National Review staff writer Madeleine Kearns, on today’s edition of The Editors, said that a Texas whistleblower who brought to light clandestine transgender procedures for minors at his hospital has contributed information that “has played such a key role in blowing the lid off the transgender medical scandal.”

“The hospital first said that it had stopped these transgender drugs and surgeries for minors after various GOP state officials started to put pressure on hospitals,” Kearns said. “But actually, what they really did is they just moved all these practices into the shadows.”

She explained that Eithan Haim, “the resident surgeon who leaked this evidence,” took his findings to City Journal’s Christopher Rufo. “Haim is very adamant that he redacted any personal information from these records, and Christopher Rufo also insists that that is true,” Kearns said. “So both of them have really staked their professional reputations on the validity of that claim.”

The Justice Department is coming after Haim, however, “saying, ‘Well, that’s a violation of HIPAA because there was these sensitive records.’ But if no patient is identifiable, then that’s just on its face not true. It’s not a violation of HIPAA.”

Kearns reminded listeners, “And of course, this is not the first time that we’ve seen the Justice Department behave this way, wielding executive power to intimidate both political opponents and cultural enemies. We’ve seen this with pro-life Americans, traditionalist Catholics, even vaccine skeptics. And . . . it looks like they’re trying to bully their enemies into kind of going along.”

Haim’s disclosure meant that “the Republican legislators, state legislators, passed a bill explicitly banning these procedures in response to his leak. Would that it were that people didn’t have to resort to leaks, but the nature of the transgender medical scandal is that they avoid sunlight.”

The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.