As Planned Parenthood’s CEO Cecile Richards began answering questions before the Congressional Oversight and Government Reform Committee today, she claimed once again that undercover videos released by The Center for Medical Progress exposing Planned Parenthood’s participation in the harvesting of fetal body parts for profit were “deceptively edited” and “highly doctored.”
And yet, Fox News points out, “just minutes before the hearing started, a forensic analysis said the videos ‘are authentic and show no evidence of manipulation or editing.'”
A question looming over the hearing was whether any of the footage was in fact altered. Democrats repeatedly suggested that important passages were missing.
But the Alliance Defending Freedom engaged cybersecurity and forensic analysis company Coalfire Systems to examine the 10 “full-footage videos” put out by CMP.
According to their review, the videos were not manipulated. The report said any missing footage was of “non-pertinent” events like meals and bathroom breaks.
Prior to this, Planned Parenthood had hired Fusion GPS, a firm which the Weekly Standard pointed out is “an opposition research firm with ties to the Democratic party and has a history of harassing socially conservative Republican donors, possibly on behalf of the Obama campaign,” to analyze the videos. Fusion backed up Planned Parenthood’s claims that the videos were doctored – or did they? Politico actually admitted that the firm found the videos to be free of manipulation (despite their misleading headline) when they broke the story on Planned Parenthood’s paid ‘research’, writing:
A report commissioned by Planned Parenthood has found that the sting videos targeting its tissue donation practices contain intentionally deceptive edits, missing footage and inaccurately transcribed conversations. But there is no evidence that the anti-abortion group behind the attack made up dialogue. …
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.”
So that now makes two forensic analyses which have found no evidence of any kind of manipulation in the CMP videos. Despite this, Cecile Richards and her Planned Parenthood-supporting friends on Capitol Hill continued to claim that the videos were manipulated. Enter the Coalfire forensic analysis. Fox again writes:
“The Coalfire forensic analysis removes any doubt that the full length undercover videos released by Center for Medical Progress are authentic and have not been manipulated,” ADF Senior Counsel Casey Mattox said in a statement.
“Analysts scrutinized every second of video recorded during the investigation and released by CMP to date and found only bathroom breaks and other non-pertinent footage had been removed. Planned Parenthood can no longer hide behind a smokescreen of false accusations and should now answer for what appear to be the very real crimes revealed by the CMP investigation.”
Planned Parenthood receives half a billion dollars in federal funding annually, and has been involved in numerous scandals, not including the most recent, regarding fetal body parts harvesting for profit. Certain members of Congress continue in their attempts to redirect Planned Parenthood’s funding directly to the more than 13,000 Federally Qualified Health Centers which help women and families in need.
