Earlier this fall, the Kansas Supreme Court filed a complaint against former Attorney General Phill Kline’s Assistant AG, Stephen Maxwell, alleging he mislead state and county offices, as well as lied to a judge in order to shut down two abortion clinics in the state. Yesterday, the Kansas Supreme Court filed a similar complaint against Kline’s chief of staff Eric Rucker.
Like Maxwell, Rucker was heavily involved in orchestrating a series of actions to unethically obtain medical records and to identify the women in those records, even if the information was otherwise redacted. He also lied to the Court three times: he said Kline’s office was also investigating live births to girls under 16 years of age, though no investigation was underway; he said they were not looking for the names of women who went to the clinic even though they had subpoenaed guest lists from the La Quinta Inn and sent people to Dr. Tiller’s clinic to take pictures of visitors’ and employees’ license plates; he also stated they didn’t know the names of children at the clinic though they had this information from La Quinta. Needless to say, the Court is not happy they were lied to.
After Kline lost his 2006 re-election and headed to Johnson County, Rucker went with him. At this time, a special agent with the AG’s office, Jared Reed, told Rucker, “[if] you continue down one path to help the cause, you actually hurt the cause. When you’re-you know, sometimes it’s best to kind of take a step back and re-evaluate and may be approach it in a different way.” Rucker replied that:
[s]ometimes the personal losses-or the benefit or gain of a-of a larger cause outweighs that of a personal impact and that the personal or individual careers are worth sacrificing for a greater cause, including the killing of babies.
Reed testified in Dr. Tiller’s trial last March that Kline was “willing to do whatever it took, including breaking the law or going above the law, to get a conviction”.
In this same trial, Rucker testified he was “not so deeply involved in the investigation,” even though, as Chief of Staff, he was well aware.
The March trial of Dr. George Tiller found a jury of 6 declaring he did not violate the late abortion law in the state on the 19 charges brought against him. Scott Roeder attended the hearing and reported left it angry that Dr. Tiller was released and went back to his practice, helping drive him to assassinate Dr. Tiller in his church on May 31st.
Throughout Kline’s public persecution of Dr. Tiller, Kline went on The O’Reilly Factor to discuss the medical records. Kline also gave copies to a Dr. Paul McHugh whom he described as highly qualified. McHugh said none of the records, as he could tell, were medically necessary and were all related to mental illness. One of the records was of a 10-year-old girl who was 28 weeks pregnant. He said the pregnancy was “terrible” but “[s]he did not have something irreversible that an abortion could correct.”
If that’s not enough for you to question McHugh’s credibility, try this gem:
At least eight men have been convicted of sexually abusing Maryland children while under treatment at the “sex disorders” clinic McHugh runs at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine — abuse the doctors did not report, citing client confidentiality. When Maryland law was changed to require that doctors report child molestation, the clinic fought it and advised patients on how to get around the law.
Men abusing children deserve patient confidentiality while women seeking abortions deserve to be ridiculed on national television.
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