2 MD doctors who beat Russian conspiracy case sue over news release

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Two Maryland doctors whose indictment was thrown out by a judge in 2024 sued federal prosecutors and health officials on Thursday, alleging Privacy Act and the Fifth Amendment violations stemming those charges being issued.

The physicians, Dr. Jamie Lee Henry and Dr. Anna Gabrielian, are seeking damages of over $25 million each from the Department of Justice for continuing to publish on its website a 2022 news release announcing the indictment, which alleged the pair conspired to provide confidential health information to assist Russia.

In the new civil suit, the Montgomery County residents are also seeking a court order for the Department of Health and Human Services and the Defense Health Agency to remove or amend an entry about Henry in a national database used in background checks of health care professionals.

Henry, a former U.S. Army major, and Gabrielian, an ex-Johns Hopkins anesthesiologist, allege that they were “immediately rendered unemployable” when the news release was first published. They allege that although the Justice Department eventually edited the post in early 2026 to add a disclaimer that the charges were dismissed with prejudice, it was too late, and the “update did not cure the damage already wrought” by prior defects.

A spokesperson for the Maryland U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.

“We believe their rights were violated and that the government’s actions were unlawful,” said David P. Sheldon, a military defense lawyer who is representing physicians in the civil suit. He said that the doctors’ lives were “utterly destroyed and decimated” because they were cast by prosecutors as “Russian insurrectionists or spies.”

“They’re seeking compensation as a result of the injustice that was done to them,” he said.

The couple was charged in 2022 with conspiracy and violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act after prosecutors said both physicians met with an undercover FBI agent who they believed was affiliated with the Russian government and disclosed several patients’ confidential health information to assist Moscow.

A set of superseding indictments narrowed down some of the allegations, and the case resulted in a mistrial due to a hung jury.

The charges were ultimately dismissed in May 2024 after U.S. District Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher found the government neglected its speedy trial obligations ahead of an attempted retrial.

The civil lawsuit says that the Justice Department’s news release wasn’t updated to reflect the dismissal until this February, more than 20 months after the order. It also says the Justice Department failed to update it after the superseding indictment was issued to scale back a claim that Gabrielian offered assistance to Russia “even if it meant being fired or going to jail.” Prosecutors had a recorded conversation in which she said the opposite, according to the complaint.

The complaint alleges that both Henry and Gabrielian are still banned from Hopkins properties and have been unable to secure full-time hospital employment despite applying “at every major hospital system” in Maryland and Pennsylvania.

Federal prosecutors’ news release was reproduced in an entry about Gabrielian in the Fraud and Abuse Control Information System, a commercial background-screening database for healthcare providers, and “confirmed as current” by the Justice Department even after the case was dismissed, according to the complaint.

The Defense Health Agency permanently revoked Henry’s clinical privileges in 2025 and reported it to the National Practitioner Data Bank, a federal government-run clearinghouse where an entry states that she “provid[ed] or conspir[ed] to provide medical records to the Russian government,” the complaint says.

The Privacy Act requires federal agencies to maintain all records used to make a determination about any individual “with such accuracy, relevance, timeliness, and completeness as is reasonably necessary to assure fairness to the individual in the determination.” It allows individuals to sue in federal court if the agency fails to comply “in such a way as to have an adverse effect” on the person, allowing damages in some cases if the court finds that the government acted “in a manner which was intentional or willful.”

This story has been updated with Sheldon’s comment.