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--:-- John Bickley: Welcome to Morning Wire, I'm John Bickley, Daily Wire Editor-in-chief.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And I'm Georgia Howe.
--:-- John Bickley: Today, we're talking about the Biden administration's prosecution of a Texas doctor who blew the whistle on transgender procedures being conducted on children in the state. Joining us now is Republican Congressman Dan Crenshaw of Texas. Congressman, thank you so much for coming on.
--:-- Dan Crenshaw: Thank you for having me.
--:-- John Bickley: Let's start with the prosecution of Dr. Etan Haim. He worked at the Texas Children's Hospital in your district. He's being prosecuted after blowing the whistle on the hospital because it was continuing to perform transgender procedures on children. And that came even after the Texas AG said that practice is dangerous. You believe this is a political prosecution. Why?
--:-- Dan Crenshaw: I believe it's political because it's such an unusual case for the DOJ, NHHS. It's unusual to bring somebody up on criminal charges for HIPAA violations. And if you look at what they're really charging him with, it's a stretch to say it's even a HIPAA violation.
--:-- John Bickley: So they're charging him for unlawful access to the database. But of course, he has access to that database, to patient data. He did not release any personal information on those patients. He anonymized any data that he released.
--:-- Dan Crenshaw: So you have to squint really hard to see this as a HIPAA violation and to justify federal agents arresting him for doing this. This is the kind of thing where you might think Texas Children's might have a civil case against him for it. And then they would go to the courts as such and there might be a fine involved, right? That's what you would normally expect from this. But these are criminal charges being brought against him for accessing a database that he has perfectly lawful access to.
--:-- John Bickley: And of course, it's political because this is such a politicized topic. This is the topic of affirmative transgender care on minors. It's pretty contentious, I've noticed, because I've introduced legislation in the Congress and watched my, even my most moderate, reasonable Democrats throw their hands up like crazy people and argue with me that it should be okay to do a double-missecting on a 12-year-old girl just because she thinks she's a boy.
--:-- Dan Crenshaw: So, hyper-politicized. And we've seen the Biden administration prioritize this issue in a way that we've never seen another administration do.
--:-- John Bickley: What do Republicans need to do if they want to counter the Democrat agenda on this?
--:-- Dan Crenshaw: Conservatives need to fight back against it. Now, in Texas, we have. Now, shortly after this whistleblower blew the whistle on Texas Children's Hospital, Texas passed SB 14, which prohibits this practice entirely. OK, then there was no question. After that, I think it can be said that all the hospitals in Texas stopped doing these procedures because it was made in law.
--:-- John Bickley: Prior to that, and what Dr. Heim was referencing when he blew the whistle, was an opinion from the attorney general. So the attorney general issued an opinion, which is a fairly normal thing to do, saying, look, we've looked into this. Our interpretation of the law based on child abuse law says that you cannot do this practice.
--:-- Dan Crenshaw: So hospitals are taking a risk at that point if they move forward because they could be prosecuted by the attorney general because he's made it clear what the interpretation is of that law. And then again, shortly afterwards, the law was made extremely clear. You cannot do this in Texas.
--:-- John Bickley: And then we have the Title IX changes from the Biden administration, which do directly address gender identity and make this something for all publicly funded educational programs.
--:-- Dan Crenshaw: Yeah, that is another great example. And I have a new daughter now. She's nine months old. And God help the people that try to put a boy in whatever sport she wants to play. There's not enough wrath for them. We have to fight this and the public is on our side on all of these issues.
--:-- John Bickley: We saw a Washington Post survey some time ago that asked the public do you support puberty blockers or hormone therapy for minors for gender transition. They didn't even ask about surgeries by the way. Just asked about those two things. 70 said no.
--:-- Dan Crenshaw: This practice of affirmative gender care is being rolled back in Europe. They're seeing that the data just doesn't add up. The recent systematic review by Dr. Cass from the UK really was kind of the final nail in the coffin on this practice. It just showed, after reviewing all of the data and all of the studies and all of the methodology behind each study, that this practice just doesn't come with any benefits, but it does come with enormous risk.
