The entirety of unedited footage of the Planned Parenthood tapes are being released online Thursday evening by the conservative website GotNews.com.
Charles Johnson, founder and editor-in-chief of the website, wrote that he received a temporary restraining order the day before from the National Abortion Federation. The group filed a lawsuit to obtain an injunction against the Center for Medical Progress to stop releasing a summer slew of undercover videos of Planned Parenthood. The videos feature Planned Parenthood officials discussing the women’s health and abortion provider receiving payment from biomedical companies for aborted fetal tissue.
GotNews.com started posting previously unreleased CNP footage earlier this week on YouTube.
In one video, a Planned Parenthood representative is shown saying that some affiliates may want to sell harvested fetal organs to increase their revenue. She said “we can’t stop them.”
Johnson said the move was an “unconstitutional” infringement of his First Amendment rights and went ahead releasing more the footage.
“We will continue writing about them as our attorneys inform us that GotNews.com is not subject to any temporary restraining order concerning [CNP filmmaker] David Daleiden,” Johnson wrote.
“GotNews.com will contest any unconstitutional prior restraint of speech all the way to the highest courts in the land,” he added.
Planned Parenthood has denied any wrongdoing.
Several congressional committees have committed to investigating the whether Planned Parenthood did in fact break the law.
In September, the House Oversight Committee sent a subpoena to CNP for all its unedited videos. On October 14, the committee said it received all the footage it requested and a viewing room was set up for all committee staff.
According to a report, Johnson told Politico that he got his hands on the Planned Parenthood footage from a “high-ranking congressional staffer ‘who felt morally compelled to have them released.'”
So far, the Republican-led effort to search for any wrongdoing has not been able to prove that the group received anything more than the overhead costs of dealing fetal tissue for research, which is legal. Last week, however, Planned Parenthood announced it would discontinue receiving the payments in order to “take the smokescreen away” from Republicans accusing the group of illegally profiting, said Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards.
Some congressional Republicans are also looking for ways to strip government funding for the group, as are a number of states.
