Inside the Justice Department finally looking at Fauci

As Dr. Anthony Fauci has continued to face political pressure from Republican lawmakers, a broader and less visible federal investigation has been examining a larger group of scientists connected to research on the origins of COVID-19.

In early 2025, Dan Bongino, then the FBI’s deputy director, called dozens of agents to the bureau’s headquarters in Washington. According to current and former officials familiar with the meeting, Bongino wanted answers about why a long-running investigation into the pandemic’s origins appeared to have stalled and why federal investigators had not more aggressively examined the actions of government scientists.

The meeting reportedly became contentious when Bongino challenged an official over a theory long promoted by President Trump and some of his allies: that the coronavirus escaped from a laboratory in China and that U.S. scientists, including Fauci, participated in efforts to conceal that possibility.

The disagreement became heated enough that Bongino eventually asked the official to leave the room, according to one person who attended.

Bongino, who left the FBI in January and later returned to podcasting, was among the officials who helped accelerate an investigative effort that has continued beyond his departure.

Federal agents and prosecutors have since sought information involving at least eight scientists, including prominent former government researchers and a Nobel Prize winner. Investigators have pursued phone records, emails, financial information, grant documents and testimony before federal grand juries.

The full scope and current status of the inquiries remain unclear. It is also unknown whether investigators have uncovered evidence sufficient to support criminal charges.

Fauci, who for decades led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, received a pre-emptive pardon from former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. covering federal prosecution for official actions between 2014 and 2025.

The investigations began well before Republican lawmakers recently asked the Justice Department to examine Fauci’s refusal to answer questions during a Senate hearing. At the same time, newly released congressional documents have intensified political scrutiny of his actions during the pandemic.

Scientists who criticize the investigations argue that the effort has become politically motivated and is designed to shift blame for the pandemic toward public-health officials and researchers. They note that no clear evidence has emerged showing that Fauci or other American scientists knowingly concealed a laboratory accident or funded research that directly caused the pandemic.

Trump supporters take a very different view. Many argue that scientists helped create the conditions that led to the pandemic and later misled the public about what happened. From that perspective, the investigations represent accountability that is long overdue.

From the Wuhan Lab Theory to Individual Scientists

During the Biden administration, the FBI’s work largely focused on whether the coronavirus originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Investigators also began examining several individual scientists.

After Trump returned to office, however, federal agents and prosecutors broadened the inquiry and began looking more closely at additional researchers.

One of the most significant developments came when Dr. David Morens, a former adviser to Fauci at the National Institutes of Health, pleaded guilty to conspiring to hide federal records by moving government-related communications into a personal email account.

Those emails included discussions about defending researchers accused of collaborating with the Wuhan laboratory. Morens described the accusations as politically driven and said he was trying to protect scientists from what he considered unfounded allegations.

A September 2025 subpoena reviewed by The New York Times showed that federal prosecutors in Maryland were also seeking information about Fauci. Investigators requested evidence of communications he may have sent from a personal email account to researchers, as well as information about any payments or benefits he may have received while intervening on behalf of federal grant recipients.

Prosecutors have also sought testimony from a former EcoHealth Alliance employee.

EcoHealth Alliance, a now-defunct nonprofit, received NIH funding that supported coronavirus research conducted in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Trump administration has claimed that the organization helped finance dangerous research at the laboratory.

EcoHealth officials have denied those accusations. The NIH has also said that the viruses being studied under U.S.-funded projects were not closely related to SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19.

Another FBI inquiry, based in Cleveland, has reportedly examined whether Fauci or other government scientists pressured virologists in early 2020 to minimize the possibility of a laboratory origin.

Bongino previously described that line of investigation as important to the broader effort.

The FBI and Justice Department declined to discuss the investigations publicly.

On his podcast, Bongino acknowledged that Fauci’s pardon could complicate any criminal case involving him. At the same time, he argued that changes made within the FBI during his tenure helped lead to the prosecution of Morens.

Allegations of a Cover-Up

Bongino has repeatedly accused government scientists of dismissing the laboratory-leak theory for political reasons.

In a 2024 podcast episode, he argued that scientists wanted to undermine Trump and feared that evidence of a Chinese laboratory accident would reinforce Trump’s criticism of China.

After Trump returned to the White House, his administration replaced a federal COVID information page with a new site promoting the laboratory-leak theory. The page placed blame on scientists and suggested that Fauci, Morens and researchers associated with EcoHealth helped conceal information about the origins of the pandemic.

