The Central Intelligence Agency deployed its Counter Espionage Department to investigate thousands of employees and contractors who refused the COVID-19 vaccine, treating a workplace compliance dispute as though it were a foreign spy operation, a new class action lawsuit alleges.
The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, claims the CIA's chief operating officer directed the Counter Espionage Department, or CED, to begin probing non-compliant workers shortly after former President Joe Biden mandated vaccination for all federal employees and contractors in September 2021. The CED is the unit responsible for rooting out foreign espionage and sabotage inside the agency.
Three anonymous plaintiffs, a CIA security officer, a CIA staff operations officer, and a cybersecurity architect contractor, are seeking the removal of all adverse information from their personnel files. The nonprofit Feds for Freedom, founded by federal employees in 2021 to challenge the Biden vaccine mandate, announced the lawsuit Wednesday. The Epoch Times first reported the filing.
The legal complaint describes the CED as an office that "utilizes invasive investigative techniques." Unlike ordinary security or HR violations, which can be expunged, investigatory material collected through CED probes permanently remains in CIA files and, the complaint states, "can be used by the Agency for any reason it deems necessary."
That distinction is the heart of the case. Employees who declined a shot now carry permanent counterespionage markings in their records, the same kind of notation that would follow someone suspected of selling secrets to a hostile foreign power.
Former CIA officer James Erdman, who uncovered the alleged practice while on detail with former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard's declassification and accountability task force, put it bluntly:
"That is an employee insubordination issue. That's handled differently than espionage. And that's why this is really concerning, because you're conflating those things."
Erdman resigned from the CIA earlier this week. He now serves as director of development for Feds for Freedom.
Erdman said he learned of the CED investigations from a tip while serving on Gabbard's task force. That task force operated under a January 2025 executive order directing an investigation into how the Biden administration weaponized the federal government against perceived political enemies.
When the task force pressed the CIA to clarify under what authority the CED investigations had been launched, the agency gave no answer, the legal complaint states. The CIA also declined to comment for the Daily Caller's report.
The pattern of non-response did not stop there. Erdman said he repeatedly pressed CIA Director John Ratcliffe's office to remove the marks from unvaccinated employees' personnel files. Ratcliffe's office never acted, Erdman told the Daily Caller. In March, one unvaccinated employee formally requested that Ratcliffe's office remove CED-collected material from his file. He never received a reply.
Erdman described his frustration with the agency's silence:
"I did everything in my power to get the agency to just fix it. That's all I wanted. Give us the answer on what happened, and fix it."
The lawsuit cites the Administrative Procedure Act and seeks removal of all adverse information from the plaintiffs' files, along with "any further relief this Honorable Court deems necessary or appropriate in order to accord full and complete relief."
The allegations fit a broader pattern that has emerged across federal agencies during and after the Biden years. Whether it was alleged cover-ups tied to senior health officials or enforcement actions that seemed to target dissenters rather than genuine threats, the federal bureaucracy repeatedly appeared to confuse compliance with loyalty, and dissent with danger.
Stephanie Weidle, executive director of Feds for Freedom, framed the stakes in her statement announcing the suit:
"When a government agency uses national security tools to punish the personal medical choices of their employees, it is agency leadership, not the employee, who has crossed the line."
That line deserves attention. The CED exists to protect the nation from foreign intelligence penetration. Using its tools against Americans who exercised a personal medical choice, even one at odds with a presidential directive, is a category error with real consequences. Those permanent file notations can follow an employee through every future clearance review, every promotion board, every internal reassignment.
The agency's refusal to explain the legal basis for the investigations only deepens the concern. If the authority was legitimate, the CIA could have said so. It didn't, not to Gabbard's task force, not to Ratcliffe's office, and not to the press.
Several critical gaps remain. The lawsuit references "thousands" of affected employees, but it is unclear whether that figure comes from the complaint itself or from broader estimates. The full name of the CIA chief operating officer who allegedly directed the CED investigations has not been disclosed. The specific "invasive investigative techniques" the CED employed against unvaccinated workers have not been detailed publicly.
It also remains unclear whether similar counterespionage investigations were conducted at other intelligence community agencies, or whether this practice was confined to the CIA. Instances of vetting failures and administrative breakdowns at agencies like DHS have raised separate but related questions about how the intelligence and security bureaucracies handle internal accountability.
Nor has CIA Director Ratcliffe publicly addressed the lawsuit or Erdman's resignation. The silence from his office, both before and after the filing, is itself a data point. Erdman says he gave the agency every chance to resolve the matter internally before it became a federal case.
The broader question of government agencies suppressing or burying inconvenient findings is not new, but the CIA case adds a sharper edge. This was not a regulatory agency slow-walking a report. This was the nation's premier intelligence service allegedly turning its own counterespionage apparatus inward, against people whose only offense was declining a vaccine.
Biden's September 2021 vaccine mandate for federal employees and contractors generated fierce resistance across the government. Religious and medical accommodation requests flooded agencies. Lawsuits multiplied. The mandate itself was eventually wound down, but its aftereffects, disciplinary actions, career disruptions, and now, apparently, counterespionage investigations, have lingered far longer than the policy.
For the three anonymous plaintiffs in this case, the damage is not abstract. A permanent CED notation in a CIA file is not a slap on the wrist. It is a mark that says, in the language of the intelligence community, that this person was once investigated as a potential threat to national security. That mark does not go away when the political winds shift.
The case also raises uncomfortable questions about institutional accountability in the intelligence community more broadly. When political figures face scrutiny over foreign-linked entanglements, the public rightly demands transparency. The same standard should apply when an agency turns its most sensitive tools on its own workforce for reasons it refuses to explain.
The lawsuit is now before a federal judge in Virginia. The CIA has said nothing. The files remain.
When the government treats a personal medical decision as an act of espionage, the problem isn't the employee who said no, it's the institution that lost the ability to tell the difference.
