The Justice Department is investigating a doctor who revealed that Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) was continuing to conduct transgender procedures after publicly stating that they had ceased.
“I’m being targeted because I’m a whistle-blower,” 33-year-old general surgeon Dr. Eithan Haim told CBN News.
TCH announced in March 2022 that it would no longer provide so-called “gender-affirming care” for minors given Governor Greg Abbott’s order to the state’s child-welfare agency to consider such “care” child abuse.
Haim, then a resident at the Houston hospital, later learned that TCH’s announcement had been a lie.
“There were a few residents who I knew who said that they had just finished implanting a puberty-blocking device in an 11, 12, 13-year-old kid who believed they were transgender, who had all these psychiatric issues which were being unaddressed,” Haim told CBN.
Haim tracked down medical records substantiating his hunch and, after redacting the patients’ names and other personally identifiable information, leaked them to journalist Christopher Rufo. Rufo published a story about Haim’s discovery, not identifying him at that time, in May 2023. The next day, the Texas Legislature banned transgender treatments for minors.
Five weeks later, on the very day Haim was to graduate from surgical training, federal agents appeared at his door. Haim took the advice of his wife, who was then seeking to become an Assistant U.S. Attorney, not to speak to them without an attorney present. They then gave him a letter signed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Tina Ansari informing him that he was a “potential target” of a criminal investigation into a case involving “medical records.”
“The largest children’s hospital in the world,” Haim told CBN, “was lying about a program that was manipulating, mutilating, and sterilizing young, confused, adolescent children.” Yet instead of investigating that conduct, the Biden administration went after the man who revealed it to the world.
On a GiveSendGo page seeking donations to help defray his legal costs, Haim wrote, “I knew that speaking out would necessarily put myself and my family at great risk, but after experiencing the extent of the corruption first-hand, it became clear that silence would never be an option.”
Haim found an ally in the Houston-based Burke Law Group, whose attorneys, he penned, “are all-in for this fight” — not just to defend him but to stand up for laws prohibiting transgender treatments for minors.
In January, Haim’s lawyers sent a letter to Congressmen Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, and Chip Roy (R-Texas), chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government, recounting the many suspicious details of the Justice Department’s investigation of Haim.
Besides the fact that the investigation was launched with what the attorneys characterized as “exceptional speed,” their letter makes it clear that the probe was designed to intimidate Haim and, by extension, anyone who challenges the medical establishment’s embrace of “gender-affirming care,” regardless of the law or the facts.
Despite never having seen the purported evidence against Haim and not knowing if Haim’s alleged conduct violated the privacy provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Ansari insisted that Haim was surely guilty of something illegal, the letter claims. “She stated that if she thought Dr. Haim had violated the law, she would take him to trial by jury, even ‘on a technicality’ and without concern for losing.” She also “stated that she was searching other criminal statutes to see whether she could prosecute Dr. Haim for causing [a] backlash” against the doctors who performed the supposedly halted procedures at TCH.
According to the attorneys, Ansari, “despite claiming to hold no opinion on the issue,” defended the procedures, the doctors who performed them, and TCH. But she “balked at our assertion that the hospital itself had potentially engaged in deceptive and fraudulent conduct.”
Ansari even threatened Haim’s wife’s career because she supposedly “interfered with a criminal investigation” by telling her husband to get an attorney before speaking to the feds, the letter alleges. Ansari “said that she and the agents would not mention Mrs. Haim’s behavior to the background investigators ‘unless [Mrs. Haim] becomes difficult.’”
Marcella Burke, one of Haim’s attorneys, told CBN that “the investigation [is] a scare tactic.”
“The Department of Justice, the FBI, Health and Human Services division, there are numerous agencies within the Department of Justice that are abusing their power to coerce whistle-blowers to keep their mouths shut,” she said.
Haim, for his part, refuses to be intimidated. According to CBN:
Dr. Haim was a featured speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. on the “Genesis 1:27” panel, referring to the Bible verse that says, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
During the discussion, Haim said transgender treatments on minors are like lobotomies — the once-touted brain surgery to treat mental illness that was later determined to do more harm than good.
“What is happening to these kids is not medicine,” said Dr. Haim.
On his GiveSendGo page, Haim wrote that while the fight against the investigation has cost him practically every cent he has, “Whatever we have paid — whether financial, emotional, or career-wise — has been well worth it” to exercise this “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to stand up for what is right and against those who abuse their authority to silence those who speak the truth.”
