The Department of Justice’s political prosecution of heroic whistleblower Dr. Eithan Haim is apparently not going well in a Texas court.
Dr. Haim disclosed last year that a Houston-based children’s hospital was still allowing illicit sex-change procedures on minors after publicly announcing it would no longer do so.
The Biden Justice Department charged the whistleblower doctor with four counts of violating the patient-privacy provisions of HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), and are seeking to penalize him with up to 10 years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines.
During a motion to dismiss hearing in the Southern District of Texas on Friday, the court excoriated the federal prosecutors for making serious errors in the drafting of the indictment in their rush to try their case before President-elect Trump is inaugurated.
“The court started by laying out the many errors the prosecutors made and asked whether the prosecution would try to correct them, but the prosecutors refused,” wrote lawyer Marcella Burke, founder and managing partner of the Burke Law Group, which is representing Haim, on X. “They charged ahead to have the judge correct errors on the fly so trial starts before a change in administration.”
Another glaring issue for the prosecution was recently brought to light. Tina Ansari, the federal prosecutor who has been leading the outrageous case, was suspended from the Texas bar on September 1 for failure to pay dues, making her continued work on the case a blatant violation of the law and Justice Department policy. She corrected the issue only after the defense brought it to light.
“Typical of the bungling, illicit, twitching pile of catastrophe that is this case,” Burke wrote.
In the spring of 2023, Dr. Haim discovered an illicit child sex-change program at Texas Children’s Hospital’s “transgender” clinic. He contacted City Journal’s Christopher Rufo to blow the whistle on the hospital’s duplicity regarding the clinic’s barbaric practices.
A year earlier, Texas Children’s Hospital announced that it would shut its Child Gender Clinic down, citing potential legal and criminal liability. The announcement came after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had pressured the hospital to stop performing transgender medical procedures on children.
But despite what the hospital said publicly, the procedures allegedly continued unabated.
As Rufo put it, the hospital had “secretly continued to perform transgender medical interventions, including the use of implantable puberty blockers, on minor children.”
Earlier this year, the Biden DOJ sent two FBI agents to the home of a Texas nurse to intimidate her after she also spoke out about the hospital’s illicit child sex-change program.
The nurse, Vanessa Sivadge, told Rufo that the two special agents, Paul Nixon and David McBride, “threatened” her and promised to make life difficult for her if she didn’t cooperate.
The Biden regime’s thuggish tactics appear to have hit a brick wall in court.
According to Burke, the judge “criticized the prosecution for adding the non-existent crime of ‘use’ of personal health information, which is not in HIPAA, to the superseding indictment. The prosecution responded flippantly and could not defend its own conduct.”
Burke wrote on X: “the prosecutors had also cited the wrong statute in the indictment, and again they refused to defend or explain themselves, simply hoping that the court would fix the errors so that the case could proceed to trial.”
Ultimately, the judge refused to fix the government’s errors and signaled that he would dismiss it if the government did not dismiss the case on its own. The government will be accountable for so sloppily stretching the criminal law to extreme lengths to charge.
Previously, the bungling prosecutors were forced to drop the “false pretenses” charge in the first count, as the actual facts in the case destroyed their allegations, as National Review’s Ed Whelan reported back in September.
The supposed factual predicate of DOJ’s indictment, and the explicit charge in the first count, was that Dr. Haim had obtained HIPAA-protected individually identifiable health information “under false pretenses.” The indictment alleged that Dr. Haim completed his medical work at Texas Children’s Hospital in January 2021 and that he later obtained access to TCH’s electronic medical patient files “under the false pretenses that he needed to urgently attend to adult care services.” (Indictment, ¶¶ 9-15.)
But in a letter last Friday, DOJ disclosed to counsel for Dr. Haim that it has learned from TCH that Dr. Haim continued to see patients at TCH after January 2021. Indeed, as late as April 14, 2023—within two weeks of his alleged illegal obtaining of patient records—Dr. Haim was “listed as a resident on an operative note for an adult patient.” (DOJ’s letter is Exhibit A to a motion that Dr. Haim filed today.) In short, DOJ’s entire theory that Dr. Haim had access to TCH’s patient files “under false pretenses” has collapsed.
So much for DOJ’s count one. And the remaining three counts (as I pointed out in my first post) rest on DOJ’s absurd claim that Dr. Haim sought “to cause malicious harm.”
Dr. Haim shared his thoughts on how the case is going on X.
“DOJ so thoroughly embarrassed themselves, it’s hard to comprehend how this is still ongoing,” he wrote. “There’s nothing I can say to translate how bad it was. You have to read it for yourself. And this was only first few minutes!”
“The DOJ tried to get the judge to do their dirty work but he refused their motion to strike the typos and non-crimes from the indictment,” he added.
Dr. Haim said he hoped the judge will make a decision to dismiss the case soon.
The case should be dismissed “with prejudice” and the Judge should consider holding all of the DOJ attorneys in contempt of Court.