Finally, Congress has taken an interest in the work done by investigative journalist David Daleiden and his colleague Sandra Merritt nearly a decade ago. A week ago, for instance, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene released the full versions of subpoenaed undercover videos that were featured at the March hearing, "Investigating the Black Market of Baby Organ Harvesting.”
As shocking as the videos are and as evil as the practice is, the more immediate problem is the possible election of presidential candidate Kamala Harris. While attorney general of the trend-setting California, Harris helped usher in the age of proto-fascism even before it was cool.
In an eye-opening email to mentor James O’Keefe, Daleiden described the brutal role Harris played in protecting her benefactor, Planned Parenthood, from his and Merritt’s investigation.
On a pleasant April 2016 day in Huntington Beach, California, Daleiden was taking out the trash when his life as he knew it came to an abrupt end:
As I rounded the corner, the door of a large, white, windowless van swung open, and a tall, uniformed officer stepped out and blocked my path. “Are you David Daleiden?” he asked. “Yes," I said nervously as I stared to freeze from confusion and surprise. "We have a search warrant for your apartment from the California Department of Justice," he said as he shoved papers at me. No less than 11 armed CA DOJ agents, accompanied by K-9 dogs, filed out of the van and sprung out of surrounding police cars.
Authorizing the raid was Attorney General Kamala Harris, then in the race for the U.S. Senate. Daleiden, 27 at the time of the raid, had embarrassed Planned Parenthood with a series of undercover videos exposing Planned Parenthood’s role in the “fetal tissue” business. Daleiden continued:
Only half of them fit in my apartment to search it, the rest waited outside with their dogs and assault rifles. The leader of the agents tried to prevent me from calling my lawyer and threatened to seize my phone while I was talking to legal counsel. They overturned my entire apartment, looking behind statues and icons of the Virgin Mary for "evidence." They thumbed through invoice printouts for fetal body parts from StemExpress, Advanced Bioscience Resources, and the admitted criminal DaVinci companies but left those behind, instead seizing all my hard drives and equipment with the original undercover footage and my laptops going back to high school. I felt powerless, like I was drowning, and it felt like the search lasted forever.
In the years to follow hundreds of January 6 defendants and pro-life activists would experience the Gestapo-like tactics Harris employed against her political opponents in California. If elected president, there will be no reason for Harris not to normalize these tactics on a federal level.
In the way of background, Daleiden had 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. Hard as it is to believe, in the not-too-distant past the media actually exposed political corruption and voter fraud.
Daleiden’s “Mirage” was a sham biomedical research company called “Biomax Procurement Services.” Over time, he 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 Merritt learned the language and the mechanics of the fetal tissue procurement business and went to work.
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 least regulated major 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. A doctor at a mega Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, for example, was seen in one video explaining the clinic’s traffic in the body parts of aborted babies.
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 that she was being recorded.
This interview was followed by an on-site review of actual body parts with the doctor and a clinician. What was impressive is how well Daleiden and Merritt play their roles as buyers. What was 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.”
So horrifying were the videos they even shocked Hillary Clinton, then gearing up her presidential run, 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.
For immediate assistance, Planned Parenthood turned to the well-connected fixers at -- where else? -- Fusion GPS. The beleaguered organization contracted with Fusion to review the unedited footage Daleiden had posted online. The media welcomed Fusion’s “forensic study” as heartily as they would its equally fraudulent “Steele dossier” a year later.
To complete the rout, prosecutorial friends of Planned Parenthood, both in Texas and California, brought utterly bogus criminal charges against Daleiden and Merritt. In California, Harris’s successor, Xavier Becerra, charged the pair with 15 felony counts -- one for each of the 14 people recorded, and a 15th for conspiracy.
The Los Angeles Times editorial board, although a champion of Planned Parenthood, was appalled. In March 2017, the board weighed in: “It’s disturbingly aggressive for Becerra to apply this criminal statute to people who were trying to influence a contested issue of public policy, regardless of how sound or popular that policy may be.”
Daleiden has spent the last nine years in a very expensive legal limbo. He is still awaiting trial on the aforementioned felony charges in a San Francisco court that offers no more promise of non-partisanship than the D.C. Court that railroaded the J6ers.
Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, Harris brags about how tough she was on crime as a California prosecutor and attorney general. As might be expected, she doesn’t reveal that the crime she was toughest on was investigative journalism.
Jack Cashill’s new book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, is now available in all formats.