--:-- John Bickley: And that's a really big problem. It's huge long-term physiological changes. And if we can't even point to any benefits from doing so, then we've got a real problem on our hands.
--:-- Dan Crenshaw: I want to talk about some of the actions you've taken related to this. So first, you sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Health and Human Services Secretary Javier Becerra demanding all documents regarding the prosecution of Haim.
--:-- John Bickley: In the letter, you say the prosecutor did not even review the evidence before considering him a target. Is that true?
--:-- Dan Crenshaw: That's true as far as we know. So that's from Dr. Haim's lawyers. And I don't think they would make that claim if they didn't have some sort of proof about it.
--:-- John Bickley: Again, showing how politicized this is. I mean, they see a case like this, they say, let's go, let's go, let's boom, boom, boom. They start shooting in the air and hooping and hollering and driving off into the sunset.
--:-- Dan Crenshaw: So that's yet another reason we think this is politicized. This kind of thing should not be done lightly.
--:-- John Bickley: Do you expect Garland to actually cooperate? He's been pretty uncooperative so far with Congress.
--:-- Dan Crenshaw: Absolutely. I don't expect real answers to this. They're going to come back and claim, if they even bother to respond, they'll come back and claim that it's an active investigation and that they can't be possibly sharing records or any information about it.
--:-- John Bickley: Another piece of legislation I have, which I think would be quite helpful in this, and I've been urging the speaker to take it up because it's already passed out of our committee. My legislation would actually prohibit funding the children's hospitals around the nation, prohibit funding specifically for GME, which is graduate medical education, which basically funds their residencies.
--:-- Dan Crenshaw: It's a federal program that helps fund residencies in hospitals. Good program we all like, but I don't think you should have access to that kind of federal money if you are engaging in child abuse and bullying parents into transitioning their kids.
--:-- John Bickley: And again the public is well behind us on this. So I want to have that debate on the floor and get that moving.
--:-- Dan Crenshaw: And that would block funds from going to that program if you did that if you promoted transgender treatments and procedures for children. Your access to that federal money would be contingent on whether or not you perform those kind of procedures.
--:-- John Bickley: Final question. We've seen quite a few seemingly political prosecutions by government agencies against Trump and many of his attorneys, John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, and even peaceful pro-life objectors. What do you make of what Jim Jordan calls a weaponized government?
--:-- Dan Crenshaw: Well, look, I mean, we even created a subcommittee on Jordan's Judiciary Committee to deal with this called the Weaponization of Government Select Committee. So obviously, it's something we take seriously as Republicans, and we're not crazy.
--:-- John Bickley: Look, I'm the first to call out my own side when people are overreacting or going down some rabbit holes they shouldn't go down. But this isn't really one of them.
--:-- Dan Crenshaw: There is a list of these prosecutions, and they are out of the ordinary. We obviously just talked about this one, which is simply out of the ordinary. Anything wildly out of the ordinary in a court of law, it should be looked at with some skepticism. And you should note that there might be political bias there.
--:-- John Bickley: The charges against Trump, I still haven't heard one real good lawyer actually come out and say, no, these are actually real charges. You know, these are somebody else might get charged with this kind of thing. Nobody has said that.
--:-- Dan Crenshaw: Everybody knows they're bogus. And the list goes on and on. And it's ironic because the Democrats are constantly wringing their hands and clutching their pearls. They were probably donated to them by rich people in Hollywood.
--:-- John Bickley: And they're constantly wringing their hands about, you know, the threats to democracy. Well, one of the greatest threats to democracy is the upending of the sanctity of our judicial system.
--:-- Dan Crenshaw: You know, if you don't believe that you can get a fair shot in the court of law, you do start to lose your democracy. That's a huge part of our social contract, of our nation's fabric that holds us together. This idea that there's due process, that if you make the right arguments and you show the right evidence that you can prevail, if that turns out not to be the case, you've got a very, very serious problem on your hands just from a basic civics perspective.
--:-- John Bickley: Well, a very troubling prospect, no doubt.
--:-- Dan Crenshaw: Congressman, thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate it.
--:-- John Bickley: Thanks for having me.
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