Admin Uses Records Policy to Jail Scientist While Being Sued for Records Abuses

The Trump administration raided the home of and jailed a scientist this week over alleged violations of record-keeping protocols, with FBI Director Kash Patel saying officials will not tolerate such abuses — all while the administration is being sued over a recent policy declaring that Donald Trump is immune from record-keeping law.

On Monday, federal law enforcement agents pounded on the door of David Morens, a former influenza researcher with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) who was once Anthony Fauci’s aide. They were carrying out an arrest warrant, carrying guns and dressed in tactical gear, Science reported.

The agents stripped Morens of his pants and shirt, and took him to the U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, Maryland, and jailed him. He was later released but asked to surrender his passport. The FBI denied claims that agents used “aggressive tactics” in the arrest.

Morens was indicted by a federal grand jury this month on three felony charges of allegedly using a private email account to circumvent federal records laws and Freedom of Information Act requests. Morens has previously denied charges when testifying in a Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing in 2024.

In a press release touting Morens’s arrest, top Trump administration officials said that they are taking a strong stand against those who violate federal record-keeping requirements.

“These allegations represent a profound abuse of trust at a time when the American people needed it most — during the height of a global pandemic,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

“Circumventing records protocols with the intention of avoiding transparency is something that will not be tolerated by this FBI,” said Patel. “If you have engaged in activity conspiring against the United States, we will not stop until you face justice.”

The statements ignore, however, that Trump and his administration are under fire for their own alleged record-keeping violations. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) dubiously declared in a memo that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional and does not apply to Trump. The law, passed by Congress after Watergate, says that communications by the president and vice president are property of the U.S.

“The President need not further comply with its dictates,” the memo said.

This memo is “widely seen by legal experts as an overt attempt to give Trump legal standing to destroy documents or hide them until the end of his current term,” reported Democracy Docket.

The American Historical Association and nonprofit American Oversight filed a lawsuit challenging the memo, saying that it is a dire threat to transparency and public knowledge.

“The lawsuit argues that the memo relies on virtually no judicial authority and defies binding Supreme Court precedent outright, representing a radical attempt to nullify a law that has governed presidential records for nearly half a century,” the groups said in a press release. “The memo reflects a broader push to concentrate power in the presidency, at the expense of the public’s right to know.”

This lawsuit comes after another lawsuit against Trump originating in claims from his first term. In 2022, the federal government seized hundreds of documents that Trump had removed from the White House and was storing in his Mar-a-Lago estate. While seeking to have the documents returned, Trump’s lawyers argued that Trump has “executive privilege” to hold the documents, in what was seen at the time as a tacit acknowledgement that they belonged to the government.

Also in 2022, Trump was revealed to have ripped up and flushed documents down the toilet during his first term to flout record keeping laws, pictures showed.

The administration has also been accused of improperly handling documents in relation to the Epstein files, which Congress has ordered to be released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

However, commentators noted that the attack on Morens is yet another attempt by the administration to prosecute scientists who they viewed to be their enemies during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik wrote on Thursday that the indictment is “a transparent effort to revive the largely discredited hypothesis that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese laboratory,” an unfounded theory that has nonetheless been perpetuated by Republicans. Trump and his allies have used such theories to continue advancing their wide-ranging, dire attacks on science and public health in particular.

Indeed, in the press release on Morens, Blanche said that the arrest was necessary for supposed attempts to “suppress alternative theories regarding the origins of COVID-19.”