When video evidence catches your employees discussing profiting from a fetal parts business, it’s the investigators who are wrong. That’s Planned Parenthood’s thinking, according to a letter to Congress from CEO and president Cecile Richards.
In light of undercover videos released from the Center for Medical Progress, there are multiple Congressional investigations of Planned Parenthood. The organization has been asked to answer for and explain its role in the sale of fetal parts from babies they’ve aborted.
In the letter, Richards points to “a forensic analysis of the doctored videos.” According to Richards, their analysis “documents numerous instances where the videos have been heavily edited to change the meaning of what Planned Parenthood staff said and deceive the public.” The analysis results were enclosed in the letter.
Such an analysis could initially spell out trouble for the undercover video project. But there’s one crucial detail. It’s worth noting who paid for the provided analysis.
The analysis was commissioned by none other than Planned Parenthood themselves and provided by former Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn Simpson and his firm Fusion GPS.
Media outlets friendly to Planned Parenthood jumped all over the “story,” but even they had to admit that the videos could still cause trouble for the organization.
The New York Times for instance, mentions that:
And the very first paragraph of a Politico piece reads:
…
But the firm also wrote that it is impossible to characterize the extent to which the edits and cuts distort the meaning of the conversations depicted and that there was no “widespread evidence of substantive video manipulation.”
David Daleiden, the president of Center for Medical Progress released a statement on the analysis. In part the letter reads:
What is also “telling” is the emotional desperation and bias expressed in the letter. Richards refers to Daleiden as an “anti-abortion extremist.”
The letter also closes with a plea from Richards asking members of Congress to “put yourselves in our place.”