Republicans on the House Oversight Committee are setting up a special room where staffers and members of Congress can watch hours of unedited footage released by David Daleiden, maker of the undercover Planned Parenthood videos that have landed the women’s health and abortion provider in hot water.
Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, announced Wednesday that his committee has received previously unreleased footage he subpeonaed from Daleiden. Both Republicans and Democrats will be allowed to access the nearly 800 gigabytes of data, but it won’t be made available to the public.
“A viewing room is set up in the committee office where all committee members and staff — majority and minority — have equal access to view the footage,” he said. “It will take significant time to evaluate all of the footage. Out of an abundance of caution to ensure the safety and security of all individuals recorded, the footage will not be released to the public at this time.”
The move is an effort by Republicans to dispel charges that they’re withholding details that would cast Planned Parenthood in a more positive light.
The footage showing top Planned Parenthood officials discussing how some clinics are compensated for providing fetal tissue has outraged Republicans, who have charged the group may have broken the law. But Democrats have said the edited videos released by Daleiden obscured important details, such as the officials emphasizing that the clinics don’t make a profit from the aborted fetal tissue, which would be illegal.
Planned Parenthood announced Tuesday that it will no longer allow clinics to accept any compensation for the overhead costs of supplying the tissue to biomedical companies, which in turn sell it to medical researchers. The oversight committee is one of several in Congress investigating Planned Parenthood over the matter.
