by Kathleen Gilbert
TOPEKA, Kansas, June 7, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The man who became the first prosecutor in America to take on Planned Parenthood in court has revealed new details in the astonishing story of how the Kansas Supreme Court colluded with prosecutors and the Kathleen Sebelius administration to halt his investigation and turn the media against him, culminating in an effort to end his legal career.
For those unfamiliar with the Phill Kline case, the recusal motion filed last month by lawyers for the former Kansas Attorney General deftly encapsulates how the investigator was vilified for allegedly violating “patient privacy” in the normal course of investigating child rape, which in turn brought him head to head with Planned Parenthood.
The motion tells the story Kline summed up recently as “Alice through the looking glass: It only gets curiouser and curiouser.”
Although Kline’s motion focused on the need for two of the state Supreme Court’s justices to recuse themselves, in a testimony to the strength of his argument, all five Supreme Court justices named for their involvement in the case recused themselves last month - an exodus unprecedented in recent memory, as a Court spokesman acknowledged.
Phil Kline
One of the motion’s early footnotes notes that the reason for the twisted tale was predictable: it involved abortion.
“It is difficult to fathom any other context where criminal targets could so effectively use the courts to prevent a prosecutor from using lawful means to gather evidence of their crimes,” said Kline’s lawyers. “However, in the context of abortion it should surprise no one.” The lawyers quoted U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s observation that, “the jurisprudence of this Court has a way of changing when abortion is involved.”
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From the beginning, AG Kline’s investigation into child rape was repeatedly hampered by abortionists’ extraordinary legal motions: in one example, the court handed over the task of redacting the records in question to the target of the investigation itself, Planned Parenthood - a move Kline called “unprecedented,” and which resulted in over-redaction.
As soon as Kline moved out of the attorney general’s office in 2007, Comprehensive Health of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri teamed with Kansas’ new top attorney in a desperate bid to recover the abortion records Kline still held.
Kline’s pro-abortion successor, AG Steve Morrison, first attempted to run “an intelligence raid for Planned Parenthood” in the spring of 2007 by demanding Kline’s records - even though Morrison already owned copies of all of them, and had no intention of prosecuting anyway - but the motion was denied. Two months later, Planned Parenthood began trying to force Kline to hand over the records. Meanwhile Morrison, who publicly cleared Planned Parenthood of charges, subpoenaed a local magistrate for his copy of the records.
When that failed, Planned Parenthood officials arrived unannounced three days later in the same judge’s office to demand the records. The judge, Richard Anderson, said the records likely contained evidence of their criminal activity, and refused.
Finally, Morrison joined forces with Planned Parenthood itself in their Supreme Court action against Kline, a bid that failed in December 2008.
But Supreme Court Justice Carol Beier’s opinion in that ruling, widely noted for its surprisingly abusive language against Kline, had a falsehood buried within that few noticed at the time: she wrote that Kline left “no coherent copies” of the records at the AG’s office, a claim Kline’s lawyers called a “whopper.” The “spectacular falsehood” was the basis of Beier’s faux “sanction” ordering Kline to return totally redundant record copies, putting him in a bad light.
Even worse, previous writings by Beier strongly hinted that the red herring was intentional: Beier had endorsed the idea that “[t]he media are tools to produce cultural infrastructure.”
The ruse worked: “Kline abortion prosecution faulted, Justices order medical records turned over to state,” reported the Topeka Capital-Journal; the Kansas City Star blared, “High court sanctions Kline for handling of abortion records.”
Ultimately, many of the 107 charges Kline had brought against Planned Parenthood, including all 23 felonies, were thrown out last year when it was discovered that the Kathleen Sebelius administration had destroyed key documents needed to compare Kline’s records with Planned Parenthood’s later submissions. The destruction took place in 2005, two years after Kline began uncovering abortionists’ alleged criminal activity.
Fortunately, Kline’s recent recusal motion has had an impact: four days after the filing, the five justices, including Sebelius-appointed Carol Beier, said they would recuse themselves based on a technicality regarding their previous involvement with Kline - something they would have known about for years - reasoning Kline’s attorney called a smokescreen to divert attention from the embarrassing motion.
Even so, said the attorney, the layers of deception demonstrated in the case have rendered it “irretrievably flawed.” Meanwhile, as Kline fights the ethics allegations aimed at suspending his license, in proceedings that have also proved deeply flawed thus far, his legal expenses have topped $300,000 and counting.
Although the recusal motion focused on Justice Beier’s role in the affair, its contents reveal just how far Kansas officials were willing to go to protect Planned Parenthood from prosecution.
Not only were AG Morrison’s actions baseless other than to erase record of abortionsts’ wrongdoing, said Kline’s lawyers, but the Beier sanction raised the stakes even more by requiring Kline to hand over records that Kansas officials never had to begin with - ones he procured in his own subsequent abortion investigations as a district attorney.
As a result, private documents and statements Kline had assured sources would be kept private, were handed over to Kansas - and abortionists.
“I’ve been told,” said Kline, “that all of that information was then turned over to the attorneys for the abortion clinics.”
Click here for more information on contributing to Phill Kline’s legal fund.
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