Courage and Consequences: Inside Whistleblower’s Harrowing Experience with Biden’s Department of (In)justice

There is stiff competition atop the leaderboard of history’s most dramatic reversals. Foremost is the resurrection of a crucified Messiah, then the parting of the Red Sea, then young David succeeding Saul as king of Israel. Somewhere nearby is Gandalf appearing east of Helm’s Deep on the first light of the fifth day (okay, maybe that one is fictional), and not far behind is Eithan Haim’s Jan. 24 vindication after very nearly facing prison time on spurious charges.

Excuse this reporter’s rare indulgence of hyperbole, but, for the small-town Texas surgeon, the sudden reversal of his fortune felt like “the biggest victory possible in the most dramatic way possible,” as he put it on The Washington Stand’s “Outstanding” podcast, for which the titular superlative is not hyperbole. “That morning, I was getting ready to go to jail. … That day … the judge has to dismiss the case with prejudice.”

Congressional Testimony

Haim related his harrowing experience on Wednesday before the U.S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government, in a hearing titled, “Ending Lawfare Against Whistleblowers Who Protect Children.”

While completing his surgical training at Texas Children’s Hospital in 2022, Haim discovered that the hospital’s public claim that it had shut down its gender transition program for minors, after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, had declared that such treatment constituted child abuse, “was a blatant lie,” he testified. “They not only continued their program, they expanded it.”

In May 2023, he anonymously blew the whistle on the hospital’s potentially illegal deception. But the Joe Biden administration’s Department of Justice chose to investigate Haim, not the hospital. Armed federal officials notified him of this investigation by knocking on his front door on “one of the most important days of my life,” the very morning of his graduation from his surgical program at Baylor College of Medicine, which is affiliated with Texas Children’s Hospital.

What followed was “a political witch hunt,” Haim protested, in which the prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tina Ansari, didn’t review the evidence, threatened the career of Haim’s wife, had to file three separate indictments for extensive errors, and had deep conflicts of interest due to family ties with the hospital. Haim not only faced 10 years in prison for crimes he didn’t commit, but also onerous pre-trial restrictions and ruinous legal fees surpassing $1 million.

“This can’t be the end of it,” he pleaded. “There has to be accountability when the unlimited resources of the federal government are used to destroy the lives of ordinary American citizens.”

Testifying beside Haim was Vanessa Sivadge, another nurse at Texas Children’s Hospital who had corroborated Haim’s whistleblowing. As they were working to sniff out Haim’s identity, federal officials paid her an intimidating visit, threatening her if she refused to give up the identity of the whistleblower, which she did not yet know. The Feds knew to target Sivadge because, she said, “in 2022, I had written an op-ed for The Washington Stand at the Family Research Council, in which I was publicly critical of so-called gender affirming care, and I condemned the medical profession for abandoning biological realities and putting profits over patients.”

The basic facts of this case have been reported by The Daily Wire, The Washington Stand, and other conservative media that have been tracking the case for more than two years. What much of this reporting lacked was a firsthand account of the private thought process that led Haim to become a whistleblower, which he recently shared on the The Washington Stand podcast.

Blowing the Whistle

For the first couple of months, after learning that Texas Children’s Hospital provided gender transition procedures to minors, “I didn’t believe it,” Haim recalled. “I didn’t believe the hospital would do something so crazy. Because this is TCH. It’s really a good hospital.”

However, Haim eventually discovered a “Grand Rounds lecture” by the Texas Children’s Hospital Department of Pediatrics, an installment in a “prestigious lecture series” to “discuss the most important topics in the field.” In the lecture, the Pediatric Department “presented the transgender program—the program that supposedly does not exist—and they’re talking about their algorithmic approach to social transition, to puberty blockers, to hormones, and then to surgery.”

“At that point, there was no question,” he recalled. “It was so crazy what these people were saying that it was like, ‘Of course, if I don’t blow the whistle, I can never live with myself. At that point, it was actually very easy.”

