These are the makings of a major scandal that should be plastered across the front page of every newspaper in America. Instead, hardly anyone has heard of it. Why?
The answer is twofold. First, the former Governor is current Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Second, her administration’s actions were undertaken in an effort to protect the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood. One needn’t be Sherlock Holmes to figure out why the mainstream media have chosen to ignore the story.
It all started in Sebelius’s first year as Governor of Kansas, 2003, when state Attorney General Phill Kline, a pro-life Republican, began investigating whether abortion clinics in the Sunflower State were reporting child rapes as required by law. “Our evidence,” Kline recalled in an article at PlannedParenthoodCorruption.org, “had revealed that during a time when 166 abortions were performed on children in Kansas, Planned Parenthood had only reported one case of child molestation.”
That evidence was not easy to come by. The Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services (SRS) and Department of Health and Environment (KDHE), both controlled by the staunchly pro-abortion Democrat Sebelius, fought tooth and nail to keep Kline from getting his hands on the relevant records. The courts eventually sided with Kline, and SRS and KDHE were forced to turn them over.
Among those records were reports on each abortion performed in the state, which abortion clinics were required to file. Kline kept copies of those reports and then, in 2004, subpoenaed Planned Parenthood for its own records. Like its allies in Topeka, Planned Parenthood delayed complying until it received a court order two years later.
Some of the reports provided by Planned Parenthood did not line up with the originals that KDHE had provided. Instead, “they had been filed with bogus language where legitimate medical reasons were supposed to have been supplied,” according to LifeNews.com. This led a judge in 2007 to find “probable cause to believe that Planned Parenthood committed 107 criminal acts, including 23 felonies,” one for each of the reports that had been altered, Kline wrote.
By that time Kline had been ousted as Attorney General after pro-abortion forces and their friends in the media targeted him for electoral defeat. By a stroke of luck, he was then appointed to the post his successor, Paul Morrison, had vacated — District Attorney for Johnson County, where Planned Parenthood’s offices just happened to reside. He was thus able to continue his investigation.
Kline left the copies of the documents originally provided by KDHE and Planned Parenthood with the judge. The judge then turned his copies over to incoming Attorney General Morrison, who in turn sued both the judge and Kline in an attempt to force them to turn all evidence over to Planned Parenthood. Morrison, said Kline, “lost both of these lawsuits but the litigation delayed my efforts for years more and resulted in the Sebelius-appointed Kansas Supreme Court ordering a secret trial and at one time, secretly silencing a witness to Planned Parenthood’s criminal conduct.”
Morrison was forced to resign amid scandal when his mistress, who still worked in the Johnson County District Attorney’s office, now reporting to Kline, publicly alleged that “Morrison was trying to use their relationship to interfere with the investigation of Planned Parenthood,” according to Kline. Sebelius then appointed Morrison’s successor, Stephen Six, who proceeded to obstruct the investigation further.
Finally, in 2011, a pre-trial hearing for the Planned Parenthood case got under way, with the current Johnson County District Attorney, Steve Howe, leading the prosecution. Then two bombshells were dropped.
First, KDHE had destroyed its original copies of the 23 abortion reports in question in 2005, once it became clear that it would have to present them in court. “Calling it a ‘routine’ document destruction,” observed Kline, “the Sebelius administration shredded documents it knew served as key evidence in a criminal investigation against a Sebelius ally.”
The second bombshell was that KDHE wasn’t the only Sebelius administration agency to destroy evidence. In 2009, the Attorney General’s office, under the leadership of Six, also shredded documents related to the investigation that had been provided to the office during Kline’s tenure. “The Six Attorney General’s office destroyed documents produced pursuant to a criminal subpoena which it knew was evidence in a criminal prosecution filed in October of 2007,” Kline stated. “Not only this, Six knew I was trying to use those documents in the criminal case.”
Because of the destruction of evidence, Howe has asked the court to dismiss the felony charges against Planned Parenthood.
At the same time as Kline, and then Howe, continued to pursue the case, Kansas Supreme Court Justice Carol Beier joined Planned Parenthood in filing an ethics complaint against Kline. The same Supreme Court on which Beier and four other Sebelius appointees sit appointed the prosecutor and the panel that heard the complaint and ultimately recommended (in October, just as the criminal case against Planned Parenthood was going to court) that Kline’s law license be indefinitely suspended — this despite the fact that not one but two previous ethics investigations had cleared him of any wrongdoing.
One of the charges leveled against Kline was that initially he didn’t tell the Sebelius administration he was investigating Planned Parenthood. However, as Kline pointed out, “it is a longstanding principle that law enforcement does not have a duty to tell a third-party witness about the nature of an investigation.” Moreover, he explained, his “chief investigator testified that one of the reasons he decided to not inform Sebelius about the investigation is fear that she would tip off the target and that it would result in the destruction of evidence” — a fear that proved to be well-founded indeed.
Such blatant evidence of criminal behavior would have sunk the career of, say, a Republican Governor who had taken similar steps in defense of a corporation. Sebelius, on the other hand, was rewarded for her crimes with a Cabinet position in the Obama administration and, following the passage of ObamaCare, unprecedented power over every American’s healthcare.
If the American Life League (ALL) has its way, she will not retain that position and power for long. ALL has produced a five-minute video recounting the story of Kline’s investigation and Sebelius’s destruction of evidence. In the course of the video, host Michael Hichborn observes:
When Penn State football coach Joe Paterno failed to call police after learning that a former member of his staff allegedly raped a 10-year-old boy, he was fired from his position. Yet although Planned Parenthood continues to protect rapists, it’s suffered no punishment, and its protector, Kathleen Sebelius, has a cozy job in D.C.
ALL is calling for Sebelius’ resignation and has posted an online petition to that effect for concerned citizens to sign.
Even the most ardent abortion-rights supporter ought to be able to get behind this effort. It is one thing to argue that Planned Parenthood has the right to conduct procedures that the government has declared legal. It is quite another to say that the organization should also be permitted to cover up child rape, aided and joined in its destruction of crucial evidence by its allies in government.
Photo of Kathleen Sebelius: AP Images
