Matt Vespa reporting for Townhall
We have another incident of FBI agents creeping on law-abiding Americans. The reason for these visits is political. The agency is targeting people who are upsetting the liberal apple cart; whether it’s posting anti-Biden memes or sounding off on alleged Medicaid fraud concerning transgender surgeries, the Feds will bear down on your home to harass you. The latest incident involves a Texas nurse who noticed potentially illegal felonious activity pertaining to transgender health care. There’s already been a whistleblower, surgeon Eithan Haim, who exposed the child mutilation surgeries happening at Texas Children’s Hospital. Now, the FBI reportedly threatened this nurse over the whistleblower case.
Christopher Rufo wrote in City Journal the sordid history of Texas Children’s Hospital and nurse Vanessa Sivadge, whose enthusiasm for working here died quickly in 2021 when she witnessed how woke antics can infect medicine. She saw a massive uptick in these child mutilation surgeries and other aspects of so-called transgender health care that have been halted throughout most of Europe. Sivadge alleges that the doctors involved in the surgeries, Richard Ogden Roberts David Paul, and Kristy Rialon, might be manipulating their patients to mutilate themselves. Sivadge spoke with Rufo about these alleged misdeeds, after which two FBI agents appeared at her home (via City Journal):
…two months after I spoke with her for that story, Sivadge called me in a panic. The FBI had sent two special agents, Paul Nixon and David McBride, to her home. The agents knocked on the door, asked her about “some of the things that have been going on at [her] work lately,” and then asked to enter her home. She was terrified. (The FBI declined to comment.)
The agents told Sivadge that she was a “person of interest” in an investigation targeting the whistleblower who had exposed the child sex-change program. They told her that the whistleblower had broken federal privacy laws. “They threatened me,” Sivadge said. “They promised they would make life difficult for me if I was trying to protect the leaker. They said I was ‘not safe’ at work and claimed that someone at my workplace had given my name to the FBI.”
The authorities—the FBI, the hospital, and, as Sivadge would later discover, federal prosecutors—were all circling the story. Both the Department of Justice and the hospital leadership were ideologically committed to “transgender medicine.” They had been embarrassed by the investigation that had exposed their actions, and they were looking for revenge.
Things went quiet for a while afterward. Sivadge resumed her work as a nurse, and the FBI did not reappear.
Texas Children’s Hospital continued its sex-change program but focused instead on patients who had reached the legal age of 18. Sivadge saw the same terrible medical regimen being prescribed for these young adults: testosterone for girls, estrogen for boys, and referrals for specialty services. While Roberts and Paul had stopped providing sex-change procedures for minors, the gender clinic still overflowed with “transgender” teens.
[…]
…Sivadge noticed discrepancies in the paperwork. After the FBI visit, she followed some of the medical charts for these patients and came to believe that doctors might be violating the law.
As Sivadge learned, Texas law forbade hospitals from billing Medicaid for transgender procedures. The Texas Medicaid Provider Procedures Manual has long stated that “sex change operations” are “not benefits of Texas Medicaid.” In 2021, Texas Medicaid officials told the Kaiser Family Foundation that this prohibition was not limited to genital surgeries but “explicitly excludes coverage of all gender affirming health services.”
[…]
When reached for comment, a spokesman for Texas Health and Human Services confirmed that the state Medicaid program has “never covered ‘gender-affirming’ surgery or prescription drugs for the purpose of ‘gender-affirming’ care.”
At Texas Children’s, as she was treating patients, Sivadge carefully scrutinized the treatments related to an alarming number of “transgender” teenagers under the care of Roberts and Paul, who, she came to believe, were unlawfully billing the state Medicaid program.
Rufo details more of Sivadge’s findings, including a statement from Roberts, who admitted that Texas Medicaid covered some of his procedures. It was jotted down in an affidavit during a lawsuit against SB14, which banned child mutilation surgeries for minors. For Haim, armed federal agents served him with a warrant, a target of the Justice Department who could put him behind bars for allegedly violating medical privacy laws.
Yeah, that could be it, or the FBI is going after enemies of the Democratic Party agenda.