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.

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.”