Targeting the Trans-Surgery Whistleblower.
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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.
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Eric Adams, Bob Menéndez, Hunter Biden, Henry Cuellar, and Cori Bush have no idea what you’re talking about.
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New Indictment of Whistleblower Eithan Haim Is Even More Outrageous
You shouldn’t need any further evidence that the only reason that the Department of Justice is targeting courageous whistleblower Dr. Eithan Haim with a life-destroying criminal prosecution is that he ran afoul of the transgender ideology that dominates the Biden administration. But if you do, the superseding indictment that DOJ filed on Thursday provides it.
DOJ’s original indictment propagated the false, but incendiary, notion that Dr. Haim disclosed HIPAA-protected information about pediatric patients and that journalist Christopher Rufo “published [that] HIPAA protected information.” It further misled the world into thinking that Dr. Haim sneakily obtained access to Texas Children’s Hospital’s electronic medical patient files more than two years after his work at the hospital had ended. And it alleged that Dr. Haim “caused malicious harm to TCH, pediatric patients at TCH and its physicians by contacting” Rufo.
DOJ’s superseding indictment implicitly concedes the major point that I spelled out in my first post on its persecution of Dr. Haim: Dr. Haim did not disclose HIPAA-protected information to Rufo, and Rufo did not publish HIPAA-protected information.
Paragraph 18 of the original indictment alleged that Rufo (“Person1”) “published HIPAA protected information obtained by Haim.” Paragraph 14 of the superseding indictment drops the mistaken claim that the information that Rufo published was HIPAA-protected. It now contends only that Rufo “published personal information.” That information, I’ll emphasize, did not remotely identify the patients, and DOJ has never contended otherwise. As I’ve pointed out, DOJ discloses far more revealing information about the patients, as it identifies them by their initials.
Unlike the original indictment, Counts 2 through 4 of the superseding indictment no longer contain the false charge that Dr. Haim “did obtain and/or wrongfully disclose” HIPAA-protected information. Those revised counts now allege that he “did obtain and/or use” such information.
DOJ’s superseding indictment also acknowledges what I highlighted a month ago: far from sneaking his way onto TCH’s patient database long after his work at TCH ended, Haim continued to see patients at TCH at least as late as April 2023. The superseding indictment no longer alleges that Haim in April 2023 “requested remote access so he could discreetly covertly access pediatric patient files.” It instead implicitly recognizes that he legitimately had access to the database.
DOJ’s superseding indictment no longer contends that Dr. Haim “caused malicious harm” to anyone. It instead maintains that he acted with an “intent” to “cause malicious harm to TCH and its physicians”—not to patients. So why are the patient-focused protections of HIPAA being misused to protect TCH and its physicians against having their abuses exposed?
DOJ’s allegation that Dr. Haim intended malicious harm against TCH and its physicians is absurd. As I’ve stated from the beginning, there is not an iota of evidence that would suggest that Dr. Haim acted with malice. In his own words, “I knew that it was my moral responsibility to expose what was happening to these children.”
Although it’s good to see DOJ retreat from some of its more outlandish claims, that retreat makes it all the more outrageous that it is continuing to prosecute Dr. Haim and to punish him with penalties of up to 10 years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines.. It is inconceivable that the Biden administration would be prosecuting another whistleblower on these alleged facts if one of its pet causes—here, transgender medical interventions on children—were not involved. It’s long past time for Attorney General Merrick Garland to dismiss this indictment.
