A Special Investigative Analysis from Operation Rescue

By Cheryl Sullenger

Washington, DC – Most Americans who casually watch the news look at the day’s events as a collection of unrelated stories.  It would astonish most people to learn that many news stories that capture headlines today are related in some way to each other.

Such is the case with two seemingly disparate major stories that continue to dominate the news: the effort to tag President Donald J. Trump as having colluded with Russia, and the matter of abortion – in particular, the Center for Medical Progress’ 2015 undercover videos that showed Planned Parenthood’s involvement in the illegal trafficking of aborted baby tissues and organs.

Those two stories are intertwined in surprising ways. 

The connections were recently highlighted in two very different events that appear to be unconnected, yet are very much different aspects of the same story.

The new revelations came to light through two events.

  • Court testimony of former high-ranking Planned Parenthood abortionists and other Planned Parenthood associates during an ongoing California Superior Court hearing.
  • A lawsuit filed by California Congressman Devin Nunes against the producers of the discredited Steele Dossier that falsely linked President Trump to Russia.

If you missed the relationship between those two stories on the evening news, it is little wonder.  News that shows Planned Parenthood and most Democrats in a negative light must be suppressed at all costs by erstwhile journalists and social media platforms that now serve as propaganda arms of Planned Parenthood and their cohorts in the Democrat Party.

That’s not mere rhetoric.  It’s a provable fact, and it is an important part of the Planned Parenthood baby parts trafficking story – and in turn, the Russian collusion hoax – that must be told.

These latest developments, along with a bit of investigative digging by Operation Rescue, reveal an incestuous cabal of politically corrupt politicians and organizations that have deceptively manipulated public opinion about the Planned Parenthood and President Trump, threatened and censored those who have tried to report the facts, and brazenly worked to ensure lies are presented as truth. 

The same people involved in this effort to suppress the truth about Planned Parenthood have also been involved in efforts to take down a duly elected President of the United States of America.

Nunes v. Fusion GPS

The main defendant in the Nunes suit is a company called Fusion GPS – the very same company hired by Planned Parenthood in 2015 to debunk the CMP videos.  Fusion GPS was later hired by the DNC and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign to produce the discredited Steele dossier that falsely accused then-candidate Donald J. Trump of colluding with the Russians to affect the 2016 presidential election.

“This is a case about active, coordinated and ongoing corruption, fraud and obstruction of justice by Fusion GPS, its founder, Glenn Simpson, and the [Campaign for Accountability],” the suit states.

In 2017, Operation Rescue wrote the following about Fusion GPS:

In 2015, Planned Parenthood was reeling from negative publicity due to the release of damning undercover videos produced by the Center for Medical Progress that showed Planned Parenthood executives in their own words haggling over the best price in exchange for aborted baby body parts and confessing to other crimes.

In an attempt to diffuse the outcry, Planned Parenthood hired Fusion GPS to conduct a “forensic analysis” of the videos, which were mostly in the form of brief summaries compiled from hours of raw video.

Planned Parenthood got what they paid for.

The Fusion GPS report falsely declared that since the videos had been edited, they were therefore fake. Planned Parenthood pushed the phony report out as gospel truth to a willing mainstream media that never bothered to question whether Fusion GPS had the qualifications to conduct a “forensic analysis” of anything.

In truth, Fusion GPS has no known qualifications in the field of forensic video analysis. But what it does have is expertise in political dirty tricks that concoct “dirt” where there isn’t any.

In his lawsuit, Nunes describes in detail Fusion GPS’ modus operandi and gives a detailed timeline into how this company provided fake reports and dossiers to smear opponents of those who hired them – details that corroborate Operation Rescue’s own reporting about Fusion GPS’ political trickery.  An excerpt is reprinted below.

In truth, Fusion GPS is a political war room for hire that specializes in dirty tricks and smears. As a regular way of doing business, it smears the opposition on behalf of its undisclosed clients. Upon information and belief, many of Fusion GPS’ clients, agents and donors are located in Virginia. Fusion GPS repeatedly uses the same means and methods: it creates fake “dossiers” and supplies the fraudulent documents to “friendlies” in the media for dissemination online and via social media.

It is clear that nothing produced by Fusion GPS can be trusted for veracity, and it appears that most Washington politicos that used them to smear their opponents knew it.

Perkins Coie

Perkins Coie is a large Seattle law firm that for years represented Planned Parenthood or joined with them in pro-abortion litigation.  Perkins Coie was representing Planned Parenthood during the release of the CMP videos in July 2015, and continues to have a legal relationship with them.

In one case of note, Perkins Coie successfully defended Planned Parenthood of Illinois in a zoning dispute that began in 2007.  Fox Valley Families claimed that zoning prevented the operation of Planned Parenthood’s abortion facility, which was built in Aurora, Illinois, with permits obtained under a pseudonym to prevent the public from discovering that a new Planned Parenthood abortion facility was under construction. Perkins Coie continued to represent Planned Parenthood through a series of appeals that finally concluded in 2018.

