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The Department of Justice filed a reply on Tuesday supporting its motion for a gag order against Dr. Ethan Haim, a surgeon indicted by the Biden administration after he blew the whistles on sex change procedures for minors. “The prosecutors in @eithanhaim’s case are doubling down on their shameless effort to ask the court to censor us and our client on @X,” the Burke Law Group, which is representing Haim, said on X. “We will continue to zealously represent @EithanHaim’s liberty, and now his (and our) First Amendment right to Free Speech.” The prosecutors in @eithanhaim’s case are doubling down on their shameless effort to ask the court to censor us and our client on @X. We will continue to zealously represent @EithanHaim's liberty, and now his (and our) First Amendment right to Free Speech.— BLG Tweets (@BurkeLawTweets) December 3, 2024 Haim initially came forward as an anonymous whistleblower to expose gender treatments being performed on minors at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston. He is facing four felony counts of violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, also known as HIPAA, according to journalist Chris Rufo, who first reported on Haim’s story. The reply in support of its motion for a gag order said the order would “prevent the defendant and his attorney from making inflammatory and and unfairly prejudiced statements.” The DOJ did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment about example of what types of speech would and would not be permitted. “Given the number of such statements readily available online, the defendant’s national platform and increasing prominence, and his avowed intention to continue to make such statements,” the order said, “there is a substantial likelihood of prejudicing the court’s ability to conduct a fair trial.” The prosecution argues Haim is advancing a “false narrative of government corruption,” which “ignores the facts and evidence.” Yet in the next paragraph, the prosecutors say most of “the defendant’s ire” is focused on the case’s former lead prosecutor, leaving the prosecutors unsure of Haim’s claims are true. Tina Ansari, the former lead prosecutor against Haim, withdrew from the case on Nov. 21 after conflict of interest concerns. Ansari’s family runs coffee and tea company FreshBrew Group, whose customers include multiple hospitals in the Texas Medical Center which house Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine are located. Ansari’s “close family members have substantial financial and political ties” to Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) and Baylor College of Medicine (BCM),” Haim’s lawyers wrote in a Nov. 13 letter. Haim was a resident at the Baylor College of Medicine from June 2018 to June 2023. He worked at Texas Children’s Hospital during part of his residency. The gag order would “completely prevent Dr. Haim or his counsel from criticizing the prosecution, no matter how correct the criticism,” according to Burke Law Group. “The prosecution tries to make its case by painting Dr. Haim’s and the defense’s critical tweets as inaccurate,” the X post said. “But as the defense already explained in its own filing, all of the public criticism has been richly deserved. Indeed, many of the tweets included pictures from the court’s transcript showing where it was the court, not the defense, that took issue with the government’s shoddy work.” It is suspicious that the DOJ filed a motion for a gag order on the same day, Nov. 20, that Ansari withdrew herself from the case, Haim said on X. “So, my question is this – what do the remaining DOJ prosecutors know about these conflicts and when did they know it?” he asked. “Because if the case against me was brought under conflicted pretenses, the remaining prosecutors cannot cleanse themselves of the odor of corruption by simply kicking Ansari to the curb and continuing on like everything is kosher.” The DOJ particularly wants to prevent Haim from retweeting allies who have defended him on X like Ethics and Public Policy Center legal expert Ed Whelan; Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas; journalist Chris Rufo; and psychologist Jordan Peterson, according to Burke Law Group. DOJ is seeking a gag order on Dr. Eithan Haim, the courageous whistleblower its transgender ideologues are targeting with an outrageous prosecution. Any gag order will backfire, as those of us not subject to it will intensify our efforts to expose DOJ’s abuses.— Ed Whelan (@EdWhelanEPPC) December 3, 2024 Texas Children’s Hospital had 30 child gender transition patients before Texas passed a law prohibiting doctors from providing transgender medical interventions to minors, according to medical watchdog Do No Harm’s database. The hospital “took away all the public-facing indications that the program was still active,” “but within the hospital, they’re prioritizing it to the highest level,” Haim said. Haim said in Rufo’s City Journal article that a surgeon implanted a hormone device in an 11-year-old girl who said she identified as a boy three days after the announcement that transgender medical procedures had stopped at the hospital. Multiple colleagues told Haim over the next year they were implanting puberty-blocking devices in minors.  After revealing this information, two federal agents with the Department of Health and Human Services showed up on Haim’s door, saying the documents he sent to Rufo were published with children’s names, violating HIPAA. But Haim’s lawyers say all patient information was redacted and that HIPAA regulations allow protected information to be disclosed to “prevent or lessen a serious and imminent threat to a person or the public.” Virginia Allen contributed to this article. The post DOJ Revisits Effort to Censor Trans Children’s Hospital Whistleblower Eithan Haim appeared first on The Daily Signal.

DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—Fox Business host Charles Payne called out the alleged “huge double standard” of President Joe Biden’s family Tuesday by revealing that his brother, who struggles with a crack addiction, is currently serving a jail sentence. Payne said his brother, who is getting out of jail on Friday, is likely one of the first Americans to struggle with an addiction to crack cocaine and may likely start using the substance again once he is free. He accused Biden of participating in elitism in order to save his son from jail time while everyday Americans struggling with addiction have had to face the consequences for their crimes. “Hearing Democrats try to justify what Biden is doing with his son because his son has a drug habit is just heartbreaking,” Payne said on “America’s Newsroom.” “I’m gonna tell you something right now, and I probably shouldn’t say this. My brother’s getting out of jail on Friday. My brother was among the first 100 crack addicts in America. At least the first 1 out of 200. In the hood, when he came upstairs and told us about crack and how great it was, I had never heard of it before. I kind of don’t want him to come out of jail because before he went in, he stopped by my aunt’s house and he didn’t have shoes on in the middle of winter.” WATCH: Payne accused black Democrats of remaining silent on the pardoning of Hunter despite the crack issue being a detriment to their community. “What’s happening with the Biden’s, and this is the ultimate sign of elitism, and just of entitlement gone amok … Where are black Democrats saying this is such a huge double standard? That if this was Donald Trump and anyone in his family, there would be people in the streets screaming. Now if you want to use this as a way of saying ‘hey, we need to find more ways of reforming and helping everyone out and not just Hunter Biden,’ but this has hurt our community so badly and no one’s immune from it,” Payne continued. “And listen, I wish I could be there waiting for [his brother] when he gets out on Friday, but I can’t,” he added. “I wish I could be there to hold his hand and everything, I can’t. We talked about this. He’s probably going to go back to smoking crack even though he hasn’t had it for a year. He was the smartest one in my family growing up, he’s a great person in his heart, and he could’ve been a great American. It’s a slap in the face to everyone that Joe Biden gets to do this. It really is, it’s a slap in the face for anyone whose family members had gone to jail for doing stupid stuff.” Biden issued a “full and unconditional” pardon for his son on Sunday regarding any crime he is charged with or may have committed from Jan. 1, 2014 to Dec. 1, 2024. The president alleged that his political opponents “singled out” Hunter by charging him for crimes that almost no American allegedly gets prosecuted for having committed, including writing false information on a gun purchase form and paying back their taxes past the deadline. A Delaware jury convicted Hunter in June on three felony charges related to his purchase of a gun in 2018 while knowingly being addicted to drugs and for writing false information on a gun purchase form. He faced up to 17 years in prison over nine charges relating to his alleged failure to pay $1.4 million in taxes between 2016 and 2019 in California. The pardon further protects Hunter from facing any potential charges regarding an alleged influence peddling scheme in his overseas business dealings in Ukraine, China, and Romania. Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation The post ‘Where Are Black Democrats?’: Charles Payne Tells Personal Story to Call Out ‘Huge Double Standard’ of Biden Family appeared first on The Daily Signal.

DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—The Biden-Harris administration opened the door for a massive increase of taxpayer-funded transgender interventions, including child sex-change surgeries, and the Daily Caller News Foundation has obtained enough data to give a partial estimate of the cost. From January 2018 to September 2023, 16 states spent more than $165 million funding “gender transition services”—including puberty blockers, hormones, and sex-change surgeries—with more than $45 million spent on interventions for children 17 and younger, according to data obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation through a series of public record requests. The DCNF asked states to provide reimbursement data for gender transition services covered through state insurance and medical assistance programs, such as the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which is funded through Medicaid. The states were able to identify gender transition services through medical billing codes such as the International Classification of Diseases codes. Published by the World Health Organization, ICD codes provide comprehensive diagnostic information for diseases and injuries and create a valuable dataset used in medical research. The DCNF requested the total amount of reimbursements paid for all gender transition services—which could include speech therapy and mental health services as well as life-altering surgeries—that were covered through state insurance and medical assistance programs. The states that provided data to the DCNF include: Michigan, Idaho, Illinois, Virginia, Nevada, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Louisiana, Maryland, New Hampshire, Wyoming, Kentucky, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, and Washington. The three states with the highest amount of reimbursements for gender transition services for adults and kids were Illinois, Oregon, and Washington state. Illinois spent $40,843,721, which included $14,296,558 in services for children 17 and under. Oregon spent $30,045,262 and Washington state spent $27,145,383. Other statewide totals for gender transition services include Maryland, which spent $11,849,062; Nevada, which spent $10,096,655; Michigan, which spent $6,821,169; and New Hampshire, which spent $2,360,534, according to data sent to the DCNF. Virginia provided the DCNF with data from 2020 to 2022, spending a total of $13,933,635 on gender transition services in three years, with $3,480,492 spent on sex-change interventions for children 17 and under. The state of Oregon specified that its data included reimbursement costs for a range of sex-change procedures, including surgeries, anesthesia costs, hair removal, speech therapy, hormone therapy, and puberty suppression. The data showed a 60% increase in sex-change interventions for adults and kids under the Biden-Harris administration across the 15 states that provided yearly data totals for 2020 to 2022, jumping from $27,753,478 spent on gender transition services in 2020 to $44,553,052 in 2022. Utah did not break down its data into yearly totals and was excluded from this calculation. While data for 2023 was incomplete, 12 states provided some totals showing $22,017,362 had been spent on sex-change interventions over the first nine months of last year. The DCNF attempted to obtain similar data from 48 states. However, many states outright denied the requests or sought exorbitant fees to obtain public data. For example, Rhode Island wanted a prepayment of more than $3,000 to fulfill the request that other states considered exempt from public information processing fees. Explosion in Sex Changes for Minors  Democrat-led policies that required insurers to pay for sex changes for minors led to an increase in the procedures nationwide, according to a leading transgender activist and physician. Every person in our nation must have the freedom to be their true self and to live free from hate.On Transgender Day of Visibility, I say to all trans and non-binary people: We see you. We love you. We will never stop fighting for you.— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) March 31, 2024 In a June 2022 email exclusively obtained by the DCNF, Jason Rafferty, the lead author of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ sex-change policy, attributed the growth of pediatric sex-change surgery to services being more “accessible” due to increased Medicaid funding. “I would say that there has likely been an increase in ‘top surgery’ among 16 and 17 year olds simply due to the fact that this surgery has become more accessible. 10 years ago when I started in this field, if a patient wanted surgery there was really only 1 surgeon in the region doing it for patients under 18 and aside from that they would need to travel across the country and pay out of pocket,” wrote Rafferty. “Clearly if you were on Medicaid or did not have the resources, it was off the table. Today, we have 3 surgeons in [Rhode Island] doing these surgeries and probably half a dozen in [Massachusetts] plus a pediatric plastic surgeon at Boston Childrens specializing in gender surgeries. Most if not all now take Medicaid – very few patients are paying the fully cost of surgery out of pocket. So, the point is that my experience is not that surgery is ‘more popular’ but just more (or simply just) accessible,” he wrote. Rafferty did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the DCNF. The rapid growth of tax dollars funding the sex-change industry can be attributed to policies from Democrat presidential administrations. In 2014, the Obama-Biden administration overturned a rule preventing Medicare from funding sex-change surgeries, opening the doors for taxpayers to pay for sex-change operations. It further expanded coverage for sex-change interventions in 2016 through its interpretation of Section 1557, a nondiscrimination provision of the Affordable Care Act. In May 2016, the Obama-Biden administration issued a rule that quietly redefined the discrimination policy to include sexual orientation and “gender identity,” a move that strong-armed the entire medical community into embracing gender ideology and sex-change interventions, especially for children. “Gender identity” is a term used by transgender activists to describe how a person feels about or perceives their sex. Activists believe these feelings override a person’s biology and should have equal weight in law and society. The Obama-Biden administration’s regulatory change prevented insurance companies from categorically denying coverage for sex-change interventions, considering such bans a form of discrimination, which forced insurance plans to offer coverage for sex-change services. “What the rule was about under Obama, and now under Biden-Harris, was to force medical providers to do the surgeries, even against their medical judgments, and for insurance companies to pay for it, which means we all pay for it,” Roger Severino, vice president of domestic policy at The Heritage Foundation and former director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services, told the DCNF. “That includes the whole gamut from hysterectomies to breast augmentations to tracheal shapes, voice training—just an extraordinary number of very expensive procedures to treat a psychological condition using physical interventions, surgeries, etc. and no real religious exemption,” Severino said. A 2023 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed the impact of President Barack Obama’s 2016 Rule, finding the number of sex-change surgical procedures performed in the U.S. nearly tripled between 2016 to 2019. Roughly 8% of patients were between the ages of 12 to 18, the study found, and showed a sharp rise in breast and chest surgery from 2016 to 2019 within the pediatric population. Biden-Harris Restores Gender Surgery Funding After Trump Admin In June 2020, the Trump administration overturned Obama’s rule on Section 1557, reinstating the government’s previous interpretation of discrimination must be based on biological sex rather than “gender identity.” At that time, Severino was the director of the Office for Civil Rights at HHS. On May 10, 2021, however, the Biden-Harris administration reversed the Trump rule and redefined discrimination under Section 1557 to include “gender identity,” again forcing the medical community, including insurance companies, to provide sex-change services to children or face accusations of discrimination. “I issued the Trump regulations, undoing the Obama Section 1557 changes that added gender identity as a protected class and requiring cross sex, surgeries, hormones, puberty blockers, included on children in federally funded programs and in insurance,” Severino said. “They were as comprehensive as they could to try to push unscientific gender ideology into the medical system, and they succeeded, over the last three plus years, in trying to coerce hospitals, doctors, and insurance companies to push experimental treatments and surgeries, including and especially on children,” Severino added. Look at those #s ??https://t.co/oCBZV2meeX pic.twitter.com/PdylS72l6U— Do No Harm (@donoharm) October 13, 2024 Do No Harm, a medical watchdog group, recently published a database that found from 2019 to 2023, 13,994 children in the United States have received sex change-related treatments and 5,747 sex-change surgeries had been performed on children. “Medical professionals must provide evidence-based care, not pursue a political agenda,” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of Do No Harm, told the DCNF. “We are committed to ending this predatory practice, which is harmful to the thousands of minors whose lives and bodies will never be the same.” Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation The post Biden-Harris Admin Opened Floodgates for Taxpayer-Funded Sex Changes on Kids appeared first on The Daily Signal.