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SUNDAY SCIENCE – INSIDE THE D.O.J.’S INVESTIGATION OF FAUCI AND
OTHER VIRUS SCIENTISTS  
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Benjamin Mueller, Glenn Thrush
September 5, 2026
The New York Times
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_ As Dr. Anthony Fauci has faced public scrutiny from congressional
Republicans, the D.O.J. has pursued a quieter and more expansive
effort against a wider circle of researchers. _

President Trump and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci were shown models of the
coronavirus during a tour of the National Institutes of Health in
March 2020., Doug Mills/The New York Times

 

In early 2025, Dan Bongino, the fiery No. 2 official at the F.B.I.,
summoned dozens of agents to the bureau’s Washington headquarters.

Mr. Bongino, a conservative media personality recently elevated to the
deputy’s role, demanded to know why a yearslong inquiry into the
origins of the Covid-19 pandemic had stalled — and why investigators
had not more forcefully scrutinized the role of government scientists,
current and former officials said.

At one point, he squared off against an official who questioned the
theory that he and many supporters of President Trump had long
promoted: that the virus had not merely leaked from a Chinese lab, but
that American researchers, among them Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, had
orchestrated a conspiracy to cover up that fact.

The meeting became so heated that Mr. Bongino ultimately asked the
official to leave the room, an attendee said.

Mr. Bongino, who stepped down from the F.B.I. in January to return
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to podcasting, and other officials helped set in motion a sprawling
and aggressive investigative effort that has outlasted his tenure, The
New York Times has learned.

As part of that effort, F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors have
sought evidence related to at least eight scientists, among them a
Nobel laureate and influential former government researchers like Dr.
Fauci.

Investigators have demanded phone, email, grant and payment records,
as well as grand jury testimony by scientists.

This account of the investigations is drawn from interviews with six
current and former officials familiar with them, who asked not to be
identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly, as well
as documents reviewed by The Times.

It is not clear what evidence those inquiries have produced or what
their status is. Dr. Fauci, once the government’s chief infectious
disease scientist, received a pre-emptive pardon
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last year from former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. that protects him
from federal prosecution for official actions from 2014 to 2025.

The inquiries were underway well before Republican lawmakers last
month asked
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the Department of Justice to investigate Dr. Fauci’s refusal to
answer questions before a Senate panel. They have continued playing
out behind the scenes as those lawmakers released documents that have
bruised Dr. Fauci’s reputation.

Dan Bongino, former deputy director of the F.B.I., at a news
conference in Washington, flanked by former Attorney General Pam Bondi
and the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel. Tierney L. Cross/The New York
Times

Many scientists see the federal government’s investigative effort as
an attempt to punish political enemies and deflect blame from the
first Trump administration for the catastrophic effects of the
pandemic.

While the origins of the coronavirus have not definitively been
established, these researchers point to the fact that the inquiries
have failed to produce any clear evidence that Dr. Fauci or other
American scientists covered up knowledge of a lab leak, or funded or
collaborated on research that led to one.

Mr. Trump’s supporters, on the other hand, accuse those scientists
of helping to start the pandemic and aggravating its harms, and
believe the inquiries represent overdue accountability.

 

 

The F.B.I.’s efforts during the Biden administration focused mainly
on whether Covid emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China, though federal
investigators also began examining some individual scientists.

Under Mr. Trump, the investigation has expanded as federal agents and
prosecutors sought evidence against new targets and intensified their
scrutiny of scientists.

Last month, Dr. David Morens, a former adviser to Dr. Fauci at the
National Institutes of Health, pleaded guilty
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to conspiring to conceal federal records by steering government emails
into a personal account. In those emails, Dr. Morens discussed efforts
to defend researchers who were under suspicion for collaborating with
the Wuhan lab.

Dr. Morens wrote that he was trying to protect researchers from what
he described as baseless “political charges” of a lab leak.

A subpoena for documents in that case, dated September 2025 and
reviewed by The Times, showed that federal prosecutors in Maryland
sought evidence about Dr. Fauci, too, including any emails he sent to
certain researchers from his personal account or payments he received
for intervening on behalf of federal grantees.

Prosecutors in Maryland also recently demanded the testimony before a
federal grand jury of a former staff member at EcoHealth Alliance, a
defunct nonprofit that the Trump White House has said
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N.I.H. funding to facilitate “dangerous” research at the Wuhan lab
where the administration believes
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the pandemic started.

