From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

The early stages of efforts to rescue 54 Haitian orphans and bring them to Pittsburgh turned into a competition with political undertones, secret meetings and a possible foretaste of a coming congressional race.
Mary Beth Buchanan, the former U.S. attorney for Western Pennsylvania, opened a bid to extract the children and the sisters from Ben Avon who ran the BRESMA orphanage in Port-au-Prince.
Ms. Buchanan, who has been openly mulling a run for the Republican nomination to challenge incumbent Rep. Jason Altmire, D-McCandless, spent four days obtaining clearance for the children to enter the United States, medical supplies for the trip down and back, physicians to escort the children and — in the final link that did not fall into place in time — an airplane cleared to land in Haiti.
She said the organizer of the other rescue attempt, Leslie Merrill McCombs, a senior consultant for UPMC, phoned and grilled her for information, obtained a list of the children and ended up shipping medical supplies gathered as part of the Buchanan effort on the plane that carried Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell and Mr. Altmire.
However the successful rescue was organized, it had the effect of short-circuiting Ms. Buchanan’s effort and shifting attention to Mr. Altmire, a former UPMC lobbyist.
Ms. Buchanan said she started on Thursday, Jan. 14, two days after the quake, by contacting Jonathan Wander, a local writer who was close with the McMutrie sisters. He put her in touch with Diana Boni, who is in charge of Haiti adoptions for Kentucky Adoption Services, the company with legal standing to file a petition for asylum on behalf of the children.
Ms. Buchanan also enlisted Valerie May, a Pittsburgh immigration lawyer. With Ms. Boni, they assembled a three-part list: BRESMA children close to final adoption; those with prospective parents but whose adoptions were in the early stages; and children with no current prospects.

Then local politics came into play.

Early Monday morning, Ms. Buchanan received phone calls from reporters: A plane was getting ready to leave Pittsburgh International.
From South Dakota, Ms. Boni e-mailed Ms. Buchanan, seemingly furious that Ms. McCombs and her group were about to go to Haiti. Later, Ms. Buchanan said, Ms. Boni attempted to relay phone calls to the plane saying she did not approve.
“My children,” she wrote to Ms. Buchanan, “are not available for publicity stunts.”
As Mr. Rendell was boarding the airplane, Ms. McCombs recalled, Mr. Altmire told her “this lady from the adoption agency is trying to stop our flight and saying we’re kidnapping the children.”
Ms. McCombs said she called Ms. Boni to tell her that U.S. authorities were backing the mission, but said Ms. Boni did not believe her.
Shortly before noon the airplane was in the air, heading south.
Ms. Buchanan pleaded with an Allegheny County youth services official to tell her what was going on. She said he referred her to UPMC’s public relations department.
Ms. May, the immigration lawyer, did not figure out until Sunday night that she was working with two separate missions.
“I believed everyone involved was working to get those children out and everyone was genuinely concerned about the welfare of the children,” she said. “It became evident that there was a political dynamic to this that no one had anticipated.”