Unsealed court documents in the transgender whistleblower case show the DOJ had information that negated HIPAA violations from the start, according to attorneys on the case and court documents reviewed by Fox News Digital.
Dr. Eithan Haim has been the subject of an ongoing criminal case brought by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) after he leaked documents to the media that revealed Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) in Houston was performing transgender medical procedures on him minors until May 2023. , despite the fact that hospital management announced it had stopped offering sex-change surgeries and puberty blockers a year ago.
Fox News Digital reviewed the unsealed documents from the court on Dec. 6, the same day it rejected a request by Haim’s attorney to dismiss the case altogether. Now, the case will go to trial in mid-February.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) initially alleged that Haim did not provide care to TCH patients after 2021, which was used as the basis for its claims that Haim had no reason to access patient records, but the unsealed documents throw down this claim, according to Haim’s lawyers.
Haim’s wife, Andrea, spoke to Fox News Digital about the case because her husband is unable to speak to the media due to a de facto court order.
“Ultimately, what this shows is that the government either knew or, at an absolute minimum, should have known that the allegations they are making against Eithan are completely false,” she said. “That was true in the first indictment, and it continues to be true now that they’re in the third indictment.”
“In a way, it’s vindicating because it’s now making public what we’ve known all along, which is that this is the definition of a gun-toting prosecution that I believe was intended to silence not only Eithan, but the whistleblowers.” others who came out against. narrative about transgender interventions against minors,” she added. “There is no doubt in my mind that they were looking for a crime to charge Eithan with. The failure of their multiple indictments shows how weak their base was from the start.”
The rotation schedule shows Haim was caring for TCH patients as part of his stay well past the January 2021 deadline and into June 2023, which TCH acknowledged as part of correspondence from its legal counsel to the Office of Health and Human Services of the Civil Office. Rights for Alleged Violations of HIPAA.
“The original indictment was based on lies that would otherwise have been harmless defamation,” his lawyers said. “He portrayed Dr. Haim as an interloper with no connection to TCH after January 2021. The false claims allegations were based on his falsely claiming responsibility for non-existent TCH patients in order to gain access to TCH records. “
Dr. Haim asked TCH for access to electronic medical records (EMR) on April 14, 2023, because of a surgery he was scheduled to perform in TCH’s women’s ward that day, according to his attorneys and court documents reviewed by Fox News Digital. .
“Residents assigned to any of the general surgery rotations of Baylor St. Luke (BSLMC) [which Haim was] can also treat patients in TCH ward for women as BCM [Baylor College of Medicine] BSLMC Faculty of General Surgery also provides coverage in the TCH ward for women,” TCH explained in their letter to HHS.
A TCH administrator confirmed that Dr. Haim “could see adult patients and that he visited her office on April 14, 2023 (the same morning we know from patient records that he had surgery at TCH) to request access,” Haim’s attorneys claimed. . “None of this material supports the claim that when he requested access to TCH’s EMR system, including adult patients, that it was a lie or that he obtained access under false pretenses.”
“The government should have known that the substantive allegations were false. Her own evidence, which she provided to the defense in discovery, disproved it,” Haim’s lawyers said in a Nov. 26 court filing. “This indicated that TCH itself considered Dr. Haim to have continued to cover TCH patients until April 2023 and that Dr. Haim provided care to TCH patients long after January 2021.”
“Government lawyers again apparently did not bother to review the evidence or learn the facts, but proceeded with the most serious charges they could muster,” they added.
Furthermore, TCH said that Dr. Haim had “approved and authorized access to TCH’s EMR [electronic medical records]” in her correspondence with HHS on August 30, 2023, which was 10 months before the DOJ charged Haim with HIPAA violations.
“This is all information that was in the government’s possession long before they indicted Eithan,” Andrea said. “For them to then sue Eithan and say he didn’t have authorization in complete contradiction to what Texas Children told HHS is absolutely shocking and malicious.”
Despite this knowledge, DOJ interviewed TCH Chief of Surgery Larry Hollier in April 2024, in which he was on record saying that he was “unable to recall an incident during his tenure at TCH where a resident was called to provide backup care services to an adult patient at TCH,” according to the third unsealed exhibit summarizing the FBI interview.
“I think there’s a lot of inaccuracy in the witness statement,” Andrea said. “Maybe the witness knew or didn’t know how the housing program worked. But I think that if this is the basis on which the government is charging Eithan, it shows how weak their case really is. That’s why Eithan’s attorney included it as part of their motion for the grand jury materials, because it really raises questions about what the real basis of the government’s case is on a factual level.”
Haim’s attorneys claim Hollier’s testimony was false and argued that once the government realized he had performed multiple backup surgeries, it could no longer rely on that testimony.
“Dr. Haim himself treated numerous patients at TCH while on rotation at other hospitals, consistent with TCH’s representations to HHS OCR,” Haim’s attorneys said in court filings. “The representations were false when the government first sued Dr. Haim and the government should know this.”
“The government cannot use the testimony showing that the access requests of Dr. Haimit was under false pretenses because the premise of that testimony, that he never had adult patients at TCH, was untrue,” they continued.
The DOJ alleges that Haim “obtained personal information including patient names, treatment codes, dates of service and attending physician from TCH’s electronic system without authorization and under false pretenses that he needed access to provide medical services for the patients under his care. ” as stated in the first and second superseding indictments.
Between the original May 29 indictment, which was unsealed on June 17, and the second indictment on October 10, the DOJ changed some of its language, removing any mention of “HIPAA-protected” information and changing the victims of the harm allegedly caused by Haim. actions from “TCH doctors and patients” to “TCH and its doctors”.
“The government has admitted only that it negligently sponsored false information to the grand jury,” Haim’s attorneys said. “She was forced to drop the false allegations from the superseded indictment, gutting the heart of her case and leaving little explanation for the false allegations charge. And the government was also forced to drop other scandalous allegations, including that he intended to harm child patients and did so for his own ‘personal agenda’.”
Fox News Digital previously reported that the prosecutor leading the charge against Haim has been removed from the case after disclosures revealed a major conflict of interest related to her family’s involvement in the hospital system.
In a letter dated November 13, 2024, Haim’s lawyers notified the DOJ of the undisclosed conflict of interest, explaining that “Mrs. [Tina] Ansari’s immediate family members have significant financial and political ties to third parties in the case, Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) and Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), who may constitute victims and witnesses” in the prosecution of Dr. Haim.
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