A former senior aide to Anthony Fauci pleaded guilty to conspiring to circumvent public-records access laws in a case involving government documents related to research funding and the Covid-19 pandemic.

According to Reuters, 78-year-old David Morens, who worked under Fauci during the pandemic as a senior official at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), pleaded guilty Tuesday in federal court in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Morens was indicted last April for a scheme that prosecutors say was intended to prevent the fulfillment of public-records requests that began being submitted to the agency in April 2020 and concerned Covid-19-related research grants.

He faces up to five years in prison.

“By pleading guilty today, Dr. Morens has taken responsibility for what he did and will continue to do so,” his attorney, Timothy Belevetz, said in a statement.

The connection to coronavirus research in Wuhan

Morens’s guilty plea is connected to the decision by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to cancel a research grant involving bat coronaviruses.

The decision was made amid evidence that the virus that caused Covid-19 may have originated in a laboratory in Wuhan. The Chinese laboratory had received part of the funding through the company to which the grant had originally been awarded.

According to the indictment, Morens and other individuals anticipated that their communications could be requested under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

For this reason, prosecutors say, they agreed to communicate through Morens’s personal email account rather than his official government account, so that the communications in question would not be easily identified in response to public-records requests.