Targeting the Trans-Surgery Whistleblower.
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Why two? Celebrities might do that, normal defendants don’t. And 1000/hr is celebrity attorney money.
Also, how much prep can you do without a charge? You could count the hours on one hand. If you add a deposition may two hands.
Seems fishy.
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Maybe he’s spent the money on publicity and trips to the hill and is counting that as defense.
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@jon-nyc said in Targeting the Trans-Surgery Whistleblower.:
Why two? Celebrities might do that, normal defendants don’t. And 1000/hr is celebrity attorney money.
Also, how much prep can you do without a charge? You could count the hours on one hand. If you add a deposition may two hands.
Seems fishy.
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A lot of firms in the AM200 are billing 2nd year associates at just $995 per hour… They are in a position where his wife knows the very best and they can afford the very best.
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The DOJ comes to your door and tells you that you are the target of a criminal probe, you wouldn’t lawyer up as strongly as you could?
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As I mentioned before, I imagine they likely worked with an attorney to prepare the documents before they were released. I don’t know how many hours that involved.
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also reasonably sure that the specific phrasing has a lot of wiggle room for lost income, travel, etc…
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1 - sure you can pay 1k an hour for a lawyer if you choose to.
2 - yes, I would hire a criminal defense attorney. Probably would require a 25k retainer. More later if it went to trial.
3 - not defense money
4 - not defense money.As I said above, he’s probably counting publicity and political lobbying as defense.
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@jon-nyc said in Targeting the Trans-Surgery Whistleblower.:
If that’s the case he’s spent far too much on legal advice given he hasn’t even been charged with anything.
Something seems missing.
Earlier this week, U.S. marshals appeared at Haim’s home and summoned him to court to face an indictment on four felony counts of violating HIPAA. His initial appearance is next Monday, where he will learn more about the charges against him.
According to one of Haim’s attorneys, Marcella Burke, he is anxious to get to trial to get his side of the story told; she is confident that this will result in the correct decision being made. (For my own part, I can confirm that nothing in the information provided to me identified any individual; all the documents were, in fact, carefully redacted.) Nonetheless, the prosecutor has pressed forward, hoping, at the least, to intimidate other medical professionals who would consider blowing the whistle on the barbarism of “transgender medicine.”
Despite the threat to his livelihood and freedom, Haim is undeterred. He plans to mount a vigorous defense in court and is soliciting public support.
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“Team of Attorneys”…
I’m telling you, this release and whistleblowing was extremely carefully managed. Between the wife’s legal expertise and his own training on HIPAA, they not only dotted their i’s and crossed their t’s, they had highlighter markers and security cameras ready to document any blowback. I’ll pull back from suggesting that they were intending to have the blowback, but they weren’t surprised.
But yes, I am also confident that he is exaggerating his costs or including things that aren’t strictly legal fees.
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I'm very concerned about the current legal bankruptcy practiced by the Feds. In more than 90% of cases, defendants settle, because they can no longer afford to defend themselves against the resources of the government.
Add in specific targeting by the DOJ and we have government by the financial lash.
This is wrong.
Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion. -
@Jolly said in Targeting the Trans-Surgery Whistleblower.:
they can no longer afford to defend themselves against the resources of the government
Even if you're innocent, we will still punish you for what we accuse you of.
The process is the punishment.
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Assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas Tina Ansari, whose office is leading the criminal investigation, argues Haim had no right to share the medical records of minor patients with the public.
However, she neglected to mention that the documents disclosed were not patient charts, were redacted to protect sensitive patient information, and complied with HIPAA, which permits anonymized information to be disclosed generally, and even protected information can be publicized if it’s used to stop egregious medical misconduct.
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Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion. -
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@Jolly said in Targeting the Trans-Surgery Whistleblower.:
I'm very concerned about the current legal bankruptcy practiced by the Feds. In more than 90% of cases, defendants settle, because they can no longer afford to defend themselves against the resources of the government.
Add in specific targeting by the DOJ and we have government by the financial lash.
This is wrong.
By promising to go for the maximum sentence if you don’t take the plea, the government also effectively punishes people for exercising their 4th amendment right to a trial.
