The Biden administration’s prosecution of a Texas surgeon who exposed a hospital’s sex-change procedures on children appears “political,” says a former Department of Health and Human Services official who enforced the law the surgeon is accused of violating.
The Heritage Foundation’s Roger Severino spoke to The Daily Signal about the prosecution of Dr. Eithan Haim, who leaked records of secret transgender procedures for minors at Texas Children’s Hospital last year. The files, published by City Journal, showed the hospital misled the public by falsely asserting it had stopped its transgender medicine program in response to a state investigation.
President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice charged Haim in May with violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, alleging he illegally accessed and released private patient information with “malicious intent.”
But Haim maintains that his motive was to expose unethical activity—and based on the evidence, he does not “fit the bill” of a doctor-turned-criminal, said Severino, Heritage’s vice president for domestic policy. Severino led the HHS’ Office for Civil Rights under then-President Donald Trump. The office processes all HIPAA claims and may refer them to prosecutors, as it did in Haim’s case.
“Generally speaking, if somebody’s doing whistleblowing, you wouldn’t have that sort of personal criminal intent that would warrant dropping a nuclear bomb on them [over] HIPAA, which really suggests that this is a political prosecution more than anything else,” Severino told The Daily Signal.
HIPAA referrals from the HHS are “extremely rare,” he said, because they are typically reserved for “the most extreme, knowing, and willful violation of the law that would be designed for some sort of personal financial gain.”
Haim, who redacted children’s names from the records he leaked, was only “trying to blow the whistle to show that there was evidence of wrongdoing and that the hospital was lying,” Severino stressed.
Haim previously told The Daily Signal he would not “bend the knee” to Biden’s bureaucrats and “their evil ideology.” He could face up to 10 years in prison and a fine if convicted.
Severino, who also worked as a trial attorney for the Justice Department, said the Biden administration is using HIPAA “to intimidate people who oppose their radical agenda that’s steeped with a hard-edged gender ideology.”
Official HHS data shows the agency has resolved more than 99% of HIPAA complaints it receives without reporting them to prosecutors as of May. Severino did not recall any such referrals during his tenure and said the Office for Civil Rights usually resorted to civil claims “because the level of criminal intent wasn’t there.”
“You wouldn’t see this sort of prosecution if it weren’t political,” he told The Daily Signal.
The HHS Office for Civil Rights and its current director, Melanie Fontes Rainer, did not respond to The Daily Signal’s requests for comment before publication.
