The California Attorney General’s Office asked for a court gag order Tuesday that could prevent the public from learning the truth about David Daleiden’s shocking undercover investigation of Planned Parenthood.
Daleiden and Sandra Merritt face 15 felony charges for invasion of privacy in California after they exposed Planned Parenthood’s allegedly illegal sales of aborted baby body parts.
Their preliminary hearing began last week with a witness for the abortion industry admitting that the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) videos were “not altered.” Then, a biotech company CEO who worked with Planned Parenthood admitted that they harvested aborted babies’ hearts while they were still beating.
Now, the CMP says Democrat Attorney General Xavier Becerra wants the proceedings closed to the public.
“Although the preliminary hearing is public, [Becerra’s] office filed a last-minute motion to place a gag order on the proceedings,” the group said late Tuesday.
The attorney general “falsely and irrationally” alleged “some kind of link” between Daleiden’s appearance on Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s show Friday and an unconfirmed threat reported by one of the witnesses, Doe 12, according to the undercover group.
“Doe 12’s credibility is already in question since the inconsistencies in her testimony on Thursday,” CMP stated.
Daleiden and Merritt believe their prosecution is politically motivated by politicians like Becerra and his predecessor, Kamala Harris, who received huge campaign donations from the abortion industry. No other journalists have been prosecuted for similar undercover investigations under California law, they contend.
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“It’s blackletter California law that you are not supposed to get a search warrant to seize the unpublished materials of a journalist, whether citizen journalist or professional journalist,” Daleiden told Carlson last week. “But that’s what Kamala Harris did…to protect [Planned Parenthood] from further scrutiny from the crimes of selling aborted baby body parts.”
Carlson said the prosecution against Daleiden seems rife with political corruption.
“In other words, a journalist brings to light criminal behavior committed by the political backers of a politician. That politician then uses armed cops to seize the evidence to protect her political backers. I wonder if there could be a more corrupt scenario than that,” Carlson said.
Daleiden agreed, adding: “It’s an assault on First Amendment civil rights. … It’s using the power of law enforcement … to punish dissenting thought.”
On Tuesday, the Attorney General’s lead investigator on the case testified that their office spoke with Planned Parenthood lawyers about what type of evidence to collect while raiding Daleiden’s home, according to CMP.
“California law specifically authorizes recording of even confidential conversations if the purpose is to gather evidence of violent crime. The CA DOJ witness testified that he did not write the footnote in his arrest affidavit for Daleiden and Merritt that disregarded this key provision of the California recording law, indicating it was never investigated at all,” according to the CMP summary from the hearing.
The hearing is scheduled to continue Wednesday in San Francisco.
The undercover investigation exposed numerous atrocities inside Planned Parenthood abortion facilities across the U.S. Its findings prompted investigations by the U.S. House and Senate, as well as a number of states.
The committees concluded by recommending that the Department of Justice investigate Planned Parenthood. Both said they found strong evidence that the abortion chain broke the law. The Department of Justice is investigating.
Planned Parenthood repeatedly has denied all allegations of wrong-doing, and many news outlets now parrot its talking points that the undercover videos were deceptively edited or debunked, even though that is not true. An independent forensics investigation verified that the videos were authentic.
Some undercover videos show how Planned Parenthood employees callously and flippantly negotiated the price of tiny baby hearts, lungs, livers and brains. Other evidence indicates the abortion giant may have broken HIPAA patient privacy laws.
The expose videos catching Planned Parenthood officials allegedly selling the body parts of aborted babies have shocked the nation. Here is a list of all 14:
- In the first video: Dr. Deborah Nucatola of Planned Parenthood commented on baby-crushing: “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.”
- In the second video: Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Mary Gatter joked, “I want a Lamborghini” as she negotiated the best price for baby parts.
- In the third video: Holly O’Donnell, a former Stem Express employee who worked inside a Planned Parenthood clinic, detailed first-hand the unspeakable atrocities and how she fainted in horror over handling baby legs.
- In the fourth video: Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Savita Ginde stated, “We don’t want to do just a flat-fee (per baby) of like, $200. A per-item thing works a little better, just because we can see how much we can get out of it.” She also laughed while looking at a plate of fetal kidneys that were “good to go.”
- In the fifth video: Melissa Farrell of Planned Parenthood-Gulf Coast in Houston boasted of Planned Parenthood’s skill in obtaining “intact fetal cadavers” and how her “research” department “contributes so much to the bottom line of our organization here, you know we’re one of the largest affiliates, our Research Department is the largest in the United States.”
- In the sixth video: Holly O’Donnell described technicians taking fetal parts without patient consent: “There were times when they would just take what they wanted. And these mothers don’t know. And there’s no way they would know.”
- In the seventh and perhaps most disturbing video: Holly O’Donnell described the harvesting, or “procurement,” of organs from a nearly intact late-term fetus aborted at Planned Parenthood Mar Monte’s Alameda clinic in San Jose, CA. “‘You want to see something kind of cool,’” O’Donnell says her supervisor asked her. “And she just taps the heart, and it starts beating. And I’m sitting here and I’m looking at this fetus, and its heart is beating, and I don’t know what to think.”
- In the eighth video: StemExpress CEO Cate Dyer admits Planned Parenthood sells “a lot of” fully intact aborted babies.
- The ninth video: catches a Planned Parenthood medical director discussing how the abortion company sells fully intact aborted babies — including one who “just fell out” of the womb.
- The 10th video: catches the nation’s biggest abortion business selling specific body parts — including the heart, eyes and “gonads” of unborn babies. The video also shows the shocking ways in which Planned Parenthood officials admit that they are breaking federal law by selling aborted baby body parts for profit.
- Unreleased Videos: Unreleased videos from CMP show Deb Vanderhei of Planned Parenthood caught on tape talking about how Planned Parenthood abortion business affiliates may “want to increase revenue [from selling baby parts] but we can’t stop them…” Another video has a woman talking about the “financial incentives” of selling aborted baby body parts.
- The 11th video: catches a Texas Planned Parenthood abortionist planning to sell the intact heads of aborted babies for research. Amna Dermish is caught on tape describing an illegal partial-birth abortion procedure to terminate living, late-term unborn babies which she hopes will yield intact fetal heads for brain harvesting.
- The 12th video in the series shows new footage of Jennefer Russo, medical director at Planned Parenthood in Orange County, California, describing to undercover investigators how her abortion business tries to harvest intact aborted babies’ bodies for a local for-profit biotech company and changes the abortion procedure to do so.
- The 13th video: exposes a Planned Parenthood medical director admitting that babies born alive after abortion are sometimes killed.
- The 14th video: catches Planned Parenthood executives discussing gruesome abortion procedures and the sale of body parts from aborted babies for profit.
