Huge: California Repudiates Kamala's Baby Parts Case

Charges Dropped Against Pair Who Busted Planned Parenthood Baby Parts Biz

After nine years of politically-driven lawfare initiated by then California Attorney General Kamala Harris, the State of California has essentially dropped all charges against David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt. In 2015, the pair’s undercover investigation into the baby parts racket almost brought down Planned Parenthood.

In 2013, the then 24-year-old Daleiden launched what would prove to be the most sustained and effective undercover journalism project since the Chicago Sun-Times’s famed political sting of 1977. That year, the Sun-Times purchased a rundown bar, renamed it “The Mirage,” staffed it with its reporters, and captured on camera the shakedowns, payoffs, and sundry criminal mischief of Chicago’s political underclass.

Daleiden’s “Mirage” was a sham biomedical research company called “Biomax Procurement Services.” Over time, Daleiden had become aware that Planned Parenthood was engaged in the trafficking of “fetal tissue,” a double-edged euphemism for “baby parts.” Working through a journalistic entity of his own creation, the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), Daleiden and his partner Sandra Merritt learned the language and the mechanics of the fetal tissue procurement business and went to work.

Planned Parenthood was not an easy target. To penetrate its many and sophisticated defenses, Daleiden and Merritt had to hit hard and deep. This they did. Over a period lasting more than two years, the highly disciplined twosome worked their way into the good graces of Planned Parenthood clinicians in several states and captured on camera the chilling words and deeds of the practitioners in the nation’s most grotesque “respectable” industry.

In July 2015, Daleiden started dropping the videos. The combination of callow words and cruel images, repeated in one video after another, rocked Washington. The timing was good. The 2016 presidential campaigns were revving up, and many Republicans spoke out about what they saw.

“The out-of-sight, out-of-mind mantra that propelled the pro-choice movement for decades is forever gone,” Kellyanne Conway, then a Republican pollster, told the New York Times. Reeling from the blow, even the Times had to wonder whether “the new offensive will succeed in crippling Planned Parenthood.”

Barack Obama, the first president to speak at Planned Parenthood’s national convention, kept his distance from the hubbub. An indifferent media got no closer to the president than his press secretary, Josh Earnest.

On July 30, 2015, a young reporter asked Earnest if Obama had seen the video that was released on that day. The video in question began with interview footage of harried Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards insisting, “It’s not a fee. It’s not a fee. It’s just the cost of transmitting this material.” The undercover footage that followed undercut everything Richards said.

A doctor at a mega Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado was seen explaining the clinic’s traffic in body parts. Aware that it was illegal to transfer “human fetal tissue” for “valuable consideration,” the doctor played semantic games with the would-be purchasers.

“We don’t want to get called on, you know, selling fetal parts across states,” she joked, unaware she was being recorded. This interview was followed by an on-site review of actual body parts with the doctor and a clinician. What is impressive was how well Daleiden and Merritt played their roles as buyers. What is unnerving is how casually the doctor and clinician picked through trays of baby parts—a heart, a brain, a lung—while talking about the commercial viability of the “fetal cadaver.”

At the press conference, Earnest appeared to be bored by the whole subject. He did not know if Obama had seen the video in question or any of the videos and did not think it mattered. He airily dismissed CMP’s investigative project “as the tried and true tactic that we have seen from extremists on the right: To edit this video and selectively release it so that it grossly distorts the position of the person who is actually speaking on the video.” Apparently satisfied with Earnest’s explanation, the reporters quickly moved on to a new subject.

Running for president at the time, Hillary Clinton could not afford to be so dismissive. Although her first instinct was to attack the video producers, Clinton herself began to waver as each new video dropped. “I have seen pictures from [the videos] and obviously find them disturbing,” Clinton told the New Hampshire Union Leader late that July. No one knew better than Clinton, however, what overwhelming force Planned Parenthood and its allies in the Democratic-media complex could bring to bear against a pair of citizen journalists.

For immediate assistance, the Planned Parenthood brass turned to the well-connected fixers at—where else? —Fusion GPS. They contracted with Fusion to review the unedited footage Daleiden had posted online. The former journalists at Fusion GPS did not even have to feign objectivity.

Armed with a ten-page report from Fusion, Richards went on the offensive. Convincing people they did not see what they saw would not be easy, but the networks made the task possible by refusing to show the actual videos. As to the newspapers and online journals, they did their bit by leaving the assessment of the videos to Fusion GPS. The media welcomed this “forensic study” as heartily as they welcomed Fusion GPS’s notorious “Steele dossier” a year later.

The Times headlined its story, “Planned Parenthood Videos Were Altered, Analysis Finds.” Deep in the copy, Fusion admitted they “found no evidence that CMP inserted dialogue not spoken by Planned Parenthood staff,” but the headline did the damage. To complete the rout, prosecutorial friends of Planned Parenthood, both in Texas and California, brought utterly bogus criminal charges against Daleiden and Merritt. Mainstream journalists yawned, even cheered.

As the 2016 presidential campaign wound its way to its unexpected conclusion, Planned Parenthood Action felt confident enough to ridicule CMP for its “fake, criminal videos.” Hillary Clinton felt comfortable enough with Planned Parenthood to make her first speech as presumptive nominee at one of its events. Hillary and friends were on a winning streak until, happily, they weren’t.

Thanks to the alternative media, millions of Americans saw those pesky videos, even if Obama refused to. So grotesque were the practices revealed in the videos they may well have cost Hillary the presidency. If she lost, however, Planned Parenthood won—or at least seemed to. The unexpected dismissal of the case against Daleiden and Merritt suggests the battle is far from over.

My newest book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, is available in all formats.