EcoHealth executives have denied
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those claims. The N.I.H. has said
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that viruses being studied there with American funding bore no
resemblance to the one that set off the pandemic.

In a separate line of inquiry, agents in the F.B.I.’s Cleveland
office have recently examined whether Dr. Fauci and other government
scientists pressured virologists in early 2020 to downplay the
possibility that the pandemic originated in a lab. Mr. Bongino last
year singled out one of those agents as a key player in an expanded
investigation.

The F.B.I. and Department of Justice declined to comment for this
article. Mr. Bongino conceded
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podcast last month that “there are a lot of complications with any
case that may develop against Anthony Fauci because of the pardon,”
even as he credited “the cleanup operation we instituted when we
went over there” for Dr. Morens’s indictment.

Dr. David Morens, a former N.I.H. official, leaving court in
Greenbelt, Md., in May, following his arraignment on charges of
evading federal records requests related to Covid research. Annabelle
Gordon/Reuters

On his podcast
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Bongino said that government scientists had dismissed the lab leak
theory because they wanted to undermine Mr. Trump.

 

 

“They knew that would be a destructive narrative for them because
Donald Trump had been talking about the danger of China the entire
time,” Mr. Bongino said. “So they hid the lab leak.”

A THEORY ABOUT A COVER-UP

Shortly after Mr. Trump returned to office last year, his
administration pulled down a website meant to help Americans find
Covid vaccines and treatments and, in its place, posted
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a full-length image of Mr. Trump atop a new page that described why
true blame for the pandemic rested with scientists.

“LAB LEAK,” the page
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declared — a leak that it suggested Dr. Fauci, Dr. Morens and
EcoHealth scientists had helped to conceal.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Dr.
Fauci ran for nearly 40 years, financed
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collaborations between EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
a lab that studied coronaviruses in the city where the Covid outbreak
began.

 

 

Some researchers favor the idea of a lab leak, whether or not American
funding was involved, citing assertions
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by intelligence officials that the lab probably failed to use adequate
biosafety precautions at least some of the time.

Most scientists favor a so-called natural origin theory, pointing to
new
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data
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published
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in recent years supporting the idea that the virus spilled from
animals into people at a wild animal market in Wuhan, a tried-and-true
route for emerging deadly viruses, including past outbreaks
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in China.

American intelligence officials have said
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there was no indication that the Wuhan lab had been in possession of
the pandemic coronavirus “or a close progenitor” before the Covid
outbreak.

In Congress, Republican lawmakers began gathering evidence against
scientists as the 2024 election approached.

“You make a pyramid,” said Mitchell Benzine, the staff director of
the Republican-run Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic
from 2023 to 2025, describing the panel’s strategy. “You talk to
and get documents from the bottom of the pyramid, and you work your
way up.”

If Dr. Fauci was at the top of the pyramid, Dr. Morens, his former
adviser, was nearer its base. The subcommittee discovered a trove
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of brash emails from 2020 and 2021 in which Dr. Morens described plans
to evade federal records laws, including by learning how to “make
emails disappear.”

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, former director of the National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases, declined to answer questions at a
Senate committee hearing in July. Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

Dr. Morens wrote about trying to quietly involve Dr. Fauci in efforts
to defend against what he described as threats to “scientific
independence” and to EcoHealth, whose N.I.H. grant was canceled
under orders from the first Trump administration in 2020.

Dr. Morens said in the emails that he wanted to protect scientists
from attacks he suggested were analogous to the “Salem Witch
Trials.”

It is not clear precisely when federal prosecutors in Maryland began
investigating those emails, but documents reviewed by The Times
indicate it was toward the end of Mr. Biden’s presidency.

 

 

By last fall, federal prosecutors were also examining Dr. Fauci and a
half dozen other scientists, including Richard J. Roberts, a Nobel
laureate in medicine, who had organized
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a letter denouncing the cancellation of EcoHealth’s grant, according
to a September 2025 subpoena to EcoHealth.

The subpoena asked for evidence that Dr. Fauci had drafted or edited
documents for EcoHealth, including records related to the Wuhan lab;
correspondence from Dr. Fauci’s personal email address to EcoHealth;
and evidence that the group had compensated Dr. Fauci with
“currency, gift baskets, wine, meals, travel” or other items.

