Kentucky’s former top law enforcement officer sought records in 2023 from two OB-GYNs who provided abortions at a Louisville clinic as he worked to build a criminal case against them.
Daniel Cameron, then the Republican attorney general, subpoenaed personnel and payroll records of two University of Louisville physicians, according to court documents unsealed Monday in Franklin Circuit Court.
Cameron said such records “could be used as evidence in pursuit of an indictment regarding a crime involving the use of public funds.”
The pursuit of the doctors’ files is the most clear-cut example that Cameron sought to flex his power to bring felony charges against people he believed had violated Kentucky’s near-total abortion ban, and in this case, Cameron alleged, using tax dollars to do so.
Cameron’s efforts were eventually foiled by two courts who ruled in favor of the doctors. No criminal charges were filed against the physicians.
Though the grand jury subpoena was issued — and eventually quashed — more than a year ago, Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd unsealed the case only this week after two media outlets — Louisville Public Media and the Kentucky Lantern — petitioned him to do so, arguing it was in the public’s interest to show how the attorney general wielded his authority.
“The former Attorney General exercised (his) power, despite the lack of any allegations that state funds had been used” to violate Kentucky’s abortion laws, lawyers for LPM and the Lantern argued in their motion to open the case file.
“The public has a clear and paramount interest in both the former Attorney General’s filings in this case and this court’s adjudication of the dispute,” the two outlets said.
At the time the subpoena was issued, Kentucky’s near-total abortion ban had been in effect for a year following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, as had a separate 2022 law that expressly prohibited the use of “public agency funds” for abortion services — the statute Cameron was specifically referencing that he claimed may have been violated.
Both laws are still in place today.
Republicans and the Family Foundation, a conservative Christian lobbying group, had previously questioned whether the public salaries of the UofL doctors also extended to their work at EMW Women’s Surgical Center, an abortion provider in downtown Louisville, where they trained medical residents.
EMW was one of two outpatient abortion clinics left in Kentucky before the medical procedure was banned in June 2022 with the Dobbs decision.
Cameron, who was at the time running a gubernatorial campaign to unseat Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, requested a grand jury subpoena to gain access to the doctors’ “personnel files, employment agreements, payroll records, copies of W-2 or 1099’s, all time and attendance information from hire date through 2022 (and) insurance policies.”
As attorney general, Cameron claimed in one of the filings unsealed Monday that he was “charged with investigating and prosecuting crimes involving the use of public funds,” and he implied that the pair of UofL doctors, whose services were also contracted by EMW, may have committed such crimes.
But he had no evidentiary basis for such a suspicion — a point that would be later cited by Shepherd and a three-judge panel on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.
On Friday, Shepherd said he would make nearly all the court records in this case public, while keeping the names of the doctors and the medical clinic confidential. The court made 177 pages of the case public late Monday afternoon.
Cameron’s one term as attorney general ended when Russell Coleman, also a Republican, took office Jan. 1.
The ‘public should know what goes on in their courts’
Unlike a court-ordered subpoena, which is predicated on a specific case or controversy, Cameron at the time argued a grand jury “can investigate merely on suspicion that the law is being violated, or even just because it wants the assurance that it is not.”
The subpoena, he said, was a tool “to uncover information relevant to a potential crime,” with the potential crime being that two doctors employed at a public university, and whose salaries are funded primarily by tax dollars, also performed abortions.
In effect, Cameron argued, the doctors used tax dollars to pay for abortions.
Lawyers for the doctors said their clients were contracted by EMW and paid by EMW, not UofL, for providing those services. And when the state’s trigger ban took effect, EMW stopped providing abortions.
The doctors, who are also UofL professors, sued Cameron in an effort to quash his subpoena, saying the documents he requested were “not relevant to any potential criminal charges, and requiring their production would be unreasonable and oppressive” calling the effort “no more than a fishing expedition . . . designed to harass.”
The doctors’ lawyers accused him of using “abortion litigation, against providers and others, for political gain in his gubernatorial campaign,” citing Cameron’s campaign website that touted him as an “advocate for the unborn (who) continues to defend Kentucky’s pro-life laws in court.”
Cameron, in another filing, in turn criticized them for attempting to “falsely slander the Attorney General as seeking this information for political purposes.”
Both parties jointly agreed to seal the subpoena and court case in July 2023, according to court records. Two months later, Shepherd ruled in favor of the doctors, countermanding the subpoena and ordering that most of the case file be unsealed.
“The Attorney General has merely alleged that two doctors who contracted to perform medical services at the clinic to which the subpoena is directed, were also faculty members at a state university,” Shepherd wrote at the time. “Those facts are uncontested, and do not on their face provide any basis to suspect any violation of any criminal statute.”
Shepherd said Cameron not only “lacks statutory authority to investigate or prosecute this matter,” but that he “has not made a valid argument, or cited any legal precedent that supports the authority of his office . . . to investigate and prosecute this case.”
In late September, Cameron blocked Shepherd’s order by promptly appealing to the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, contesting both the ruling quashing the subpoena and the order unsealing the case.
Cameron lost his bid for governor roughly six weeks later.
In early August 2024, a three-judge panel on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld Shepherd’s ruling.
Quoting from the doctor’s lawyers, the appellate judges said Cameron’s subpoena amounted to a “fishing expedition,” because no evidence existed in the case to support his suspicion: that tax dollars were illegally spent on abortion services.
In one of his final explanations for why the case should be unsealed, Shepherd said he “recognizes the Attorney General may have an interest in maintaining secrecy if further investigation or prosecution of these matters is contemplated.”
But, he added, “the court is also mindful that one of the strongest demands of a democratic system is that the public should know what goes on in their courts. The public is party to all criminal proceedings.”