According to the Nunes suit, a partner at Perkins Coie, attorney Marc E. Elias, who still serves as head of the firm’s political law practice, was hired on April 3, 2015, by the Clinton presidential campaign.   In March 2016, Fusion GPS approached Elias and expressed a desire to become involved in the 2016 presidential election.  Perkins Coie’s Elias soon hired Fusion GPS to create a document that was meant to manufacture a fictious tie between Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and Russian interests.

The first line of the Fusion GPS video analysis report done for Planned Parenthood reads, “At the direction of counsel to Planned Parenthood, Fusion GPS analyzed a series of videos recently released by the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) purporting to represent undercover sting operations against Planned Parenthood.” [Emphasis added.]

While it is true that Planned Parenthood is represented by several law firms, in this context it is possible that Perkins Coie was the counsel who directed Fusion GPS to create a fake report, just like they did later with the fake Russian dossier.  

The cover page of the Fusion GPS report prepared for Planned Parenthood – which should have indicated the names of parties that hired them – is mysteriously missing.

Another Perkins Coie partner, Robert Baur, acted as Barack Obama’s personal attorney after he was elected to the Senate and served President Obama as White House Counsel before returning to Perkins Coie in 2011. (This link is filled with more information about this and is well worth the read.)

Perkins Coie has amassed a huge amount of political influence in the U.S.  Today, Perkins Coie represents the Democratic National Committee and nearly every Democratic member of Congress. 

New Venture Fund

Also connecting Planned Parenthood and the fake Steele Dossier scandal is a dark money group called the New Venture Fund, an affiliate of the multi-tentacled Arabella Advisors.  The New Venture Fund is inextricably linked to Planned Parenthood as aptly explained in this linked article published by Y’all Politics in 2017.

Nunes’ suit against Fusion GPS also includes the Campaign for Accountability as a defendant.  The suit mentions the New Venture Fund as a donor to the Campaign for Accountability, which has also been a client of Fusion GPS. (See page 8.)  The NVF-funded Campaign for Accountability is accused of conspiring with Fusion GPS to fax an ethics complaint against Nunes to the Office of Congressional Ethics (“OCE”) in an attempt to threaten and intimidate him, and interfere with a Congressional investigation so Nunes would refrain from making criminal referrals against them to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Cecile Richards

When the facts are boiled down, Cecile Richards is the lynchpin that ties Planned Parenthood to the Russian collusion scandal.

Richards, whose mother was former Texas Governor Ann Richards, grew up immersed in politics.  While President and CEO of Planned Parenthood, she had cultivated political and media connections along with favor with Hollywood celebs and other big-money Democrat donors, such as George Soros and his son, Alex, who she considered family friends.  Those connections helped parlay Planned Parenthood into a formidable political force unlike any before it.  These connections helped to both insulate Planned Parenthood and promote its public persona as the premier “women’s health” organization in America.

During 2015, and throughout the 2016 election, Perkins Coie client and now-former Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards was campaigning heavily for Hillary Clinton, who was by then also represented by Perkins Coie.  Richards often traveled with Clinton and appeared with her at campaign events and was a frequent visitor to the Obama White House. 

Richard’s relationship with Clinton paid off over the years. Even as Secretary of State, Clinton did favors for Planned Parenthood.  She worked to allow Ecuadorians who faced 8 years in prison for stealing millions from the impoverished people of Ecuador to get a fast-pass visa into the U.S. in exchange for large contributions, where their family set up two companies, DaVinci Biosciences and DV Biologics, which purchased aborted baby remains exclusively from Planned Parenthood and sold the parts worldwide.  After their role in the baby parts trafficking business was discovered due to the CMP undercover investigation, they were were sued by the Orange County District Attorney’s office, and admitted their guilt, were heavily fined, and ordered to shut down.

When the CMP undercover videos first began to drop on July 14, 2015, Planned Parenthood was caught flat-footed.  Richards made several television appearances, but she appeared cold, unsympathetic, and unprepared to cope with the public outrage that was building with the release of each new video.

Crisis Management

Planned Parenthood Federation of America hired a pricey crisis management firm, SKDKickerbocker, to right their sinking ship.  In reality, Planned Parenthood was already a SKDKnickerbocker client, but the public relations group preferred a “behind the scenes” role.  Once news broke of SKDKickerbocker’s involvement in Planned Parenthood’s crisis management campaign, it immediately took steps to scrub its website of any mention of its previous involvement with Planned Parenthood.

This might be because they didn’t want anyone looking at them too closely. 

