It was a spring day in 2016 when 11 heavily-armed men pulled up to pro-life activist David Daleiden’s southern California home. Dalei...
It was a spring day in 2016 when 11 heavily-armed men pulled up to pro-life activist David Daleiden’s southern California home.
Daleiden’s crime? Exposing Planned Parenthood officials discussing the sale of body parts and organs of aborted babies.
The person going after him? California Attorney General Kamala Harris.
At the behest of Planned Parenthood, on April 5, 2016, Harris ordered a raid on Daleiden’s apartment to seize undercover footage shot by his organization, the Center For Medical Progress. Harris’s office charged Daleiden with violating video privacy laws.
During the raid, Daleiden told The Daily Wire that a “dystopian kind of clown car” from the California Department of Justice showed up to his apartment in Orange County. To raid his apartment—which he says was only large enough to fit five people at a time—the 11-man team came armed with rifles and a canine unit in a white, windowless van.
“There were five big guys traipsing around inside the apartment looking behind statues of the Virgin Mary and rooting through my investigative files,” Daleiden said in an interview this week. “It was the most bizarre thing, watching them flip through, and thumb through printed out pages that I had of different companies’ invoices for aborted baby parts from Planned Parenthood. They set the invoices aside and they didn’t seize those.”
They did take about half of the undercover footage Daleiden and his team had obtained of Planned Parenthood officials. A federal judge in San Francisco then placed an injunction on Daleiden from publishing the footage. Some of that footage has begun to trickle out in recent months, thanks to the work of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), whose office obtained the videos through congressional subpoena.
Daleiden said the raid lasted about four hours and was a “harrowing experience.”
“Imagine the state police showing up at your doorstep and just ransacking your belongings,” he said. “They overturned everything and made a huge mess.”
He said the agents were like “hurricane Kamala tearing through your living space.”
Daleiden said that the investigators who took his footage and began investigating him didn’t even watch the footage they were taking.
“Under Kamala Harris’s leadership, they did this full on, SWAT team-style raid to seize the undercover tapes because they had all this damning stuff about Planned Parenthood on them,” he said. “But then once they got the tapes, they didn’t actually watch them, they just tried to validate a list that Planned Parenthood had given them of people that they could identify and use to bring these completely unprecedented charges against me under the California Video Recording Law.”
Daleiden and fellow investigator Sandra Merritt were later charged with 15 felony charges of videotaping “confidential” communications by Harris’s successor—and future HHS Secretary—Xavier Becerra. Litigation is still ongoing in that case, though about half of the charges have been dismissed.
“It’s a total weaponization of government,” Daleiden said. “As California attorney general, Kamala Harris weaponized the power of her office to cover up barbaric criminal activity on the part of Planned Parenthood. And she did so by invoking a never-before-used California video recording law that has never been applied to undercover news gathering.”
Daleiden said that Harris should be asked if she ever watched the videos his team had taken, or knew what was on the videos before ordering them to be seized.
“So Kamala Harris weaponized her office and weaponized the law in a completely unprecedented way to try to discriminate against free speech that her powerful political backers disagreed with and that they wanted to suppress because the evidence was so damning for them,” Daleiden said.
Harris ordered the raid just two weeks after she met with Planned Parenthood officials, and after the organization had specifically requested the computers used for the undercover videos to be seized. Now the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Harris has long maintained close ties with Planned Parenthood. She has made promoting abortion a central point of her campaign.
No comments