David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) announced Wednesday that they are filing a new motion in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to request the removal of Judge William Orrick in the lawsuit brought against them by Planned Parenthood, pointing to his ties to Planned Parenthood.
According to Daleiden’s petition, Judge Orrick has "an ongoing and longstanding professional relationship with one of the named Plaintiffs.” Orrick is a founder and officer of the Good Samaritan Family Resource Center (GSFRC), an organization that partners with Planned Parenthood and had a Planned Parenthood clinic incorporated on its premises while Orrick served as secretary and counsel to the organization.
The petition also cites the use of Orrick’s image by his wife in Facebook posts to “endorse inflammatory public statements about the disputed facts of this case – statements that denigrated the principal Defendant in the harshest terms, while lauding Plaintiffs.”
Orrick’s wife used his image in a post that referred to CMP’s undercover videos, allegedly exposing Planned Parenthood’s illegal trafficking in fetal tissue, as “domestic terrorism.”
"Judge Orrick is part of the Planned Parenthood family," Daleiden told reporters on a press call Wednesday.
Daleiden and his lawyers say Orrick and his wife assisted in getting a Planned Parenthood clinic at GSFRC while they served there.
"Judge Orrick's image has been deployed repeatedly online in support of terrible statements referring to the CMP videos as 'domestic terrorism,' literally 'domestic terrorism,'" said Peter Breen of the Thomas More Society, the pro-life legal group representing Daleiden and CMP.
Daleiden petitioned the Supreme Court in August to remove a gag order that Judge Orrick issued barring CMP from releasing additional undercover footage.
“Judge Orrick’s gag order, issued at the behest of Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation, is an unprecedented attack on the First Amendment by a clearly biased federal judge,” Daleiden said at the time. “Judge Orrick even wants to press his gag order in the California Attorney General’s bogus criminal case against me—though he, NAF, and Planned Parenthood insist the gag order only applies to my defense, and not to the Attorney General’s bogus prosecution.”
Daleiden previously filed a motion in June to Orrick’s state-level court seeking his removal but that motion was denied, so he is appealing the decision to the Ninth Circuit.
CMP’s undercover videos, showing Planned Parenthood employees discussing the procurement and sale of fetal body parts, have prompted a federal investigation of the abortion giant by the FBI and the Department of Justice.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) referred Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers to the FBI for investigation in light of the undercover videos last December.
Grassley wrote at the time that the Committee’s findings document “substantial evidence suggesting that the specific entities involved in the recent controversy, and/or individuals employed by those entities, may have violated that law. Moreover, that evidence is contained entirely in those entities’ own records, which were voluntarily provided to the Committee and are detailed in the report.”