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On his last day on assignment in Topeka, Kansas, LifeSiteNews reporter Peter Smith did this video interview with Phil Kline regarding an important revelation during the ethics trial.

TOPEKA, Kansas, February 25, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Surprising testimony in the Phill Kline ethics trial revealed that former George Tiller legal counsel Dan Monnat and one of his subordinates may have violated state ethics in obtaining sensitive information that they later used against Phill Kline.

As Kansas attorney general, Phill Kline was investigating Tiller and Planned Parenthood for failures to report child rape under Kansas law.

Around 8:46 Friday morning Monnat testified that, during a November 2008 hearing, someone had put on his office’s desk a CD that contained information on patients obtaining abortions after 22 weeks, as well as customer information from La Quinta Inns, where many of Tiller’s patients spent the night. He said that “no one was sure who it came from.”

Monnat said one of his staff explored the CD and found that it contained “an attempt to compare [Kansas Board of Health and Education] records and La Quinta hotel records” in order to identify adult abortion patients.

The CD also reportedly included a vast amount of other information such as live births and other sensitive patient medical records, which Kline’s office had obtained in their overall investigation of failures to report child rape. Kline attorney Reid Holbrook then asked if he was aware that the Kansas code of professional conduct stated that, if a document is inadvertently sent to someone it doesn’t belong to, it is to be returned to its owner.

Monnat earlier had said that he wanted one of his staff over Thanksgiving to look over the CD to see if there was anything valuable related to the case. The examination of the third party medical records may have also been a violation of HIPAA rules, which only has an exception for prosecutors.