarm that COVID-19 represented a serious public health threat.
Daszak, 60, is identified in the indictment as “co-conspirator 1” and EcoHealth as “Company #1”; Gerald Keusch, 87, a retired expert in infectious diseases at Boston University who participated in some of the email exchanges and was an outspoken defender of Daszak and EcoHealth, appears in the document as “co-conspirator 2.” Neither he nor Daszak is accused of any crimes in the indictment.
At an early stage, Morens asked his correspondents to communicate through his personal email address so their exchanges wouldn’t be subject to freedom of information requests. This is illegal, but almost never prosecuted.
Still, Morens’ concern was understandable, since FOIA requests had been weaponized by conservatives mining academic correspondences to undermine research into global warming and harass researchers. Morens was pilloried for his email practices during a House Oversight Committee hearing two years ago, and apologized.
“Scientists rely on open communication and collaboration, so you’re constantly emailing everybody,” Daszak told me. “So everybody’s connected, and that’s what’s exploited in these conspiracy stories. It’s made to look nefarious. It’s preying on the openness of science and shutting that down.” I couldn’t reach Keusch for comment.
Some of Morens’ efforts were aimed at restoring a $3.4-million NIAID grant to EcoHealth to fund research into the origins of pathogens in the wild. Trump had ordered the grant canceled in April 2020, a few days after a Fox News reporter told him it had all gone to the Wuhan (China) Institute of Virology, which was a target of lab-leak advocates. (In fact, only about $600,000 had gone to the lab, one of eight foreign and domestic sub-grantees.)
Biden restored the grant after an internal NIH investigation deemed the politically inspired cancellation “improper,” but by then three precious years of research had been lost. It was later canceled again. EcoHealth has shut down completely.
Several emails cited in the indictment referred to government reports that were public and remained so. Some were private exchanges bemoaning the conservative slander that, as Daszak put it, a “powerful cabal of scientists from within NIH helped draft anti lab-leak narrative.” In others, Daszak alerted Morens that batches of EcoHealth emails had been “FOIAed.”
As for the indictment’s assertion that Morens had destroyed government documents, it doesn’t specify any official reports that were concealed or destroyed; the reference may be to Morens’ own emails, which he deleted from his personal account.
Other emails were jocular personal exchanges between colleagues and friends. One exchange concerned a gift of two bottles of inexpensive wine Daszak sent Morens, implying that this was a bribe aimed at persuading Morens to obtain the grant for EcoHealth or to try to get it reinstated. In fact, the grant had been given a high grade by an independent panel charged with selecting grant recipients; neither Morens nor Fauci was personally involved in the process.
The debate over COVID’s origin isn’t an academic exercise. Protecting humanity from the next pandemic, and the ones after that, depends on gaining an accurate understanding of how pathogens originate and reach human communities. Obsessing over a factually unsupported and politically inspired accusation that a Chinese lab foisted COVID-19 on the world will distract from the hard work of addressing the more likely scenario, say by better policing of the illicit trade in infection-prone wildlife species.
Punishing scientists for exploring politically unpalatable research won’t help. “This is the reward for our warning the world that these viruses were coming,” Daszak says of the campaign to discredit EcoHealth. “These were good grants for very important work, and that’s all gone now.”
Dear Mr. Pelley:
I meant what I said in my letter last week to the 60 Minutes team: joining 60 Minutes is the honor of my career and I am grateful to be working alongside the people who have contributed to the most important television journalism brand this country has ever produced. While I’m new to 60 Minutes, I’ve devoted my career to investigative journalism and storytelling. I started this job excited to collaborate and to benefit from the wisdom and experience of the 60 Minutes veterans, with you among them. For that reason, one of the first things I did in my new role was call you to talk and invite you to dinner. It is a profound disappointment that you rejected that overture and chose ambush instead. Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. I welcome a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate among the team, but this was nothing of the sort. Yesterday’s performative display of hostility enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation-demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress. I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama. I am eager to work alongside those who share this goal.
Despite yesterday’s misconduct, I had hoped that in sitting down with you today we could find a path forward together. You made clear that you are not interested in such a path.
Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you. I therefore write on behalf of CBS News, Inc. (“CBS”) to inform you that your employment with CBS is terminated for cause effective immediately. Enclosed is your formal termination letter.
Sincerely,
Nick Bilton
Executive Producer, 60 Minutes
The co-founder of Aspiration, Joseph Sanberg, was sentenced to 14 years in prison on Monday after defrauding investors and lenders of over $248 million.
The startup, an eco-friendly digital banking company boasting fossil fuel-free investments, carbon offsets for gas purchases, and a debit card with cash-back benefits for shopping at clean companies, was founded by Sanberg and Andrei Cherny. Cherny left the company in 2022 and has not been charged.
Sanberg, an Orange County native, pleaded guilty to wire fraud in October after being arrested in March last year. Aspiration subsequently filed for bankruptcy and liquidated all of its assets by July.
Sanberg and venture capitalist Ibrahim AlHusseini, who also faces charges, together forged a series of bank statements in order to obtain loans. From 2020 to 2021, the pair forged AlHusseini’s bank statements to show millions of dollars in assets in order to obtain millions of dollars from lenders.
