Trump Isn’t the Only Victim of Lawfare

The Trump trials have been in the headlines for months, and for good reason. As CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, no Trump supporter, put it, “I doubt the New York indictment would have been brought against a defendant whose name was not Donald Trump.”

Yet, no matter whether you love or hate Trump, what makes the Trump case so disturbing is that it is not exceptional. Trump is far from the only victim of lawfare. In fact, many people have been targeted by the Biden Department of Justice (DOJ) for opposing left-wing ideologies.

One of the most concerning cases involves Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH). In public, TCH claimed that it was not performing child sex-change procedures. In private, TCH physicians were referring teens with serious mental illnesses such as depression to surgeons for double mastectomies. Many were also prescribing puberty blockers to these same minors.

In 2023, a whistleblower stepped forward to bring TCH’s lies to light. In his own words:

It is absolutely astonishing: so many of the charts that I have just perused and read through as I’m doing my work, [these patients] have serious mental health issues. They’re autistic. They have previous suicide attempts. They’re depressed. They’re on anxiety medications. They have a disability of some kind. It’s just absolutely wild.

The whistleblower revealed these details to reporter Christopher Rufo, who published the story in City Journal. The news spread quickly. In fact, it took the Texas legislature only a week to pass a law prohibiting sex-change procedures on minors in Texas. The uproar finally induced TCH to comply with the law.

Yet that was not the end of the story for the whistleblower, general surgeon Dr. Eithan Haim. On the last day of Haim’s residency at Baylor College of Medicine, U.S. Marshalls knocked on his door. After Haim revealed that he was the whistleblower whom Rufo had interviewed, he knew that trouble was coming.

Sure enough, Haim was arrested and charged with four felony counts of violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). He now faces up to 10 years in prison and a steep and expensive legal battle.

The worst part? Haim is not the only ordinary American facing such a battle. Another, Paulette Harlow, was recently sentenced to 24 months in prison. She had committed the crime of blockading an abortion clinic in Washington, D.C. Harlow is 75 years old and has a debilitating medical condition, so it is entirely possible that she will die in prison. She and numerous other individuals and pro-life organizations have recently been targeted by the DOJ under the auspices of the FACE (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances) Act, passed in 1994.

Other examples of lawfare in recent years include U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s 2021 memorandum to the FBI encouraging agents to investigate conservative parents who protest at school board meetings. Garland’s memorandum says that “malice, violence, and threats against public school officials … could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism.” Yet the memorandum only cites a single case of violence during a school board meeting.

Americans have recently seen their most prestigious colleges overrun by masked rioters, with nary a word from the DOJ. Yet when ordinary people stand up to the DOJ’s actions, the response is crushing. That is why it would be a mistake to assume that Trump is the only one to be targeted by prosecutors.

After all, if Zakaria is right and Trump was only put on trial for political reasons, why would a politicized justice department stop there?