Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina was not pleased Friday morning after CNN’s Chris Cuomo suggested that her anti-abortion rhetoric may have inspired a mass shooting in Colorado Springs, Colo.
“Do you feel any sense of regret about how you characterized what was going on at Planned Parenthood after the attack in Colorado?” Cuomo asked.
His question was in reference to Fiorina’s public response to a series of undercover videos released this year by a pro-life activist group, the Center for Medical Progress, showing Planned Parenthood executives discussing compensation for organs salvaged from the remains of aborted children.
Planned Parenthood’s go-to defense has been to accuse CMP of “selectively editing” the tapes. (A Planned Parenthood-commissioned analysis agreed that the tapes had been deceptively edited, but the research firm behind the report, Fusion GPS, admitted to watching only four videos.)
Several reporters, including Cuomo, have repeated this accusation, but many of them have also declined to say whether they have actually watched all of the 15-plus-hours of footage released by CMP.
And with a shooting spree earlier this year outside a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado, which claimed the lives of three people, including a pro-life police officer, the press now suggests that CMP and pro-life candidates likely inspired the deadly event.
It “seems as though he was influenced by some of the rhetoric that was coming out of you and others, that painted a very ugly picture, an unfair one, about Planned Parenthood,” Cuomo said Friday morning.
The Colorado gunman, Robert Lewis Dear, reportedly admitted to targeting the facility, shouting in a court appearance this week that he is a “warrior for the babies.”
“Oh please. Really Chris?” Fiorina responded. “Look, nine video tapes have come out about Planned Parenthood. It is very clear what they have been doing. And in fact, Planned Parenthood several weeks ago made a quiet little announcement that they would no longer accept compensation for what they call ‘fetal tissue.'”
“That’s about as close to an admission as you can get,” she added.
But Cuomo would have none of it. “That’s not what they say,” he said.
Fiorina has caught flack from reporters and media fact-checkers for saying of Planned Parenthood during the second GOP debate, “I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes … Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.”
The video she referenced, the seventh of 11 videos, does show the product of an “intact delivery abortion” moving around in a specimen tray in the last stages of its life.
But Fiorina claimed incorrectly that a Planned Parenthood affiliate can be heard in one of the videos saying that they would purposely keep infants alive longer so as to salvage their brains.
“What happened in Colorado is a terrible thing, this guy is a deranged murderer, and I hope he is put away for life,” the GOP candidate said Friday. “It may be that we should be classifying that as domestic terrorism as well. But that has nothing to do with the truth of what is going on in Planned Parenthood, and this is a typical left-wing tactic, to try and shut down the truth by silencing people.”
Cuomo argued back, “The videos were edited, you know that.”
“I actually don’t know that,” she Fiorina responded.
“Of course they were edited! Of course the videos were edited. No, no, no, let’s be careful about what we’re saying,” the host said.
Fiorina agreed, adding, “Let’s be very careful about what we’re saying, Chris. Let’s be very careful about what we’re saying.”
“You’re saying that the raw portions of the videos substantiate the claims that you and others made,” Cuomo added. “That has not been proven to any satisfaction in any objective way. There were scenes and pictures depicting horrible things that nobody should want to see that weren’t authentic.”
He added, “Now, you have somebody who went out and killed in the name of that.”
“Really? Really?” Fiorina asked. “Chris, careful, you’re a journalist. I don’t recall anybody in the pro-life community celebrating this tragedy … I think you’ve bought the Planned Parenthood line hook, line, and sinker. So, good to know that.”
This isn’t the first time that the CNN host has floated the idea that speech in the United States should be curbed so as to avoid inspiring violence. In May, Cuomo, who received a law degree from the Fordham University School of Law in New York City, said that the First Amendment doesn’t cover “hate speech.”
“Hate speech is excluded from protection. Don’t just say you love the Constitution. Read it,” he said on social media.
He later walked back this claim, admitting that it was a “clumsy” attempt to argue that there are limits to free speech.
