Kline investigates Planned Parenthood

Kline had begun his investigation of Planned Parenthood’s abortion clinic, Comprehensive Health, in 2003 under the supervision of Shawnee County District Judge Richard Anderson.  After exhausting a full spectrum of delaying tactics, Planned Parenthood finally turned over 29 incomplete patient files to Anderson in June 2006. It was not until October 2006, a month before his defeat in his re-election bid, that Kline finally took possession of the files.

When he received the relevant patient files from Planned Parenthood, as well as those from Tiller’s clinic, Anderson commissioned special counsel Stephen Cavanaugh to make sure each one of them was properly scrubbed of identifying information.

This Cavanaugh and two reviewing physicians took pains to do. Cavanaugh made this clear in a hearing on October 24, 2006, at which he testified that he had personally reviewed all of the files from both Tiller’s clinic and Planned Parenthood’s. 

“I was confident that all identifiers had been properly redacted and the privacy of the female patients was protected,” Cavanaugh would later affirm.   Had local journalists not so willfully blinded themselves, they would have seen through the “privacy” smokescreen right from the beginning.

In his review of the Planned Parenthood files, Cavanaugh turned up a problem he did not expect but that Planned Parenthood likely feared would be discovered all along: very few of the individual late-term abortion files contained a “determination of viability.” 

As required by Kansas law, the abortion doctor must determine the gestational age of the unborn baby and, if more than 22 weeks, the baby’s viability. The originals of these reports are sent to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE), but by law a copy must be kept in each patient file.

This is critical.  Viable babies beyond 22 weeks cannot be aborted in Kansas without documentation of severe risk to the mother.  In the 26 patient files that Cavanaugh cited there was no record of non-viability or maternal risk despite the fact that the unborn babies had passed the 22-week mark.

In an August 14, 2006 letter to Cavanaugh, the attorneys for Planned Parenthood replied that its non-viability reports for unborn babies beyond 22 weeks were kept in a “separate secure file.” This was an interesting admission in that local CEO Peter Brownlie, as mentioned, had all along been insisting that Planned Parenthood did not perform any late-term abortions.

The attorneys made another curious admission in this letter.  If the gestational age were less than 24 weeks, they write, “The fetus is determined to be not viable.”  This admission is substantiated in those KDHE reports for the unborn in the 22-24 week range that have been made public.  In these, Planned Parenthood staff routinely note, “No reasonable probability at this gestational age.” This fatal presumption flies in the face of the state law, which demands that the physician exercise “care, skill, and proficiency” in determining viability once the unborn baby is beyond 22 weeks.

Anderson promptly authorized a subpoena for the KDHE reports.  Planned Parenthood complied, or at least seemed to.  For several months all seemed well for Planned Parenthood, but the surprise election of Kline as Johnson County DA had to have unnerved them.  They must have known that Kline would soon discover still another problem with the reports, this one even more damaging.

Kline charges Planned Parenthood

With Judge Anderson’s expressed permission, Kline took copies of the Planned Parenthood records with him when he returned to Johnson County in January 2007.   When he had settled in a few months later and began to review the KDHE reports, he immediately spotted the problem and alerted Anderson to the same: the reports submitted by Planned Parenthood that were supposed to be copies of the KDHE originals did not match the originals.

Troubled by what he saw, and knowing that the two prosecutors were at odds, Anderson wanted an unbiased opinion.  So he quietly shared the reports with a document expert from the Topeka Police Department. As Anderson later testified in open court, the expert concurred with his suspicions that the reports “didn’t match up,” that they, in fact, appeared to have been counterfeited.

"It was visually obvious that some documents had been manufactured," Kline would relate to the Supreme Court. Anderson would tell the same court, “Somebody may have committed a felony in an attempt to cover up a misdemeanor.”

