Pro-life journalist David Daleiden recently filed a lawsuit against presumptive Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris, the former attorney general of California, for going after him in what one activist has described as a “mafia-style prosecution.”
Daleiden, the anti-abortion activist journalist behind the undercover videos of Planned Parenthood officials making compromising statements about fetal tissue procurement, filed his lawsuit against Harris in May.
In response to him releasing the videos featuring executives with the nation’s largest abortion provider, California sued Daleiden through an unprecedented use of the state’s eavesdropping law. Harris, an outspoken supporter of Planned Parenthood who stood to gain political points for pursuing a criminal case against the founder of the Center for Medical Progress, initiated the case — which included a raid on Daleiden’s residence — during her successful campaign for U.S. Senate.
In a 2019 interview with EWTN, Daleiden went after Harris for using her office as attorney general to advance her own political goals.
“She consciously and willfully involved herself directly and personally in the Planned Parenthood case,” he said of Harris. “She had an in-person meeting with six Planned Parenthood executives from California in Los Angeles, two weeks before the raid on my apartment.”
Daleiden continued:
Among the Planned Parenthood folks present [at the meeting], two of them were witnesses in the criminal investigation that Kamala Harris’ office was orchestrating against me and Sandra [Merritt]. And they show that the agenda items that Kamala Harris discussed with those Planned Parenthood witnesses and representatives at that meeting included both Planned Parenthood’s political agenda in California and issues in the criminal investigation.
He argued to EWTN there was a “direct mixing” between Harris’ “political roles and political agenda and campaign agenda” and her “role as a law enforcement officer.”
In his legal filing against Harris, Daleiden is seeking “justice for a brazen, unprecedented, and ongoing conspiracy to selectively use California’s video recording laws as a political weapon to silence disfavored speech.”
His lawsuit also names Xavier Becerra, the current California attorney general.
“David Daleiden became the first journalist ever to be criminally prosecuted under California’s recording law,” the suit states, “not because of the method of video recording he utilized in his investigation — which is common in investigative journalism in this state — but because his investigation revealed and he published ‘shock[ing]’ content that California’s attorney general and the private party co-conspirators wanted to cover up.”
For his part, Becerra has maintained his position. In a statement released in 2017, when the charges were filed against Daleiden, the attorney general argued the Center for Medical Progress violated Planned Parenthood’s right to privacy.
“The right to privacy is a cornerstone of California’s Constitution, and a right that is foundational in a free Democratic society,” he said in a press release. “We will not tolerate the criminal recording of confidential conversations.”
Planned Parenthood has called Daleiden a “discredited journalist” for waging a “multi-year illegal effort” to expose the abortion company.