A federal judge with ties to Planned Parenthood refused Wednesday to allow the release of more undercover videos filmed by David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress.
Daleiden’s legal team, which still is defending him against 15 felony charges in California, asked U.S. District Judge William Orrick III to lift his block on the additional videos, Courthouse News reports. They said Orrick’s gag order is getting in the way of Daleiden’s ability to defend himself.
On Wednesday, however, Orrick refused to do so.
Notably, the judge has “an ongoing and longstanding professional relationship” with the abortion giant Planned Parenthood, according to the legal team.
Here’s more from the report:
“When you have felony charges against your client, you have to be able to use everything for your client,” Daleiden’s attorney Peter Breen, with the Thomas Moore Society, told Orrick in court.
Orrick rejected that argument, finding the state court judge can admit parts of the enjoined videos as evidence if he deems it necessary in the interest of fairness and justice.
“If Judge [Christopher] Hite finds that some of the preliminary injunction material should be released, I’m not going to interfere with that, in order to protect the Fifth Amendment rights of Mr. Daleiden,” Orrick said.
Orrick also listened to Daleiden’s argument to dismiss several of the National Abortion Federation’s allegations against him, according to the report. His lawyers argued that legal pursuit of the allegations violated state free speech statutes and cited a similar case (Food Lion v. Capital Cities/ABC) involving undercover journalists who exposed unhealthy meat handling practices.
Daleiden and his legal team have been fighting Orrick’s gag order in court for more than a year. Earlier this year, Daleiden said he has at least 12 more videos that would further expose Planned Parenthood’s baby body parts trade.
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In 2017, they filed a petition requesting that Orrick be removed from the case. They argued 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, 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, according to their petition.
The petition also cited 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 said previously.
In May, however, a federal appeals court refused to remove Orrick from the case.
Then in August, the legal team filed a new motion to dismiss the gag order, PJ Media reported at the time. With the gag order gone, Daleiden said the Center for Medical Progress would be able to release at least a dozen more videos exposing top abortion leaders at the National Abortion Federation conference.
“NAF’s federal lawsuit was one of the first in federal court sought a federal gag order against the remaining undercover videos,” Daleiden said in the announcement. “This undercover footage has not seen the light of day. It includes some of the most damning and incriminating tapes that we ever recorded” about “the sale of aborted baby parts.”
In July, NAF dropped seven out of 11 bogus charges that it filed against Daleiden and CMP. In 2015, NAF sued David and CMP after they began releasing undercover videos exposing Planned Parenthood’s trafficking of baby body parts. Buying and selling fetal tissue is illegal under federal law.
The expose videos catching Planned Parenthood officials 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.