Although easy, Haim’s decision to blow the whistle was far from rash. “I still knew there was a risk because it was a Biden regime; they fabricate crimes,” he acknowledged. He and his newlywed wife, with whom he hoped to soon start a family, had “spent months talking” about the decision beforehand. There was nothing naïve about his decision.

So, though Haim feared what the Biden administration might do, he feared God more. “I had seen the people I worked with destroy themselves. Because all my colleagues who go along with this, and who don’t say anything—they sell their souls,” he said. “That calculus was very clear. I might risk my profession, but I have to save my soul. Because if I believe in God, if I believe in judgment, then those things—which, they are real—it becomes very easy.”

In other words, “I was willing to go to prison. I was willing to die,” Haim declared. “I don’t mean that hyperbolically. I mean that realistically. Because, when we stood up against the DOJ, and the FBI, and the entire media propaganda network, this was the most powerful Leviathan constructed in human history. We were going against the greatest odds possible with zero resources, zero connections. … The singular tool we had … was the truth.”

Paying the Price

Once the Biden DOJ sleuthed out Haim’s identity, the consequences came hard and fast. They notified him of the criminal investigation against him, even though they had no evidence that a crime had been committed. Eventually, they charged him with violating HIPAA, the law governing the privacy of patient records. “None of the information released had any identifiable patient information,” said Haim. “If there is none of that, then you [have committed] no crime.”

Haim’s wife Andrea had been hired as an assistant U.S. attorney—the same rank as his prosecutor, Ansari, but in a different district—but the background check was not yet complete. “The first time my attorney spoke with Tina Ansari … she threatens my wife,” Haim said. “She said, unless Andrea, my wife, continues to be difficult, she’s not going to have any problems with her background check. And that’s essentially blackmail.”

“That’s a very unsubtle threat. ‘Do what we want, or we’re going to destroy your spouse’s career,’” agreed Family Research Council Senior Fellow and podcast host Joseph Backholm. It just “goes to [show the] state of mind of how they’re operating.”

Haim’s case was assigned to U.S. District Judge David Hittner, a Reagan appointee on senior status. “He’s a supposed conservative, but he’s one of these squishy conservatives who doesn’t understand what he believes in,” related Haim. “So we thought … maybe he can at least grant me a fair trial. But that was not the case at all. I mean, this guy was just as corrupt, just as deceptive. … The judge never made the DOJ define what they were charging me with. Which means if I went to trial, the judge was going to run a kangaroo court: they can bring, [or] he can exclude, any evidence he wants to.”

Haim was in so much jeopardy that someone thought it worthwhile to put him in contact with an “ex-black-ops-type guy” who turned out to be “an expert in human extraction” to hide Haim away if things went sour. “Of course, I would never do that because this is my country,” said Haim.

Then came the general election of 2024, where President Trump snagged every battleground state on his way to an Electoral College romp, instituting a total “vibe shift” against wokeness across America.

“Election Day was good in terms of the country and everything. But, in terms of my case, it didn’t really matter that much,” Haim recalled. The problem was that “the same people under Biden” were still in charge of prosecuting him, and in fact “they were accelerating the case.” After the election, the team of prosecutors got the judge to issue a “de facto gag order on me,” said Haim, threatening jail time but issuing no technical order that he could appeal.

Meanwhile, the DOJ attorneys tried to hasten the trial from a February start date to a start date of Jan. 27, one week after Trump’s inauguration. Haim said that DOJ attorneys continued to accelerate the case “after inauguration, after the executive order” ending DOJ weaponization. By this point, Haim said, he was “already $1 million in debt” due to crippling legal fees, an amount large enough that was “starting to impact our legal defense” by making them omit certain court filings for which they could not afford to pay.

