Pro-abortion Vice President Kamala Harris claimed that former President Donald Trump intends to jail journalists he disagrees with if he is elected in November — ignoring her own record of using her office as California attorney general to go after pro-life journalist David Daleiden for releasing undercover videos exposing the abortion industry’s fetal body parts practices.
“And consider what he intends to do if we give him power again … His explicit intent to jail journalists, political opponents, and anyone he sees as the enemy. His explicit intent to deploy our active duty military against our own citizens,” Harris claimed at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago on Thursday night during her speech officially accepting the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.
Daleiden released undercover videos in 2015 of Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Federation (NAF), and biomedical research companies regarding the alleged trafficking of aborted baby body parts.
Harris, who was California attorney general between 2011 and 2017 before leaving to fill a U.S. Senate seat, ordered a raid on David Daleiden’s Huntington Beach apartment on April 6, 2016 — one of the two individuals with the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) who released the videos. She did so after charging Daleiden with violating a state recording law, which had never previously been used against a journalist, according to his attorneys.
Harris, whose political career has been propped up by major abortion organizations, never investigated Planned Parenthood for the alleged trafficking claims while she was attorney general.
Harris directed California Department of Justice agents to seize Daleiden’s laptops, hard drives, and ultimately hundreds of hours of undercover footage from his nearly three years of investigating the abortion groups.
A California Department of Justice agent who was present during the raid on Daleiden’s home later testified that Obama-era Attorney General Loretta Lynch asked Harris to launch an investigation into Daleiden and his colleague Sandra Merritt. The state DOJ’s first investigation report also states that Planed Parenthood Affiliates of California General Counsel Beth Parker asked for the computers used to create videos taken at the abortion conferences, Fox News reported.
Daleiden and his attorneys have alleged, citing billing records, that Harris met with several top California Planned Parenthood executives before the raid on March 23, 2016.
Daleiden recounted the raid in a 2020 article for Breitbart News:
The team of eleven armed agents overturned every box, file, and furniture item in my one-bedroom apartment. They seized all of my laptops and hard drives going back to high school. For the first thirty minutes, they refused to let me call my lawyers. Most damningly of all, they thumbed through copies of invoices from Planned Parenthood’s business partners for late-term aborted baby body parts, yet conspicuously left them behind. Apparently Kamala Harris had already decided that anyone selling body parts was innocent, and anyone exposing the sales, guilty.
Attorneys for Daleiden alleged in 2021 that new court documents revealed how Harris passed off his investigative materials seized during the 2016 raid to the National Abortion Federation (NAF), which at that time was waging a civil suit against Daleiden.
At the time of the raid, Harris had allegedly received thousands of dollars in funding from Planned Parenthood for her 2016 Senate campaign. Right before the raid on Daleiden’s apartment, Harris had also “sought to drum up support for Planned Parenthood,” The Los Angeles Times reported at the time. Her campaign website included a page that asked supporters to sign a petition “to defend Planned Parenthood,” according to the report.
Harris’s involvement with Planned Parenthood and other abortion organizations prompted pushback from pro-life organizations at the time, who accused her of having a conflict of interest and called for her to resign from her role as attorney general and call off her Senate campaign.
“The fact that Ms. Harris is seizing private property of a pro-life California activist who has exposed horrific practices conducted by Planned Parenthood, which donated thousands to her last campaign, while her Senate campaign promotes and defends them — the nation’s largest abortion provider — is a conflict of interest and abuse of government power,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement at the time. “Ms. Harris should resign from her attorney general post and end her bid for the U.S. Senate. She has abused her government office and no longer deserves the public trust.”
In September 2016, emails obtained by the Washington Times showed that Harris’s office also collaborated with Planned Parenthood to produce legislation that targeted Daleiden, Breitbart News previously reported.
The emails, according to the Times, were accessed through a public records request, and revealed conversations between officials of Harris’s office and Planned Parenthood regarding legislation that would criminalize undercover journalists for publishing and distributing recordings of private communications with abortionists. That legislation was later signed into law by then-Gov. Jerry Brown (D).
Harris’s successor as California attorney general, Xavier Becerra (who is now the secretary of Health and Human Services) picked up where she left off, filing 15 felony charges against Daleiden and CMP in 2017 — most of which a judge later tossed out. Becerra has also reportedly received thousands of dollars from Planned Parenthood over the course of his political career.
Planned Parenthood and others ultimately sued Daleiden for damages, for which a judge awarded the abortion group $2.4 million in damages and more than $13 million in attorneys fees. The Supreme Court declined to take up the case in 2023.
In 2021, a United States District judge imposed a permanent ban on the release of Daleiden’s undercover investigative videos that contain recordings of National Abortion Federation (NAF) conferences, in a lawsuit brought by the NAF.
Daleiden sued Becerra and Harris in 2020, alleging that Harris colluded with Planned Parenthood in a “brazen, unprecedented, and ongoing conspiracy to selectively use California’s video recording laws as a political weapon to silence disfavored speech,” the complaint reads. That case remains pending.
CMP’s videos, which include interviews and conversations with abortionists taped undercover, accuse Planned Parenthood of profiting from the sales of body parts of babies aborted in the group’s clinics. Abortionists in the videos also allegedly appear to discuss altering how they perform abortions, in order to harvest specific intact organs and body parts. CMP alleges the groups violated a federal law that makes it a felony to sell or purchase of human fetal tissue for valuable consideration. In December of 2016, the Senate Judiciary Committee referred Planned Parenthood Federation of America to the FBI and the Department of Justice for investigation and possible prosecution after investigating CMP’s claims.
Planned Parenthood has denied the allegations and claim that CMP’s videos were edited to frame them (full, unedited versions of the videos are available to the public). The group and its affiliates have not been formally charged with wrongdoing, and fact-checkers also maintain that abortion organizations featured in the videos have behaved legally. The abortion organization did change its fetal tissue collection policy in October of 2015 in response to CMP’s videos, stating that Planned Parenthood no longer accepts any legal reimbursement for expenses related to tissue donation.
The Biden-Harris Department of Justice (DOJ) has also notably gone after pro-life activists more than pro-abortion activists in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, even though the majority of violence has been perpetrated against pro-life pregnancy centers and churches.
Data obtained by Rep. Chip Roy’s (R-TX) office indicates that, in less than four years, the Biden-Harris DOJ has accounted for more than a quarter of all Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act prosecutions — 55 of 211 cases — since the FACE Act was passed in 1994.
The Biden-Harris DOJ has also specifically used a KKK-era law called “conspiracy against rights” with the aim of increasing prison time for pro-life activists accused of violating the FACE Act.
Several of these cases have involved FBI raids of pro-life activists homes, the jailing of Christian grandmothers, and even the prosecution of an 87-year-old communist concentration camp survivor.
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.