The debate over COVID’s origins remains unresolved.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Fauci led for nearly four decades, funded research partnerships between EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Some scientists and intelligence officials consider a laboratory accident plausible, in part because of concerns about biosafety practices at the Wuhan facility.

Other researchers continue to support a natural-origin explanation. They point to genetic and epidemiological evidence suggesting that the virus may have passed from animals to humans through a wildlife market in Wuhan, similar to previous outbreaks of other emerging viruses.

American intelligence agencies have previously said they found no evidence that the Wuhan laboratory possessed SARS-CoV-2 or a very close ancestor of it before the outbreak began.

Congress Builds a Case

Republican lawmakers began collecting documents and testimony from scientists in the years leading up to the 2024 election.

Mitchell Benzine, who served as staff director for the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, described the strategy as building a pyramid: investigators begin with lower-level individuals and documents and gradually move upward toward more senior officials.

In that framework, Fauci represented the top of the pyramid, while Morens was closer to the bottom.

Congressional investigators uncovered numerous emails from Morens in which he discussed ways of avoiding federal records requirements, including messages about making emails disappear.

Morens also wrote about quietly involving Fauci in efforts to protect researchers and defend what he called scientific independence.

Some of those efforts involved EcoHealth Alliance after the first Trump administration canceled one of the organization’s NIH grants in 2020.

Morens compared the political attacks against scientists to the Salem witch trials.

Federal prosecutors appear to have begun examining those communications near the end of Biden’s presidency.

By the fall of 2025, prosecutors were also investigating Fauci and several other scientists, including Nobel laureate Richard J. Roberts, who had organized a public letter criticizing the cancellation of EcoHealth’s federal funding.

A subpoena sent to EcoHealth sought documents showing whether Fauci had helped prepare or edit materials for the organization, including records connected to the Wuhan laboratory.

Investigators also requested personal-email communications and information about whether Fauci had received any money, gifts, meals, travel or other benefits from EcoHealth.

The Morens Case

Morens ultimately admitted to violating federal records rules and to receiving improper gratuities.

Those gratuities included two bottles of wine from Peter Daszak, the former president of EcoHealth Alliance.

Daszak said the gift was intended as a joke referring to public calls for his imprisonment and the prosecution of other scientists.

EcoHealth and Daszak were later barred from receiving federal contracts after officials accused the organization of failing to adequately supervise research conducted at the Wuhan laboratory. Both disputed the allegations.

Government-transparency experts criticized Morens for attempting to move official correspondence outside normal federal recordkeeping systems.

At the same time, critics noted that officials in the Trump administration have also faced accusations of using private email accounts or encrypted messaging services for government business.

Daszak described the case against Morens as politically retaliatory.

Morens’s attorney said his client had accepted responsibility for his actions.

Fauci Denies Wrongdoing

Fauci has said he had no knowledge of Morens’s efforts to conceal communications.

His lawyers have established a legal defense fund to respond to what they describe as a growing wave of investigations and political attacks following Fauci’s refusal to answer questions before a Senate panel.

The Senate committee later voted to hold him in contempt of Congress.

Fauci’s attorney, David Schertler, said there was no legitimate basis for investigations by Congress, the Justice Department or state attorneys general and argued that the inquiries were wasting government resources.

The FBI has also examined whether Fauci influenced scientists who were studying the origins of COVID-19 in early 2020.

Republican lawmakers have claimed that Fauci pressured researchers to abandon early suspicions of a laboratory origin while they were preparing a scientific paper on the subject.

Some have also suggested that a federal grant was used to influence at least one researcher.

Fauci and the scientists involved deny those accusations.

They have said the grant had already gone through the approval process before Fauci discussed COVID’s origins with them.

The researchers have also said their opinions changed after reviewing more genetic evidence from coronaviruses found in animals such as bats and pangolins. Those comparisons, they said, showed that some features of SARS-CoV-2 that initially appeared unusual also existed in naturally occurring viruses.

Long-Delayed Accountability

Fauci and other scientists not only supported research that they believe contributed to the pandemic, but also of using the public-health crisis to justify social-distancing restrictions and expanded mail-in voting during the 2020 election.

Bongino has publicly claimed that those measures were designed to influence the election, though multiple investigations have found no evidence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

The investigations into Fauci and other scientists now sit at the intersection of several unresolved disputes: the failure to admit the true origins of COVID-19, questions about government transparency, federal research funding, pandemic-era public-health policy and the increasingly partisan battle over how the pandemic itself should be remembered.

Will the federal inquiries will uncover evidence of broader criminal misconduct?.