The Trump administration was sued Tuesday in two separate civil complaints related to a request for details about FBI employees who worked on cases involving President Donald Trump and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, and a 3rd suit difficult the removal of knowledge from federal health agency web sites.
The lawsuits are the most recent in a growing variety of legal salvos searching for to dam — or decelerate — the rapid-fire series of executive actions Trump and his allies have taken since he returned to the White House on Jan. 20.
The three cases were filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.
The primary case, a class-action criticism, was filed by a bunch of nine unidentified FBI agents and employees of the agency against the Department of Justice.
That suit seeks to dam the publication or dissemination of knowledge in surveys the plaintiffs or their supervisors have been ordered to fill out identifying “their specific role” in cases involving the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot criminal cases, and the criminal prosecution of Trump himself for retaining classified records after leaving the White House in early 2021.
The suit says the survey was issued “to discover agents to be terminated or to suffer hostile employment motion.”
“Upon returning to the Presidency, Mr. Trump has ordered the DOJ to conduct a review and purge of FBI personnel involved in these investigations and prosecutions,” the suit says.
“This directive is illegal and retaliatory, and violates the Civil Service Reform Act.”
The suit says the plaintiffs “reasonably fear that every one or parts” of a listing of FBI agents who worked on the Jan. 6 and Trump cases “is perhaps published by allies of President Trump, thus placing themselves and their families in immediate danger of retribution by the now-pardoned and at-large Jan. 6 convicted felons.”
The criticism says that a number of the plaintiffs’ personal information “has already been posted by Jan. 6 convicted felons on ‘dark web sites.'”
A second suit, filed by the FBI Agents Association and 7 unnamed agents against the DOJ, also notes the survey requesting details about whether the agents worked on Jan. 6-related criminal investigations.
That criticism asks a judge to guard the plaintiffs “from Defendants’ anticipated retaliatory decision to reveal their personal information for opprobrium and potential vigilante motion by those that they were investigating.”
An attorney for the agents within the second suit, Chris Mattei of Koskoff, Koskoff and Bieder, said in a press release, “The DOJ’s plan to release the names of FBI agents who investigated January sixth is an appalling attack on non-partisan public servants who’ve dedicated their lives to protecting our communities and our nation.”
“It is evident that the threatened disclosure is a prelude to an illegal purge of the FBI solely driven by the Trump Administration’s vengeful and political motivations,” said Mattei. “Releasing the names of those agents would ignite a firestorm of harassment towards them and their families and it have to be stopped immediately.”
CNBC has requested comment from the DOJ on the suits.
The third lawsuit was filed by the advocacy group Doctors for America against the Office of Personnel Management, the Health and Human Services Department, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration.
That criticism challenges the abrupt removal Friday from CDC and FDA web sites “a broad range of health-related data and other information.”
Zach Shelley, an attorney for Public Citizen Litigation Group, which is representing Doctors for America within the suit, told CNBC that “without the data that the CDC and these other agencies have taken down, more persons are going to get sick, more persons are going to suffer and more persons are going to die.”
Shelley said that under the Trump administration, “agencies are taking motion that undermines their stated mission.”
The suit says that data is usually utilized by “health professionals to diagnose and treat patients and by researchers to advance public health, including through clinical trials meant to ascertain the security and efficacy of medical products.”
The removal of the information got here two days after Charles Ezell, OPM’s acting director, issued a memo that ordered federal agency heads to “terminate” programs “that promote or inculcate gender ideology” and take away all web sites, social media accounts and other media which have that goal.
Ezell’s order got here greater than every week after Trump signed an executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”
The suit says that before that unannounced removal, the datasets had been on the web sites for years.
Their removal “creates a dangerous gap within the scientific data available to observe and reply to disease outbreaks, deprives physicians of resources that guide clinical practice, and takes away key resources for communicating and interesting with patients,” the suit says.
The CDC removed web pages for its Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance System, pages dedicated to data on “Adolescent and School Health,” in addition to pages for “The Social Vulnerability Index” and “The Environmental Justice Index,” in accordance with the suit.
Also removed was a report and web pages related to HIV infections, the criticism says.
The FDA removed several pages, including one titled “Study of Sex Differences within the Clinical Evaluation
of Medical Products,” and one other titled “Diversity Motion Plans to Improve Enrollment of
Participants from Underrepresented Populations in Clinical Studies.”
“The selections by CDC, FDA, and HHS to remove the webpages and datasets contradict their stated missions and are causing and can cause substantial harm to Plaintiff and its members, in addition to other physicians, researchers, and patients who depend on the removed webpages and datasets,” the suit says.
Spokespeople for OPM, HHS and CDC declined to comment on the lawsuit. The media affairs office of FDA didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment.
