Clinics Want To Know How Bill O’Reilly Got Confidential Patient Records

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Two clinics in Topeka, Kansas have asked the Kansas Supreme Court to investigate Kansas Attorney General Phil Kline and Fox Broadcasting’s Bill O’Reilly over O’Reilly’s claim that he possessed information from the records of patients who underwent abortion procedures.

Kline, a vocal opponent of abortion, took possession of ninety medical records from the two clinics earlier this year “as part of his investigation into alleged cases of child rape, failure to report child rape and violations of state’s late-term abortion statue.” According to Kline’s website:

Those medical records are being reviewed by criminal prosecutors and investigators in my office. I want to remind Kansans that women and children are not and never will be under investigation – only abortion doctors, confirming doctors, and rapists are under investigation. Also, I have never sought the women’s identities. I do not need their identities. Their privacy is protected by a protocol my office established with the district court judge to removing the identifying information of the women from the very beginning.

O’Reilly maintains that an “inside source” gave him the information from the Topeka records. He cited the case of a doctor who performed late-term abortions “because patients were depressed,” and referred to the procedure as “executing babies.”

Last week, Kansas’s former attorney general, Bob Stephan, asked the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission to investigate Kline’s fundraising activities.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

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So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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