The Justice Department on Monday indicted a Texas doctor who revealed that Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) was still performing transgender procedures on children after stating publicly that it was no longer doing so.
Dr. Eithan Haim, 34, of Dallas is being charged with violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) for leaking TCH patient records to journalist Christopher Rufo in 2023 to prove the hospital was lying when it announced in 2022 that it was halting “gender-affirming care” for minors. (The day after Rufo’s story was published, the Texas Legislature banned such treatments.)
Haim, then a resident at Baylor College of Medicine, had previously worked at TCH during his residency.
“There were a few [TCH] 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 News in March.
Haim, who believes that transgender treatments for children are the modern-day equivalent of the once-hailed lobotomy, decided to blow the whistle on TCH, obtaining patient records from the hospital’s database and giving them to Rufo. Both Haim and Rufo maintain that Haim had fully redacted all personally identifiable information from the records prior to leaking them; and, as National Review’s Madeleine Kearns explained, “if no patient is identifiable … it’s not a violation of HIPAA.”
In a press release announcing the indictment, the Justice Department claimed: “In April 2023, Haim allegedly requested to re-activate his login access at TCH to access pediatric patients not under his care. The indictment alleges he obtained unauthorized access to personal information of pediatric patients under false pretenses and later disclosed it to a media contact.”
Perhaps that is true, but considering that — assuming Haim and Rufo are telling the truth — no patient was identified in the disclosure, it hardly warrants a federal investigation and the threat of 10 years’ imprisonment and a fine of up to $250,000. As The New American observed in March:
“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.
“Of course, this is not the first time that we’ve seen the Justice Department behave this way, wielding executive power to intimidate both political opponents and cultural enemies,” said Kearns. “We’ve seen this with pro-life Americans, traditionalist Catholics, even vaccine skeptics. And … it looks like they’re trying to bully their enemies into kind of going along.”
According to a letter from Haim’s attorneys to Representatives Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Chip Roy (R-Texas), the government, in the person of Assistant U.S. Attorney Tina Ansari, is clearly siding with the child-mutilators at TCH. The New American:
Despite never having seen the purported evidence against Haim and not knowing if Haim’s alleged conduct violated the privacy provisions of [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 [as an Assistant U.S. Attorney] 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.’”
“Dr. Haim blew the whistle against a hospital that proclaimed it had stopped performing gender-changing surgeries and treatments on minors, when, in fact, it had not,” Haim’s lawyer, Mark Lytle, told the Daily Caller. “These surgeries are a violation of Texas law. Dr. Haim was brave in coming forward. Now the federal government is coming after him. He will strongly defend himself at trial and we expect he will be found not guilty.”
Haim, whose GiveSendGo page has raised nearly $700,000 to cover his legal expenses, appears unfazed by the indictment.
“Why should I be intimidated into silence when what we exposed was voted to become illegal, and I had not violated any privacy laws?” Haim told the Daily Wire. “For me, it’s obvious that this is a political investigation in order to prevent this from happening at other hospitals that might be lying to the public about the existence of their programs.”
Had TCH followed through on its announcement, Haim would not have felt compelled to uncover the truth and would thus not be in legal jeopardy. Unfortunately, noted Kearns, “the nature of the transgender medical scandal is that they avoid sunlight.”
“There’s nothing a doctor should do behind closed doors that they’re unwilling to defend in public,” Haim told the Daily Caller. “That’s never how medicine should be, especially when it involves children.”
