‘Never Seen Anything Like It’: Attorneys Shocked by DOJ Intimidation against Hospital Whistleblowers

Whistleblowers who exposed the Texas Children’s Hospital for illegally providing gender transition procedures to minors have experienced “a number of acts of intimidation by the FBI and the government,” attorney Marcella Burke described Wednesday on “Washington Watch.” Whistleblowers like Eithan Haim and Vanessa Sivadge, both represented by the Burke Law Group, must now grapple with the reality that “the government is now coming to our homes to intimidate us, and they’re coming after us, and they’re not coming after the doctors and the hospitals doing these things illegally,” Burke said.

Last year, FBI agents knocked on Haim’s front door, served him with a written notice that he was the subject of a criminal investigation, and attempted to conduct an interview right then and there. As a result of their hands-on investigation, Haim racked up a quarter million dollars in legal fees before the DOJ ever filed charges. FBI agents also came knocking at Sivadge’s home, informing her that her Christian beliefs about human sexuality made her a person of interest in their investigation and promising to make life difficult for her if she didn’t cooperate.

Certain agents seem to play an out-sized role in the FBI’s intimidation pressure campaign against the two whistleblowers. “The FBI agent who went to Vanessa’s home is the same agent who signed the summons for Dr. Haim,” said Burke. “At Dr. Haim’s arraignment, he sat — in an empty courtroom — right behind me and Mrs. Haim.”

The longer I reflect, the stranger that last detail becomes. The first occupants of any sparsely filled seating area — whether in a church building, or classroom, or auditorium, or doctor’s office waiting area — always act the same way. They spread out, both to fill the space and to create comfortable privacy buffers between different groups, until the seating area grows more crowded. To sit right next to someone from a different party in an empty room would be weird; to sit directly behind them feels positively creepy.

“It’s just been very shocking, as an attorney, seeing it. And the white-collar lawyers and the criminal defense team — no one has seen anything like it,” Burke declared. “We have the lawyer who was the former United States Attorney for the Southern District of Texas as our lead trial lawyer on this case. He’s never seen anything like it.”

Burke’s clients believe that the federal government’s intimidation campaign is designed to deter other would-be whistleblowers from coming forward, and “I think that that’s not an unreasonable opinion,” she added. Haim, Sivadge, and others who decide to become whistleblowers “are really, really brave people, because they’re afraid. They’re afraid of the government. They’re afraid of losing their jobs. They’re afraid of getting doxed or swatted. They’re afraid of being harassed in public.” Yet “they put all of that to the side and decide that they’re willing to endure,” to do what they know is right.

Sivadge, especially, as the second whistleblower, was “an inspiration” to Burke. She had read about Haim in the news and was aware of the federal government’s vendetta against him, and yet “she knew that she had information that what he was saying was true … so she came forward to endorse what he had been saying,” said Burke.

“In the meantime, [Sivadge] had asked the hospital for a religious accommodation … to be able to leave the transgender medical division of the hospital … and to just go back to her original passion, which was working with children in the cardiac unit,” Burke described. “She could not in good conscience bear false witness against the teaching in the Bible about the binary sexes that God created, male and female.” Instead of honoring Sivadge’s religious beliefs and granting her an accommodation, the hospital fired her.

Yet Sivadge expressed “no regrets” about her decision to blow the whistle, even though it cost her job, and her husband has none either. “I spoke to them over dinner, when she was deciding whether or not she wanted to come forward,” Burke recalled. “They talked about a Bible verse in Ephesians about being bearers of light as Christians and to shine in the darkness. And they knew, in their heart, that she couldn’t just quietly walk away from this.”

The verses that guided Sivadge’s decision are Ephesians 5:11-13, “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret. But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible.”

Sivadge “knew she’d have to go public to have any sort of things change in the hospital,” Burke explained. “She’s just known from the start that this would be difficult. … She knows it’s a process, and she’s working the process. And she’s very disciplined, and she trusts God.”

Sivadge knew this because it’s exactly what Jesus promised his followers. “Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple,” the teacher from Nazareth warned. “For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? … So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple” (Luke 13:27-28, 33).

“Her faith is very inspiring to me — and the faith of her husband,” Burke beamed. “It’s not every day, as a lawyer, you get to represent people in cases like this. And so, I think this case is a real inspiration for everyone at our law firm. It’s a real honor to represent women like Vanessa.”

Burke expressed confidence about her team’s prospects in defending Haim from the federal indictment against him, and Sivadge too if the weaponized DOJ chooses to bring one. “We’ve been very clear from the very beginning, as his attorneys, that we have thought that it was very misguided, that the government has the facts wrong, has the law wrong,” she said. “It is astonishing, frankly, that the case has been brought.” But it has, so now “we’ll have to just go to trial, and we’ll have to defend him on the merits.”

For those who see misconduct in their workplaces, particularly in hospitals that are illegally treating minors with gender transition procedures, Burke urged them to come forward because “there’s nothing more that you can do to protect children than to come forward with evidence of these things happening,” particularly evidence of fraudulent billing.

“There [are] lawyers you can call that will teach you how to collect evidence in the right way to avoid any risk — to protect patient information, for example — and to know that you’re protected under multiple federal and state laws,” Burke explained. “When you whistleblow, at the end of the day, the law is on your side.”