In Topeka, meanwhile, Attorney General Paul Morrison launched a two-week review of the Planned Parenthood patient files.  In the course of this review, April 10, 2007 to be precise, Judge Anderson told the assistant AG representing Morrison, “There is evidence of crimes in those records that need to be evaluated.” 

The judge’s concern did not seem to impress Morrison, who was giving all the appearance of working hand-in-rubber glove with the abortion industry. In April 2007, he made an oral motion ordering Kline to hand the evidence back to the potential criminal defendant, Planned Parenthood.  Kline refused to give the files up.

A few weeks after Morrison’s order to Kline, in May 2007, Planned Parenthood held a gala fundraiser in Kansas City, Missouri’s historic jazz district. The two featured guests were Planned Parenthood’s national president Cecile Richards and Governor Kathleen Sebelius, whose birthday was the rationale for the party.  

By the end of the evening, according to the local Planned Parenthood newsletter, “Hundreds of PPKM supporters were dancing in a conga line around the concert hall.”  Leading the “dancing pack” was Peter Brownlie, the local CEO whose abortion clinic was at the center of a deadly serious criminal investigation. The Planned Parenthood crowd “sure knows how to have fun!” enthused the newsletter reporter.

A few weeks after the party, Planned Parenthood secretly made an appeal to the Supreme Court.  On June 7, its attorneys demanded that the patient files be returned and that Kline be held in contempt. In a rare move, the Supreme Court agreed to seal this case.

“It's unusual for the target of a criminal investigation in Kansas to sue the prosecutor,” the Star would later report with some wonder.  The suit would eventually cost Kline at least $140,000 in legal fees, which the state is still refusing to cover.

Later in the month of June, Morrison showily “cleared” Planned Parenthood of all wrongdoing with much applause from the media and the abortion industry.  As Morrison was coming to understand, however, he was fighting a two front war.  Anderson still held the original patient files from Planned Parenthood, and he wasn’t giving them up either.  On July 9, 2007, Morrison filed a motion for Anderson to return the files to Planned Parenthood despite Morrison’s awareness that the viability reports were, to say the least, suspect.

Morrison’s office tipped off Planned Parenthood about the motion, and one of its attorneys, Pedro Irigonegaray, showed up unannounced in Anderson’s office a few days later. Irigonegaray demanded the patient files, but Anderson, as he would later testify, was not about to hand them over.

“These records do not match,” Anderson told Irigonegaray. The Planned Parenthood attorney continued to demand them, chiding Anderson as “unpredictable.” Anderson was stunned by Irigonegaray’s demeanor. He had known the Planned Parenthood attorney for twenty-five years. “Look at these records,” Anderson told him. “There is a problem here.”

Unmoved by Anderson’s concerns, Morrison filed a suit with the Supreme Court against the judge and joined Planned Parenthood’s suit against Kline. 

Kline fully understood the reason for Planned Parenthood’s anxiety, and he quickly took the offensive. In October 2007, Kline presented his evidence to District Court Judge James Vano, who found “probable cause” of crimes having been committed and allowed the case to proceed.  On October 17, Kline promptly filed 107 counts, 23 of them felonies, against Planned Parenthood’s abortion clinic, Comprehensive Health.

The abortion industry and it shills cried foul. Ashley Anstaett, Morrison’s spokeswoman, told The Associated Press that Attorney General Morrison had already reviewed Kline’s accusations and found no wrongdoing.  “We are skeptical that these charges have any merit, and we continue to wonder how much politics influenced Mr. Kline’s decision to file these charges,” Anstaett said. 

Judge Anderson was proving no easier to intimidate than Kline.  That same month, October 2007, he responded to Morrison’s petition that he return the original medical records both to Tiller’s clinic and Planned Parenthood respectively.

Returning this evidence, Anderson told the Supreme Court, “would unacceptably increase the risk that the evidence could be lost, destroyed or compromised while active investigations and prosecutions are on-going.”

“It is difficult to understand,” Anderson added emphatically, “how this would benefit the citizens of the state of Kansas.”

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