The Deep State tried to bury this truth.
But the ugliness couldn’t stay hidden forever.
And Tulsi Gabbard uncovered an explosive secret that has the deep state scrambling.
The CIA allegedly investigated thousands of unvaccinated employees as if they were potential foreign espionage and sabotage threats, according to a new class action lawsuit. Read that again. Not fired. Not written up. Investigated for espionage.
In September 2021, former President Joe Biden mandated that federal employees and contractors receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Shortly after, the CIA’s chief operating officer allegedly directed the Counter Espionage Department (CED) to begin investigating employees and contractors who did not comply.
According to the lawsuit, “Any employee or contractor who refused the vaccine was treated by the Agency as a threat to the United States government and ordered to be investigated as the same.”
Think about what that means. Intelligence officers with decades of service, security clearances, and records clean enough to work at the most secretive agency in the country — treated the same as suspected foreign agents because they made a different medical decision than Joe Biden preferred.
The CIA’s espionage division “utilizes invasive investigative techniques,” the legal complaint states. While security violations and HR violations can be expunged, investigatory material collected in CED investigations permanently remain in the CIA’s files. And this intelligence “can be used by the Agency for any reason it deems necessary,” the complaint states.
That last part is what makes this more than just a COVID-era grievance. These records don’t go away.
“The fact that the investigation occurred in the first instance, and the fact that there has been no assurances that anything stemming from that investigation has been essentially wiped clean, it does, unfortunately, set conditions — precedent — for where if there is any reason or need to investigate any of these individuals at any future date, this could be used as a basis to do so,” said Carol Thompson, one of the lawyers representing the officers.
The man who brought this to light is former CIA officer James Erdman. Erdman said he learned of the CED investigations from a tip while on detail with former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, whose declassification and accountability task force was digging into how the Biden administration weaponized the federal government against perceived political enemies under a January 2025 executive order.
Erdman, who worked with Gabbard’s group, also testified to the Senate about the CIA spying on that group as it worked on a number of matters, including the CIA’s change in its assessment of the origins of COVID-19. So the same agency that allegedly surveilled its own unvaccinated employees was also allegedly keeping tabs on the team investigating it. The layers here keep adding up.
When pressed by Gabbard’s task force to clarify under what authority the CED investigations had been launched, the CIA did not give an answer, the legal complaint alleges.
Erdman didn’t go straight to court. He tried to work within the system first. He repeatedly pressed CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s office to remove the marks on unvaccinated employees’ personnel files, but the director never took action.
“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,” Erdman said.
In March, one of the unvaccinated employees formally requested Ratcliffe’s office remove the material dug up by the CED from his file, but never received a reply. No response. So a lawsuit it is.
Erdman has since resigned from the CIA and now serves as the director of development for Feds for Freedom. Feds for Freedom, originally called Feds For Medical Freedom, has led legal challenges to defend the constitutional rights of hundreds of thousands of federal employees and contractors since its founding in 2021.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. “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,” said Feds For Freedom Executive Director Stephanie Weidle.
At other federal agencies, employees who applied for religious accommodations were considered compliant until after a determination was made about their application. That’s not what happened at the CIA, according to Erdman.
And here is where Erdman’s argument cuts deepest. Even under the Biden administration’s own premise that the COVID-19 vaccine mandate was unquestionably good for the health of CIA staff, defiance of the mandate should have been handled as insubordination rather than a counterespionage case, Erdman said.
“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,” he said.
He’s right. And that conflation wasn’t accidental. Routing these cases through the Counter Espionage Department rather than human resources carried a specific consequence — permanent, irremovable files that follow these employees wherever they go inside the intelligence community. That’s not a bureaucratic mix-up. That’s a deliberate choice with deliberate consequences for people who exercised their right to make their own medical decisions.
The suit alleges violations of the Administrative Procedure Act, the law that governs federal agency procedures, and lists as plaintiffs an anonymous CIA security officer, an anonymous CIA staff operations officer, and an anonymous cybersecurity architect contractor.
The plaintiffs seek the removal of all adverse information from their files and “any further relief this Honorable Court deems necessary or appropriate in order to accord full and complete relief.”
The Biden administration told the country that refusing the COVID shot was selfish, dangerous, and anti-science. Some federal agencies treated non-compliant employees as a paperwork problem. The CIA, allegedly, treated them as enemy agents. There is no version of that decision that looks like a health policy. It looks like a punishment.
And the punishment may still be sitting in those files right now.
“Any claim that the CIA was simply ‘protecting the health of employees’ by ordering Counter Espionage Department investigations into unvaccinated officers collapses under its own absurdity. Whether or not someone gets vaccinated is a personal medical decision, not an indication they are a spy. The investigations were never about health — they were a blatant abuse of power dressed up as policy,” said Kevin McAfee, president of Feds For Freedom.
The lawsuit is now in federal court. The CIA has not offered a public explanation for why the Counter Espionage Department was the appropriate vehicle for enforcing a vaccine mandate. Ratcliffe’s office has not answered requests to clean the files. And the employees who refused a shot are still carrying the mark of a counterespionage investigation in their permanent records.
But Tulsi Gabbard’s task force kept digging. Erdman kept pushing. And now a federal court will have to answer a question the CIA apparently refuses to: on what authority do you investigate a loyal American officer as a spy because he declined a vaccine?
Sources: Daily Caller News Foundation, The Epoch Times, Feds for Freedom