Planned Parenthood can no longer hide behind a defense of distraction.
With hours of video footage available online showing its senior level executives and its baby-part-harvesting corporate partner, StemExpress, discussing the business of baby body parts, Planned Parenthood and its allies did the only thing they could do – deflect.
Unable to defend their words and afraid Americans would watch the videos and make up their own minds, Planned Parenthood employed a Democratic opposition research firm to discredit the videos and promote the narrative that the CMP videos, even the full versions available on YouTube, are all “heavily edited.” Planned Parenthood’s defenders then broke out the thesaurus and began an ever-escalating series of claims about the videos. From “edited” to “manipulated” to “doctored” to “fraudulent.” And the media played right along.
But this week, ADF released the results of a new forensic report that debunks this talking point. Coalfire, one of the country’s most trusted digital forensic analysis companies, released a report indicating the undercover videos recorded by the Center for Medical Progress are “authentic and show no evidence of manipulation.”
Forensic analysts were granted access to all of the raw investigated footage recorded by the Center for Medical Progress and checked it against the full length videos posted on the CMP YouTube account. They found the only events not depicted in the publicly available videos fell into five common categories: commuting, waiting, adjusting recording equipment, meals, and restroom breaks. All of the edited content was “non-pertinent” to the actual investigation.
For months Planned Parenthood defenders have been pounding on the door of CMP, demanding to see the videos in their entirety. We now know the door they have been pounding is to the men’s room. Seriously. This is a photo of one of the “highly edited” gaps in the full version of the videos CMP has posted online.
David Daleiden, the videos’ creator, has been saying exactly this about the videos ever since a Democratic activist firm was hired to do what it does – discredit opponents. But even that Planned-Parenthood–
Even Planned Parenthood’s own paid-for “analysis” confirms that there is “no evidence of audio manipulation” and that it did not reveal “widespread evidence of substantive video manipulation.” But Planned Parenthood and its media allies have ignored this fact, focusing instead on their suspicions about the missing parts of the full videos available on YouTube. And now we have confirmation of just how ridiculous this fixation has been.
I don’t need to see David Daleiden in the bathroom to give context to Planned Parenthood executives negotiating prices for baby body parts and discussing how they can “crush” the parts they don’t need in order to retain the organs their buyers are willing to pay for. I don’t need to watch him eating a sandwich to understand that StemExpress “partnered” with Planned Parenthood to meet its baby-part needs because “Planned Parenthood is a volume institution” or the repeated promises in marketing materials bearing a Planned Parenthood endorsement that StemExpress provides a “financial benefit” and “fiscal[] rewards” to Planned Parenthood. StemExpress has tried to flush these incriminating (for Planned Parenthood) promises from its website, but the Internet doesn’t forget.
Certainly, CMP is releasing short highlight videos of its investigatory footage instead of forcing people to watch the sometimes five-hour-long meetings. Only a Planned Parenthood partisan would call that “deceptive.” Fortunately, ESPN’s SportsCenter doesn’t force me to watch (although I will) an entire University of Virginia football game to know the depressing final score. But like UVA football, if I want to endure the full video footage (and I have), I’m free to do so.
If you have access to YouTube you have access to the full videos – excepting moments like trips to the bathroom. And every American taxpayer should and can watch these videos for themselves and make up their own mind about whether they want their taxpayer dollars funding this highly profitable and scandal-ridden organization.
All Planned Parenthood can do to try to resist the mounting evidence against it—that it is engaged in the for-profit trafficking of the hearts, lungs, and livers of the unborn children it has destroyed—is to distract. But claiming that five-hour-long videos are “doctored” because David Daleiden didn’t share with the world his trips to the bathroom is a new level of desperation.