In addition to violations of federal records laws, Dr. Morens pleaded
guilty last month to receiving illegal gratuities in the form of two
bottles of The Prisoner Red Blend Napa Valley wine from Peter Daszak,
EcoHealth’s former president.

Dr. Daszak said the wine had been a joking allusion to calls in 2020
for his and other scientists’ imprisonment. (Dr. Daszak and
EcoHealth were later barred
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from federal contracts under Mr. Biden over allegations that they
failed to properly monitor work at the Wuhan lab, which Dr. Daszak and
the nonprofit denied.)

Government oversight experts criticized Dr. Morens’s efforts to hide
critical correspondence about the pandemic, while noting that Trump
administration officials have themselves been said to conduct
government business on private email accounts
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or an encrypted messaging app
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“It seems like retaliation,” Dr. Daszak said of the case, in which
he appears as an unnamed co-conspirator. “The right learned pretty
early on in Covid that public health is a threat to power.”

Peter Daszak, former president of EcoHealth Alliance, testified before
a House committee in 2024.Credit...Ting Shen for The New York Times

Timothy Belevetz, Dr. Morens’s lawyer, said that Dr. Morens “has
taken responsibility for what he did and will continue to do so.”

Dr. Fauci has said he “knew nothing” about Dr. Morens’s actions.
His lawyers have created a defense fund to respond to what they
described as a “legal barrage” that followed his refusal to answer
questions from a Senate panel in July, including the announcement of
state investigations. The panel voted
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to hold him in contempt of Congress.

“Dr. Fauci has done nothing wrong, and there is no basis for any
investigations, whether by Congress, the Department of Justice, or
state attorneys general,” David Schertler, his lawyer, said.

 

 

“The only thing that will come from these completely unjustified
efforts to besmirch Dr. Fauci’s reputation and his lifelong
commitment to public health is wasted time and resources that would be
better used on real issues.”

The F.B.I., which has for years asserted that the virus originated in
the Wuhan lab, has also more recently examined whether Dr. Fauci
pushed a group of scientists in early 2020 to downplay early
suspicions that the coronavirus may not have evolved naturally.

Republicans have long suggested that Dr. Fauci pressured those
scientists into changing their view as they prepared an article about
the pandemic’s origin, perhaps by plying one of them with a federal
grant.

Dr. Fauci and the scientists deny those claims. The grant in question
was reviewed and approved for funding before Dr. Fauci discussed the
origin with those scientists, he said.

The researchers said
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their initial suspicions were allayed instead by more extensive
analyses of coronaviruses in other species, like bats and pangolins,
which showed that unusual-seeming features of the novel virus were in
fact present in naturally occurring viruses.

Democratic lawmakers said that the attacks on Dr. Fauci and other
scientists echoed past efforts to prosecute political enemies.

“It smacks of McCarthyism because it seeks to demonize individuals
for seemingly fictional and illusory reasons,” said Senator Richard
Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut. “The question is whether
there’s selective targeting.”

Mr. Bongino has blamed Dr. Fauci and other government scientists not
only for financing research that led to the pandemic, but also for
using the resulting catastrophe to push social distancing measures and
mail-in balloting provisions in 2020.

He has said on his podcast that those measures were introduced for one
purpose, referring to an outcome that multiple investigations
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have established did not happen: “Steal the election. One hundred
percent.”

_BENJAMIN MUELLER_ [[link removed]]_
reports on health and medicine. He was previously a U.K. correspondent
in London and a police reporter in New York._

_GLENN THRUSH_ [[link removed]]_ covers the
Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun
violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and
prisons._

_Kirsten Noyes and Georgia Gee contributed research. Adam Goldman
contributed reporting._

_Subscribe to the NEW YORK TIMES_ [[link removed]]

Kirsten Noyes and Georgia Gee contributed research. Adam Goldman
contributed reporting.

VACCINE RECOMMENDATIONS AND ACCESS, PLUS MEASLES DEATHS: 3 QUESTIONS,
ZERO CONSENSUS
[[link removed]]IZZY
BRANDSTETTERFIGUEROA, PHD, RILEY MULHOLLAND, MPH, JESS STEIER,
DRPHUNBIASED SCIENCESeptember 3, 2026

* Science
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* Dr. Anthony Fauci
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* COVID-19
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* Department of Justice
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* investigation
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* Donald Trump
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*
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