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Fifth Circuit drops bombshell on @PPFA — and the national media hotair.com/archives/2019/…
Planned Parenthood took a body blow at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals last night — and so did the national news media.
Despite the universally adopted narrative that the videos produced by David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress had been “debunked,” the appellate court unanimously ruled that the videos were not deceptively edited and presented compelling evidence of misconduct.
They vacated the district court’s injunction that forced Texas to keep Planned Parenthood on its Medicaid rolls and ordered a new review on the merits.
The opinion itself takes a sharply critical tone toward Judge Sam Sparks’ attitude toward the state’s HHS Office of Inspector General and scolded him for discarding their opinion in favor of Planned Parenthood’s witnesses.
In her concurring opinion, Judge Edith Jones notes that the state has empowered the OIG to “investigate and penalize Medicaid program violations,” and is due deference from the courts — especially with the evidence they had at hand.
The court rebuked Sparks for assuming the videos were unauthenticated:
"The district court stated, inaccurately, that the CMP video had not been authenticated and suggested that it may have been edited."
"The district court stated, inaccurately, that the CMP video had not been authenticated and suggested that it may have been edited."
"The district court also noted that neither the Inspector General nor the Medical director had expert knowledge concerning abortion procedures."
"And the court discounted Ms. Farrell’s videotaped statements because she claimed on the witness stand that she really had no personal knowledge of the medical aspects of abortion procedures and had never even been in the room when an abortion was performed. …"
"In fact, the record reflects that OIG had submitted a report from a forensic firm concluding that the video was authentic and not deceptively edited. And the plaintiffs did not identify any particular omission or addition in the video footage."
"Moreover, the district court also suggested that there was no evidence that any of PPGC’s research was federally funded, so the regulations relied on by OIG might be inapplicable. But the record actually establishes the UTMB study was funded by the National Institute of Health.
In other words, the videos have been authenticated. Far from being “debunked,” they depict exactly what they appear to depict — abortion providers discussing how to illegally jigger abortion methods in order to maximize revenue on fetal tissue.
The court ruled that the state’s IG made a reasonable decision to rely on this evidence in disqualifying PPFA locations from its Medicaid program AND ruled that Sparks acted unreasonably and arbitrarily in discounting video evidence in favor of PPFA's post hoc rationalizations