In desperation, Haim decided to “violate this de facto gag order. So I spoke out on January 22nd. And I said, ‘This case is corrupt. The judge is corrupt. He’s running a kangaroo court’—which is all 100% factually true.” On Thursday, Jan. 23, the judge hauled Haim into court to tell him, in Haim’s retelling, “‘because you violated a fake gag order’—that he never signed—‘I’m going to send you to jail, and I’m going to move up your trial.’ It was a punishment really. … He also wanted this case to go away because it was making him look bad.”

On Thursday night, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., got involved, contacting the DOJ and urging them to send instructions to the U.S. attorneys in the Southern District of Texas.

On Friday morning, Haim “was getting ready to go to jail,” even sharing all his media contacts with his wife, in case she had to advocate for him while he was behind bars, he recalled. Friday was “usually the day I operate,” he said. “I thought they were going to arrest me at my hospital. Luckily, I had a couple quick cases. I operate, and then I go home, kind of expecting police to surround me at some point, but they don’t, thankfully. So, I go home. I’m hanging out with my wife and my baby.”

Complete Reversal

“All of a sudden, we get the news that … the DOJ files a motion to dismiss the case with prejudice,” he narrated. Dismissing a case with prejudice means that the same charges cannot be brought again. “That’s big, but it doesn’t mean anything because the judge hates me, and he’s a corrupt old man. Because he can refuse to dismiss the case,” Haim explained.

“All of a sudden, I hear my wife say—you know, kind of yelling my name. And I’m like, ‘All right, either [it’s] the police, or the judge signed the order,” he continued. “She says, ‘The judge signed the order to dismiss the case with prejudice.’ And I’m like, ‘It’s done.’ And then I said to my wife, ‘I love you.’” Haim had forgotten that he was on the phone at the time with The Daily Wire, and with his permission they published his first candid reaction at the removal of the dark cloud of legal jeopardy, which the Biden DOJ had kept hanging above him for nearly three years.

“I never thought I’d be capable of any of this,” Haim reflected. “I was just some random guy, man. Like, I had no connections. We had no money. But simply by telling the truth, you can achieve anything. But really, if you live in accordance with God’s covenant, then he will reward his friends and punish his enemies. And I believe that’s true.”

For Haim, the battle is not completely over yet. “This is over once these people are held accountable. I can’t rely on politicians to do that. I can’t rely on the DOJ to do that. … I’m going to push this until these people are held accountable,” he declared. “They had to construct evidence in order to frame me for a crime that never occurred. They had to conspire with individuals in order to deprive me of civil rights. That is what I believe … I can prove in a court. So that is just a matter of time.”

Risking It All

“And they did that because you dared oppose the broader agenda of, ‘We should be able to mutilate children in their pursuit of happiness, in our pursuit of wealth … and anybody who disagrees with us is a bad person. And we’re not going to have a debate with you. We’re not going to discuss this with you. We’re going to try to ruin your life,’” Backholm concluded. In that regard Haim shares company with Jack Phillips, Barronelle Stutzman, and others who have experienced the full wrath of a hostile government, enraged by their religious commitment to do what is right.

Their examples show that sometimes doing what is right entails great risk. “You voluntarily walked into the fire because that was the right thing to do, like accepting that risk. You were unwilling to just take the road of passivity because it’s safe,” Backholm told Haim. “It’s not just about you getting victory—because you have gotten victory. … It requires us in those moments to lead by example. Both fear and courage are contagious.”

“You have to walk into the fire, and you have to be willing to get burned,” answered Haim. “I almost lost my entire career. We lost all of our money. … You had people who were threatening to kill me.”

This perspective is impossibly foolish to those focused only on this world. It can only be shared by those who believe in the judgment to come, who are “looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God” (Hebrews 11:10). Facing down a lawless aggressive persecution alone seems scary, but fear of God reminds us how temporary the pressure is. “For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:17-18).

“You cannot know what the end result is going to be,” Haim concluded. “But, if you can accept whatever possible result, with the worst possible results being prison or death, then yeah, then you go forward.”

Originally published by The Washington Stand.

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