One of the first things done by SKDKickerbocker was to send memos around to media outlets instructing them not to cover the baby parts story because the CMP videos “violated patient privacy.”  This suppression of the baby parts trafficking story was relatively successful within the mainstream media, although more conservative outlets continued to follow the story.

SKDKickerbocker is well-connected and powerful.  Its current senior partner, Anita Dunn, happens to be the wife of Perkins Coie’s Robert Bauer and was former interim communications director under President Barack Obama.  She was a new hire in 2015 who already had been writing favorably about Planned Parenthood for several years.

The company’s clients are a wide range of people, groups and companies representing the most liberal of causes. Former and/or current clients include Barack Obama, Andrew Cuomo, and Michael Bloomberg. 

They represent the Rockefeller Foundation, Facebook, the Obama Presidential Center, AT&T and the Center for Reproductive Rights, a pro-abortion law firm that frequently represents Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers in attacking pro-life legislation through the courts.

In addition to abortion, SKDKickerbocker represents social activist groups involved in gun control and gay rights.  It also has represented a wide range of Democrat political candidates, including Kansas Governor Laura Kelly, who surprisingly defeated Trump-backed Republican immigration expert Kris Kobach in 2018.

SKDKnickerbocker and Fusion GPS helped Planned Parenthood over the hump of bad publicity. Fusion GPS provided the fake forensic video analysis and SKDKickerbocker made sure that analysis was put into the hands of nearly every mainstream media reporter and news outlet in the nation along with a carefully crafted messaging program.

This allowed Planned Parenthood to rebound and take the offense, attacking the CMP journalists as liars and criminals.

Texas criminal charges

Two of the pro-life undercover journalists, David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, were criminally charged, first in Texas then in California.  In both cases, prosecutors had improper relationships with Planned Parenthood.

Houston District Attorney Devon Anderson convened a grand jury to investigate CMP allegations that Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast was trafficking in aborted baby remains in late 2015.   Operation Rescue documented and exposed the fact that Anderson illegally collaborated with Planned Parenthood and others to flip a grand jury investigation into one that criminally charged Daleiden and Merritt in January 2016.  Once the improprieties were publicized, Anderson was forced to admit she broke the law. She dismissed the Houston charges against Daleiden and Merritt in March 2016, and later lost her bid for re-election.

Kamala Harris

On April 5, 2016 – just days after the Texas charges were dismissed – California Attorney General Kamala Harris ordered a search warrant to be served on David Daleiden’s apartment.  This later resulted in the filing of 15 felony counts of illegal recording in a case initiated by Harris, who is currently a Democrat candidate for President. 

One of Harris’ main campaign contributors at the time was Planned Parenthood. 

Operation Rescue was able to disgorge the Kamala Harris Attorney General’s office of 223 pages of documents through a California Public Records Act in 2017 that show how Beth Parker, Chief Legal Counsel to Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California worked arm-in-arm with Jill Habig, who then served as Special Counsel to Attorney General Kamala Harris, to craft a new “Video Tape Law” that provided stiffer penalties for making undercover recordings like the CMP videos.

In January 2019, Harris hired Planned Parenthood’s favorite law firm, Perkins Coie, and Mark Elias, of the Fusion GPS/Steele Dossier fame, to serve as her 2020 Presidential campaign general counsel.  

Criminal Preliminary Hearing Testimony

Over the past several days, a preliminary hearing in the California criminal case against Daleiden and Merritt has revealed stunning testimony.

On September 12, 2019, Special Agent Brian Cardwell testified* that Attorney General Lynch sent a letter to California Attorney General Kamala Harris and asked her to conduct an investigation into pro-life journalists Daleiden and Merritt. It was that letter that prompted Harris to issue the search warrant of Daleiden’s apartment.

Peter Breen, who represents Daleiden, told LifeSiteNews, “We’ve always said it was a political prosecution, but hearing that Loretta Lynch was the one that instigated it, that’s a huge, huge factor.”

Harris’ close relationship with Planned Parenthood then acting under orders from Attorney General Lynch makes it appear that the California criminal prosecution of Daleiden and Merritt is actually an Obama Administration crusade to punish the pro-life journalists for exposing their political partner, Planned Parenthood.

Other testimony at the preliminary hearing has also been newsworthy.

As reported by LifeSiteNews, which has been covering the hearing from the courtroom, on Friday, September 6, “A Planned Parenthood abortionist exposed in a Center for Medical Progress (CMP) undercover video as a baby body parts trafficker admitted the CMP video clips played in court Thursday were not altered.” [Emphasis added.]

Later, Cate Dyer CEO of the organ procurement company StemExpress, which contracted with Planned Parenthood to harvest tissue and organs from babies they aborted, took the stand.  She admitted under oath “that her biotech company supplies beating fetal hearts and intact fetal heads to medical researchers,” according to another report by LifeSiteNews.com.

