There’s a new District Attorney in Harris County, Texas — the site of a grand jury’s indictment of Center for Medical Progress investigators David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, the charges of which were later dismissed — and that new D.A. appears to be cleaning house.
Operation Rescue reports that newly elected D.A. Kim Ogg “has notified 40 prosecutors that their services are no longer needed.” One of those to be let go was Assistant District Attorney Sunni Mitchell, whose connections to Planned Parenthood caused many to scrutinize the grand jury’s indictment of investigators who recorded potentially damning conversations with high-ranking Planned Parenthood officials. Mitchell was found to have been the source of a leak in the District Attorney’s office. As Susan Michelle-Hanson reported for Live Action News in May of this year:
The Washington Times notes that “Schaffer [Planned Parenthood’s attorney] said that Harris County Assistant District Attorney Sunni Mitchell figured out a way to bypass a state directive in order to deliver him raw video footage taken by the pro-life Center for Medical Progress.”
Hanson also points out that before this was discovered, the D.A.’s office was “already under suspicion” for various reasons, one of which was that “the grand jury never even voted on whether or not to indict Planned Parenthood.” Another reason was that one of the prosecutors was “on the board of Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast,” the organization which was just recommended and referred for criminal prosecution by the Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives. Hanson reported on this development earlier this month, writing:
As Texas Right to Life notes, former Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson “mismanaged the case to the benefit of her friends at Planned Parenthood,” indicting “citizen journalists David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, the heroes who documented the shocking misconduct of Planned Parenthood” instead of prosecuting Planned Parenthood “after they were caught red-handed in blatant wrong-doing.”
Charges against the CMP investigators were later dropped, and Anderson was not re-elected. But as Texas Right to Life notes, Daleiden’s and Merritt’s indictments remain “a disgrace to Harris County.”
Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast’s Director of Research, Melissa Farrell, was caught on tape discussing the ease of making it look as if any profit made by her organization’s sale of aborted fetal body parts wasn’t actually profit. It’s “all just a matter of line items,” she stated:
Despite myths that persist in both social and mainstream media, the videos released by the Center for Medical Progress have not been debunked or shown to have been “faked.” In fact, two forensic analyses (including one commissioned by Planned Parenthood) found that there was no manipulation of either the audio or the video of the footage released.
Hopefully, Harris County is now ridding its District Attorney’s office of those suspected of colluding with Planned Parenthood to indict those seeking to expose the breaking of federal law regarding the trafficking of aborted fetal body parts.
