By Jonathan Landay
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A U.S. judge on Tuesday put on hold for five days the firings of 11 CIA officers who were ordered to resign or face imminent termination over their temporary jobs with the spy agency’s diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs.
In an administrative stay issued after a hearing, U.S. District Court Judge Anthony Trenga gave the government until Thursday to file a response to the officers’ request for a temporary restraining order, and set arguments for Monday.
“These people are being fired just because of an assumption that’s been made that they are leftists,” the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Kevin Carroll, himself a former CIA undercover officer, told Reuters.
The CIA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Administrative stays, which do not deal with the merits of a case, are orders to briefly pause action at issue in the dispute to preserve the status quo and give courts more time to consider legal arguments.
Carroll said his clients are among 51 CIA officers temporarily assigned to DEIA programs who were placed on paid administrative leave two days after U.S. President Donald Trump issued a sweeping executive order on January 22 ending such programs across the government.
The 51 officers were summoned to the visitors center, outside the agency’s high-security perimeter in Langley, Virginia, and had their identification badges “seized,” he said.
They were given three options that they were ordered to accept by 5 p.m. on Wednesday: retirement by October 1, resignation effective on Tuesday or termination on May 20, according to copies of unclassified notices the officers were given that Reuters reviewed.
Unless they made their decisions by the deadline, they would be terminated, said the notices, one of which had spaces for their signatures and those of a witness.
Carroll said the orders violated CIA administrative procedures, the Administrative Procedures Act and his clients’ constitutional rights.
The CIA, he said, argued that the National Security Act gives CIA Director John Ratcliffe the power to fire personnel when it is in the U.S. national security interest.
Carroll said the people he represented were not counterintelligence threats. In his filing, he described them and their families as collateral damage from “a domestic political dispute” between the Republican and Democratic parties regarding the efficacy and legality of DEIA initiatives.
“They’ve not been accused of any misconduct at all,” he told Reuters.
(Reporting by Jonathan Landay; Editing by Don Durfee, David Gregorio and Daniel Wallis)