Peter Breen of the Thomas More Society, which is representing David Daleiden, told the pro-life reporter, “If you have a fetus with an intact head and an intact body, and intact extremities, that is something that would indicate that child was born alive, and then had their organs cut out of them, or that that child was the victim of an illegal partial-birth abortion.”

The grisly and inhumane partial-birth abortion procedures, involve aborting babies alive and killing them by stabbing the backs of their heads and suctioning out their brains before they are fully delivered.  These abortion procedures are legally prohibited by the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. 

As for killing babies born alive during late-term abortions, that is exactly what sent the notorious Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell to prison for the rest of his life.

“Planned Parenthood and StemExpress essentially admitted that they broke the law.  Such an admissions under oath from Planned Parenthood executives and StemExpress are surprising, since Planned Parenthood has insisted that the recorded conversations were altered. Yet this testimony under oath actually verifies that the CMP revelations were in fact true,” said Troy Newman, President of Operation Rescue and a CMP founding board member.  “This is really a game-changer.”

Newman is a defendant along with Daleiden, Merritt, and two other pro-life activists in a civil RICO case filed by Planned Parenthood, which goes to trial in San Francisco on October 2.  The criminal case testimony could prove important in the civil case overseen by Judge William Orrick, who has taken the position that the CMP videos were faked. 

Planned Parenthood based their contention that the videos were “deceptively edited” on a forensic video analysis report it had commissioned through its attorneys in late July 2015, after the release of the third CMP video summary.

Criminal Referrals of Planned Parenthood

In December 2016,the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives both referred Planned Parenthood organizations and several middle-man organ procurement companies to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation and prosecution. 

Those referrals were ignored by Obama’s Attorney General Loretta Lynch and FBI Director James Comey, who was retained by President Trump and later fired after leaking classified information to the press and lying about it.

There is information from highly placed sources that former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, may have provided cover for Planned Parenthood, delaying the investigation.  It is no coincidence that many Planned Parenthood resignations took place after the firing of McCabe in January 2018. 

Now, to punctuate McCabe’s corruption, U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu has recommended that criminal charges be brought against McCabe for the Inspector General’s allegations that McCabe leaked and lied.

McCabe and Rosenstein had an interest in killing the Planned Parenthood investigation.  Apart from a willingness to cover up wrongdoing by the powerful and politically-connected Planned Parenthood, any investigation into the abortion giant would have exposed as fraudulent one of their primary sources in their investigation against Trump – Fusion GPS.  Once Comey and McCabe were purged from the Department of Justice, the Planned Parenthood case began to show signs of life.

Most recently, in June 2019, Sen. Lindsey Graham, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, along with Sen. Charles Grassley, past Chairman of Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr asking for an update on the criminal investigation into Planned Parenthood for the illegal sale of aborted baby remains. 

So far, there has been no public update on the Planned Parenthood case, however, the DOJ rarely comments on ongoing criminal investigations.  Some response to Graham and Grassley’s query is expected soon.

Possible Indictments?

The possibility of indictments against Planned Parenthood officials – Cecile Richards in particular – may have been responsible for her sudden departure from Planned Parenthood in January 2018, along with a host of other Planned Parenthood executives and abortionists that were the subject of the CMP videos.

Richards was a close confidant of Hillary Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s.  All three had one primary thing in common. They ambitiously all sought wealth and power, for themselves, and worked hard to fundamentally change America into a place where Conservative Christian values were excised from the government and the public forum.

Both Clinton and Obama were involved, either directly or indirectly, with the phony Russia collusion smear against candidate then President Donald Trump.  Planned Parenthood, Clinton, and/or Obama were clients of Perkins Coie, Fusion GPS, SDKKickerbocker, and had an interest in the New Venture Fund funneling money to the Campaign for Accountability, which went after Rep. Devin Nunes when it looked like he was getting too close to making criminal referrals.  All were involved to some extent in both scandals.

The troubling thing is that there are actually more people involved in this corruption than can be mentioned here.

The possibility of indictments of both Planned Parenthood and those involved in the attempt to destroy President Trump with fake allegations of Russian collusion looms large on the horizon.  In reality, they are mostly the same people. 

Planned Parenthood indictments could help clear Newman, Daleiden, Merritt, and others of any wrongdoing in the pending RICO case.  Indictments in the Russian collusion scandal could finally bring closure and restore unity in America.

Now, the nation collectively holds its breath as we all wait for Attorney General Bill Barr to bring justice.

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Learn more about Planned Parenthood’s involvement in political corruption by reading the following articles:

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*The following day, after Cardwell testified about a letter from Attorney General Loretta Lynch to Harris, he changed his testimony to say the letter was once sent by four House Democrats to Lynch and Harris in July 2015. LifeSiteNews.com reported on the changed testimony, and we will leave it to the reader to decide whether Cardwell’s first or second testimony on the subject is most believable. [This update made 9/15/2019.]