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Four counts of HIPAA violations.
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So he even confessed.
Seems like you could blow the whistle without actually providing patient records to an activist.
Rufo could have generated enough noise for the Governor to start an investigation based on testimony and de-identified details alone.
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@jon-nyc said in Targeting the Trans-Surgery Whistleblower.:
So he even confessed.
Dr. Haim maintains that the documents provided to Rulo confirmed that gender-affirming care continued to be provided but that sensitive patient information was redacted from the documents.
I wonder what he understands "sensitive" to mean.
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@jon-nyc said in Targeting the Trans-Surgery Whistleblower.:
So he even confessed.
Seems like you could blow the whistle without actually providing patient records to an activist.
Rufo could have generated enough noise for the Governor to start an investigation based on testimony and de-identified details alone.
Confessed to being the whistleblower? Who cares? Show me where the documents he shared were identifiable to any patients.
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If he didn’t violate hippa that should come out in a pre trial motion. The case should get tossed.
My guess is it’s not that simple.
Hence my point.
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https://www.thefp.com/p/eithan-haim-gender-distressed-children-indicted
As Haim later wrote in City Journal, “Before leaving, they handed me a letter revealing that I was a ‘potential target’ of an investigation involving alleged violation of federal criminal law related to medical records.” Haim then went public about the threat facing him in an interview with Rufo. (The U.S Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas did not respond to a request for comment.)
Haim was indicted last week, but, as of this writing, he and his attorneys do not yet know the precise nature of the charges. One of his lawyers, Mark Lytle, told me it’s very unusual to bring felony charges for an alleged HIPAA violation unless there is a significant underlying crime, such as a hospital clerk selling a celebrity’s medical records. He said the indictment of Haim seems politically motivated. “The government is entering into the town square on the culture wars and didn’t like what Eithan had to say,” said Lytle. “I think they are looking to make an example of him.”
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“The government admits evidence that contradicts their allegations against Dr. Haim,” the doctor’s lawyer, Marcella Burke, told The Daily Wire on Monday morning. “The government’s own disclosures blow apart their allegations. They have both the facts and the law wrong and we look forward to clearing this up so Dr. Haim can move on with his life.”
Haim had blown the whistle on Texas Children’s in May 2023, in an explosive story published by journalist Christopher Rufo, alleging that the hospital had lied about ending its transgender medical program and was still performing attempted transition procedures on children as young as 11.
In June 2023, Haim received a home visit from federal agents. He discovered that the Justice Department was targeting him, attempting to charge him with four felony counts of violating HIPAA.
The DOJ has based their case, in large part, on the claim that Haim had no reason to access Texas Children’s Hospital records after he finished a surgical rotation at the hospital in January 2021.
On Friday, however, the government disclosed new information to Haim’s defense team that “directly contradicts” this claim, showing records of Haim’s work at Texas Children’s on nine different occasions between January 20, 2021 and April 14, 2023.
“The entire premise of the government’s case has been that Dr. Haim was an interloper, falsely claiming responsibility for TCH patients to hide some nefarious and malicious reason for accessing TCH records,” reads the filing, first obtained by The Daily Wire. “This rested on the foundational premise that Dr. Haim treated no patients at TCH after January 2021. But the government’s Friday the 13th disclosure has now blown apart this entire premise.”
Dr. Eithan Haim, left (Yi-Chin Lee/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images)
Haim’s lawyers say that the first count of the DOJ’s indictment, alleging that Haim acted under false pretenses, must be dismissed since the “legitimacy of the rest of the indictment is now in question.”“Until Friday night, the government has insisted to the defense and the judge that Dr. Haim had zero reason to access TCH medical records,” another one of Haim’s attorneys, Ryan Patrick, told The Daily Wire in a Monday statement. “Instead, what this shows is the government convinced a grand jury to indict Dr. Haim without the FBI requesting a basic text search of his name inside the medical record system. It appears that nearly everything the government thought it knew is now wrong.”
That may well be true, but if he was not a caregiver for the patients' records he looked at, it might still be a HIPAA violation.