Additionally, they forged a letter from their audit committee stating that $250 million in funds were available, when in reality Aspiration had less than $1 million. The amount of loans defrauded exceeded $248 million.
In 2021, Sanberg artificially inflated Aspiration’s 2021 revenue by $44 million by recruiting 27 fake customers to sign letters of intent pledging tens of thousands of dollars per month for tree planting services. Sanberg himself funded the contracts and used the inflated revenue numbers to obtain more loans.
The charges sparked an NBA investigation into salary cap allegations due to Aspiration’s connections with Clippers owner Steve Ballmer.
Ballmer personally invested $60 million in Aspiration, all of which was lost. He is now the target of a civil lawsuit alleging his participation in the scheme. Ballmer denies the allegations.
The team announced a $300-million sponsorship deal with Aspiration, and Clippers player Kawhi Leonard signed a four-year, $28-million marketing contract with the company, which reportedly performed no duties. The issue has raised concerns about how players are circumventing the NBA’s salary cap.
The team lost the $300-million sponsorship deal and an additional $20 million paid for carbon offset purchases.
Residents in the city of Monterey Park will be the first in the nation to vote on a permanent ban on data centers Tuesday.
If approved, Measure NDC would prohibit data centers within the city limits and could only be overturned by another vote.
Yard signs saying “No Data Center” in English and Chinese with images of dragons line sidewalks in the San Gabriel Valley city.
As a wave of data center opposition sweeps the country, numerous towns and counties across the U.S. have instituted temporary moratoria and other restrictions on the facilities. But only a handful have instituted indefinite bans, and just four other towns have sent related matters to the ballot.
Supporters are hoping the vote will set a precedent for the rest of the region, where residents are fighting proposals in Vernon and City of Industry.
“This is about as permanent a ban as we can get,” said Steven Kung, co-founder of the group No Data Center Monterey Park. “Winning Measure NDC would send a huge message to the rest of the San Gabriel Valley about how residents don’t want data centers.”
The ballot measure emerged from the fight against a 247,000-square-foot center proposed in 2024 by the Australian-owned investment firm HMC StratCap for a residential area in Monterey Park.
The facility would have sat less than 500 feet away from the nearest home and used three times the electricity of the 60,000-person, predominantly Asian American city.
While the developer touted the potential for jobs and tax revenue, residents expressed concerns about noise and air pollution, rising electricity rates and a potential to lower property values.
The company pulled its plans in late March following public outcry and a March 4 city council vote to extend a temporary data center moratorium and place a ban on Tuesday’s ballot.
In a letter to the city council, HMC StratCap said it would pursue a different use for the land and would not engage in a ballot measure fight.
The city council later banned data centers indefinitely, the first in California to do so, said Mayor Elizabeth Yang. But she’s still been out campaigning for the measure with all four other council members.
“If a council puts in an ordinance, a future council can reverse it too,” said Yang. “With the ballot measure, unbanning it is a lot harder because you need the entire city to vote on it.”
The measure proposes the ban “to protect air quality, drinking water resources, and public health” and “prevent impacts to electricity and water rates.”
While California places third in the country for existing data centers with about 300 facilities, it hasn’t been a hot spot in the recent AI-driven data center boom. High electricity rates, expensive land and regulatory hurdles mean that fewer, and smaller, facilities are currently planned than in Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Illinois or Arizona.
“Most of California’s data centers are small by today’s standards,” said Shaolei Ren, an engineering professor at UC Riverside who studies how to reduce the environmental impacts of data centers. “Ten years ago, they would be medium-sized, but the power demand for new AI data centers has increased a lot.”
The average operating data center demands 45 megawatts, according to the Washington Post, while the average planned one would draw 430 MW. The one proposed for Monterey Park would have required about 50 MW at peak demand.
As proposals crop up in SoCal, they’re met with fierce opposition. Montebello, El Monte and Baldwin Park have all enacted temporary moratoria, and Alhambra recently banned data centers as part of a zoning code update. City of Industry, Vernon, City of Commerce and Santa Fe Springs are moving in the other direction, trying to court developers and streamline data center approvals. Community groups are fighting that.
Outside the San Gabriel Valley, residents of Coachella and Imperial County are showing up in droves to protest local proposals.
Matthew Shaw, a volunteer with the Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development, who recently published a report on opposition to AI data centers, said a vote to ban them in Monterey Park “would lead to copycats, partially because so many groups are just opposed to any data center development at all.”
While there is no formal opposition to Measure NDC, some building trades like Ironworker Local 433 supported the Monterey Park data center when it was still live before city council. Those in the data center industry are lamenting the state of public opinion.
“These are multi-billion-dollar assets that are built by multi-trillion-dollar companies. These things will get done,” said Mehdi Paryavi, chairman of the International Data Center Authority. “My biggest problem is that our industry does not invest enough in community engagement.”
Paryavi said towns that seek to limit data centers are missing out on thousands of jobs generated by data center construction, operations and customers, as well as faster artificial intelligence speeds and better performance.
Kung said local community organizers are “looking at the empirical evidence” and seeing a ban as a win.
“We’ve never seen a city that embraces a data center and is like, ‘Look how our quality of life has increased, look how all the revenue has gone into citywide improvements,’” he said. “That just doesn’t exist.”
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