DOJ Indicts Whistleblowing Surgeon for Exposing Transgender Procedures at Texas Children’s Hospital

The Department of Justice has indicted Dr. Eithan Haim, a little-known surgeon who exposed Texas Children’s Hospital for secretly conducting transgender surgeries and treatments on minors, on four felony counts related to his alleged violation of a medical-records law.

Last year, Haim anonymously leaked evidence of the child sex-change procedures to conservative journalist Christopher Rufo. The documents revealed that Texas Children’s Hospital had continued running its transgender program, despite announcing that the program had been discontinued in accordance with Governor Greg Abbott’s 2022 directive equating such medical interventions with child abuse.

The Houston-based hospital was ultimately forced to stop its trans-medical practices after a state law took effect in September 2023, prohibiting drug and surgical “gender-affirming” interventions for minors.

U.S. marshals notified Haim of the indictment at his home this week and summoned him to court for violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Haim and his legal team, who don’t yet know the full nature of the charges, are set to appear in court on June 17.

“My client is anxious to get to trial to get his side of the story told,” Haim’s attorney Marcella Burke told National Review. “I am confident this will result in the correct decision being made.”

In January, Haim publicly identified himself as the whistleblower in an effort to protect himself from retaliation by the DOJ and the Department of Health and Human Services. Greeted by federal officials at his doorstep last June, the general surgeon discovered that he was a potential target in a criminal investigation regarding his leaking of medical records. The prosecutor claims he failed to redact sensitive patient information.

“After understanding how far this corruption went, I had no other option but to take the story public and fight back,” Haim previously told National Review. “If I don’t do this now, I’m going to pass on this conflict to my children. That’s something I will not tolerate.”

“There was this deep visceral part of me that knew exactly what was happening — that they were there because we had challenged the political ideology, and they were there to make an example out of me,” Haim said, describing the moment federal agents showed up at his door.

Rufo, who reviewed the records himself before publishing the initial article, denies that the documents exposed the personal information of patients. “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,” the journalist wrote in his latest City Journal story, in which he broke the news that Haim had been indicted.

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.

Haim and Ansari’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.