Back in June, I condemned the Biden administration’s outrageous prosecution of Dr. Eithan Haim. Dr. Haim is the courageous whistleblower who revealed that Texas Children’s Hospital (in Christopher Rufo’s words) “secretly continued to perform transgender medical interventions, including the use of implantable puberty blockers, on minor children” after it had publicly announced that it would no longer do so. As I explained, the only reason that the Department of Justice was targeting Dr. Haim with a life-destroying criminal prosecution is that he ran afoul of the transgender ideology that dominates the Biden administration.
It’s gotten much worse. 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.”
The only “false pretenses” here are DOJ’s—specifically, DOJ’s false pretenses that, in the words of Attorney General Merrick Garland, it “makes decisions about criminal investigations based only on the facts and the law.” It’s long past time for DOJ to end its politically motivated prosecution of Dr. Haim.