Sherry Chen by Cowan Lake in Wilmington, Ohio. Her lawyer asks, “How is this not a clear case of racial discrimination?” CreditMaddie McGarvey for The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — Government officials say they intend to fire a Chinese-American hydrologist who was prosecuted but eventually cleared of espionage-related charges.

The hydrologist, Sherry Chen, an employee of the National Weather Service, received a letter over Labor Day weekend notifying her that the government planned to fire her for many of the same reasons it originally prosecuted her.

Last year, federal agents investigated Mrs. Chen as a possible Chinese spy.They found no evidence of espionage, but still arrested her on lesser charges that could have led to 25 years in prison and $1 million in fines. The Justice Department ultimately dropped the case.

Since then, she has been on paid administrative leave waiting to learn whether the government will allow her to return to her job at the Weather Service’s office in Wilmington, Ohio.

Countering online hacking and espionage threats has become a priority for the Obama administration, and a cornerstone of a strategy to counter those threats has been more aggressive investigations and prosecutions.

But the charges brought against Mrs. Chen, in addition to separate charges against a Chinese-American professor at Temple University, which were dropped Friday, has renewed concerns that innocent Chinese-Americans are becoming targets for prosecution.

Earlier this year, 22 members of Congress asked Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch to determine whether ethnicity was a factor in the espionage charges against Mrs. Chen, who was born in China but is a naturalized citizen of the United States.

Representative Ted W. Lieu, a Democrat of California, said in an interview on Tuesday that the decision to fire Mrs. Chen was “outrageous” and a “saving face issue” for the agency.

Mr. Lieu said he planned to ask the Justice Department for an independent investigation into whether the initial charges against Mrs. Chen were warranted, and whether, in light of the charges that were also filed against the Temple professor and then dropped, there is a pattern of Chinese-Americans being arrested and indicted on charges based on their ethnicity.

“Their allegations against her do not rise to the level of a termination,” Mr. Lieu said, adding that Mrs. Chen had no previous disciplinary record and had in fact received top reviews and awards for her government service. “If she was not a Chinese-American, she would not have been arrested, indicted and would not now be in the process of being fired.”

Last December, federal agents arrested Mrs. Chen and accused her of illegally accessing a federal dam database on behalf of foreign interests in China. However, the investigation found that Mrs. Chen had only shared information from publicly available websites with a former college classmate, now China’s vice water minister, who asked her how reservoir projects are funded in the United States.

In her search to answer his question, Mrs. Chen asked supervisors for relevant data and at one point searched the National Inventory of Dams’ password-protected website, using a password provided by a colleague. Mrs. Chen never found any information relevant to her classmate’s query, but did download information that was relevant to her work forecasting flooding along the Ohio River, which she never used or shared.

Her use of a colleague’s password to download data from a government website became a major component of the government’s espionage case against her, as well as her dismissal.

In a letter repeating many of the earlier charges, Laura K. Furgione, the deputy director of the National Weather Service, wrote that she proposed to fire Mrs. Chen for “conduct demonstrating untrustworthiness,” “misrepresentation,” “misuse of a federal government database” and “lack of candor.” Ms. Furgione did not respond to emailed requests for interviews.

Her letter, which was dated Sept. 4, the Friday before Labor Day, gave Mrs. Chen 15 calendar days to reply.

One of the reasons Ms. Furgione cited for Mrs. Chen’s dismissal was new. She wrote that the government had concluded Mrs. Chen “demonstrated untrustworthiness” because she had “secretly provided internal N.W.S. data to a member of the general public.”

Ms. Furgione referred to a former employee of the National Weather Service, Thomas Adams, Mrs. Chen’s former boss at the agency, who had emailed Mrs. Chen, asking her to send him data he had left behind.

However, Mrs. Chen’s supervisor at the National Weather Service told federal agents that the data Mrs. Chen had provided Mr. Adams was not “considered proprietary data.”

The other reasons for the dismissal repeated earlier claims regarding use of the co-worker’s password, which the co-worker had made available to everyone in the office, and even emailed to Mrs. Chen in this case.

On Tuesday, Mrs. Chen said she was devastated to learn the government did not intend to reinstate her.

“Why are they doing this to me?” she said. “They are going to take everything away from me.”

Mrs. Chen’s lawyer, Peter Zeidenberg, a partner at the firm Arent Fox, said he planned to help Mrs. Chen respond to Ms. Furgione’s letter. He said if her gravest offense was breaking policy, it is telling that the colleague who provided the password is not being disciplined.

“He gave her the password. He was the supervisor in charge of these passwords,” Mr. Zeidenberg said. “He didn’t know this was a grave offense. So why did they expect her to know?”

“How is this not a clear case of racial discrimination?” Mr. Zeidenberg asked.

Mr. Zeidenberg said Mrs. Chen had not yet decided how to respond to her dismissal. On Tuesday, Mrs. Chen planned to appear in front of Arent Fox’s offices in Washington to solicit donations for her legal defense.

“I have no choice but to get legal representation to respond to this trauma once again,” Mrs. Chen said.（source：New York Times）