Dr. James Holsinger has also been a longtime leader of the Confessing Movement in the United Methodist Church. The Confessing Movement is a rightwing "renewal group" affiliated with the Washington, DC-based Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), whose purpose for a generation has been to divide and disrupt the historic churchs of mainline protestantism in the interests of advancing neoconservatism and the religious right.

Holsinger was elected to the highest court in the Methodist Church a time when the IRD-affiliated church "renewal" groups had launched efforts to use church judicial systems to enforce their notions of orthodoxy, particularly on matters related to homosexuality.

Now, an investigation Rev. Andrew J. Weaver, Ph.D. and Lawrence H. McGaughey, Esq., and published at Media Transparency, shows that Holsinger used the sale of a United Methodist Church-owned hospital in Kentucky, as a cash cow for his personal ambitions. It took years of litigation by the church to find out what had happened to its money, only to learn that Holsinger had diverted millions to endow professorships at the Chandler Medical Center at the University of Kentucky where he served as Chancellor and fundraiser-in-chief.

Meanwhile, Weaver and McGaughy report Holsinger did not disclose to his fellow church justices that he he was party to significant litigation against the church in the state courts -- and thereby surface any potential conflicts of interest. The litigation cost the United Methodist Church (UMC) millions of dollars in legal fees to recover its assets. The article also raises questions about how those assets (that were not given away) were managed while under the control of Dr. Holsinger and his associates, some of whom apparently also had conflicts of interest.

Weaver and McGaughy report:

From the time of the sale of the property in July of 1995 until the [Kentucky Annual Conference of the UMC] KAC filed suit against the GSF on May 18, 2000, the foundation's trustees "refused to give an accounting of the proceeds from the sale to the Kentucky Annual Conference". In fact, as late as June of 2006 the lay and clergy members of the KAC felt compelled to pass a resolution formally seeking necessary "[i]nformation on assets, income earned, tax issues...investment practices, conflicts of interest, and other information" from the foundation.

The Good Samaritan Hospital (GSH) of Lexington, Kentucky, was one of dozens of hospitals built by the Methodist church in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to provide care for the poor and indigent. The GSH had an unbroken legal and historic connection to Kentucky Methodism dating back to 1925. Photographic evidence presented in court showed that from 1968 until 1995, signs inside and outside of the hospital publicly proclaimed "The Good Samaritan Hospital of the United Methodist Church." Not surprisingly, the Kentucky courts repeatedly ruled that the hospital "was held in trust" for the KAC and that the church rightfully owns the assets.

It was only when Holsinger was named as Surgeon General nominee that the litigation came to an abrupt halt. Within a matter of days after his May 24, 2007, nomination, Holsinger resigned from the GSF trustees [the entity that controlled assets from the sale of the hospital] and the lawsuit, communicating through a spokesperson that to continue would be incompatible with an appointment as Surgeon General. Within a mere two weeks, the suit was finally settled, after seven years of litigation."

Read the whole report here.