Then Republican candidate for governor and Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron waves to the crowd during the 143rd Fancy Farm Picnic, Aug. 5, 2023. Behind him are U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell; Elaine Chao, former U.S. Transportation and Labor secretary; U.S. Rep. James Comer (partially blocked by Cameron’s arm) and Cameron’s wife, Makenze Cameron. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)
FRANKFORT — The word “privacy” does not appear in the U.S. Constitution. But the right to privacy — to be free from baseless government intrusions into our “persons, houses, papers and effects” — is woven all through the Constitution and our laws.
Despite having sworn an oath to support the Constitution and the law, former Attorney General Daniel Cameron misused his power in order to harass physicians who had performed abortions in Kentucky when the procedure was still legal here.
We know this only because a court case that had been kept secret for more than a year was recently unsealed. The Lantern joined with Louisville Public Media to hire lawyers to ask that the records be opened because the public needs to know — and we want to report — what happens in the courts.
The public also needs to know when government officials abuse their power, as they have long been wont to do.
How Kentucky’s former top prosecutor used his powers to go after abortion providers in secret
Our nation’s founders understood the risk of unencumbered government power. They took pains in the Constitution to keep Americans secure from the kind of harassment inflicted by England’s monarch, whose men could search anyone’s belongings “without any cause other than the perceived suspicion that they were political enemies.”
In the summer of 2022, in the days after Americans lost the federally-protected right to end a pregnancy, EMW Women’s Surgical Center and Planned Parenthood filed a legal challenge to Kentucky’s near-total ban on abortion. The ban had been triggered into effect by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.
Two physicians on the University of Louisville medical faculty provided abortions and trained future doctors at EMW — training required to maintain the medical school’s accreditation. At a hearing asking a judge in Louisville to block the abortion ban, one of the physicians testified, “Abortion is essential health care. … People have the right to determine whether they wish to have children.”
Cameron, who had made opposition to abortion a cornerstone of his political platform, was defending the state’s abortion ban and also gearing up for his successful campaign to become the Republican nominee for governor.
Kentucky appeals court rejects AG’s efforts to get employment records in abortion case
He decided to go after the physicians’ employment records and sought the information through the discovery process. When that didn’t work, Cameron opened a criminal investigation and subpoenaed their W2s, 1099s, insurance info, time sheets and job descriptions under the pretense that a Franklin County grand jury wanted them.
Two Kentucky courts concluded that Cameron had no evidence to justify his demands for the physicians’ records, that he was conducting an illegal “fishing expedition,” much like the king’s henchmen.
Significantly, Cameron’s successor, Attorney General Russell Coleman, also a Republican, ended the fishing expedition by opting not to seek a review by the Supreme Court.
All along the way, political considerations appear to have steered Cameron. He pleased conservative interests like the Family Foundation by going after the physicians’ info in the first place. But by the fall of 2023, in the heat of the gubernatorial race and with Democrat Andy Beshear attacking him on abortion, Cameron wanted to keep his actions secret. He quickly obtained a Court of Appeals order to keep the case sealed when Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd signaled his intent to open it.
Cameron misused his considerable powers as attorney general against Kentuckians whose offense was taking the opposite side of a divisive public issue. If, as the physicians argued, Cameron had succeeded in obtaining their private information, he might well have used it to publicly harass them or as fodder for his campaign.
Cameron’s fig leaf of a rationale was a suspicion that public money was somehow supporting abortion because the U of L professors also worked at EMW, at one time Kentucky’s only abortion provider. Longstanding state and federal laws ban the public funding of abortions.
But, as his own legal team admitted, even that flimsy fig leaf had evaporated by the time Cameron issued the criminal subpoena because the one-year statute of limitations on that law had expired.
To give Cameron the benefit of the doubt, to protect any genuine investigation of any genuine possible wrongdoing, Judge Shepherd had allowed the attorney general’s team to present its evidence privately or “in camera.”
We can conclude from the record that Cameron had no justification for probing the physicians’ private records. Mitch McConnell’s protege, endorsed in his quest for the governorship by Donald Trump, had put ambition and politics above the law he had sworn to uphold.
Kentuckians need to know that, no matter how they feel about abortion or politics.
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