Pat Sullivan via Creative Commons
David Robert Daleiden (right) leaves a courtroom after a hearing in Houston in 2017.
Dear Mr. Tom Brejcha,
Thank you for your email the other day, via The Daily Wire, sounding an alarm about the criminal prosecution of David Daleiden. I am well aware of his efforts to expose wrongdoing at Planned Parenthood, and I am therefore moved to respond to your appeal on his behalf.
As president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Society, a Chicago-based national not-for-profit public interest law firm, you must have lots of things to attend to, so I appreciate that you were able to make time to bring me up to speed on the travails of this “pro-life hero,” as you call Daleiden. He’s the guy who in 2015 released video evidence of, as you put it, “Planned Parenthood’s top leadership - - - medical directors, national program directors, even its Senior Director of Medical Services -- callously negotiating the harvesting and sale of aborted baby body parts.”
“And now,” you wrote me, “he’s been charged with nine bogus felonies.” That’s why my “emergency donation” is so essential, in Daleiden’s “hour of need.”
What actually happened, though you don’t mention it, is that the videos were heavily edited and thoroughly discredited. As The Guardian reported in 2016, “The accusations in the video are broadly considered to be false, the product of aggressive and misleading editing. More than a dozen states have completed investigations that cleared Planned Parenthood of any wrongdoing or have declined to investigate altogether, citing a lack of evidence.”
However, in 2019 a federal jury in California found that Daleiden and his associates violated laws against racketeering, illegal recording, trespassing, and fraud, and were ordered to pay Planned Parenthood $2.3 million in damages.
In 2017 Daleiden and fellow anti-abortion activist Sandra Merritt were also charged with fifteen felonies by the office of California Attorney General Xavier Becerra. On December 6, 2019, after various court challenges and re-filings, they were ordered to stand trial on nine felony counts of criminal eavesdropping and conspiring to invade the privacy of abortion providers.
In response to my email query about the status of this prosecution, the press office of the Thomas More Society wrote, “We don’t have anything to report on Mr. Daleiden’s case.” The clerk’s office of the San Francisco Superior Court told me via telephone that a meeting of the parties will take place on July 27 to set the new trial date.
So to be clear, Mr. Brejcha, this is what you mean when you say “And now, he’s been charged with nine bogus felonies.” A trial date will soon be set for a case initially filed in 2017.
In an article in The Progressive from April 2021, writer Helen Christophi noted that Ray Ruddy, a key donor to Daleiden’s anti-abortion group, the Center for Medical Progress, sent Daleiden an email urging him to contact Phill Kline, then-Kansas attorney general, claiming Kline had “found evidence of a body parts network and was prepared to prosecute. Evidently, Phill is quite [an] expert in this subject.”
After the article appeared, Daleiden took issue with the characterization of his Planned Parenthood videos as “doctored” and a “deliberate deception” and for noting that Planned Parenthood had been cleared of wrongdoing. We responded by providing multiple sources backing up these statements.
For instance, The Progressive response noted, “A Google search shows words including “doctored,” “deceptive,” “deception,” “campaign of deception,” “deceiving,” “misleading,” “false,” “fake,” “disinformation campaign,” “vicious smear campaign,” and even “a carnival of truthiness,” have been used in articles about this saga since 2015.”
Our letter to Daleiden concluded: “[W]e stand by our story as published. If you would like to write a letter to the editor about it, you are welcome to do so. Our upper limit is 200 words.”
No letter was forthcoming.
As you note in your email, Mr. Brejcha, the Thomas More Society is also representing Daleiden in several civil cases, including one that it has brought against Bercera and former California Attorney General Kamala Harris for having filed criminal charges against him; an appeal of the $2.3 million civil judgment in California; and a defense against a civil lawsuit brought by the National Abortion Federation, in your words, “perminantly banning David from doing any more undercover journalism against Planned Parenthood.”
Your email drove home the urgency of the moment:
[. . . ] So please don't delay. Donate $35, $50, $100, or more to stand with David Daleiden today.
I notice that when I click on any of these, the page it goes to says my emergency contribution will go “to help defend David and other pro-lifers,” but doesn’t seem to limit donations to this purpose. Lately, as you know, the Thomas More Society has emerged as a leading player in the still-ongoing efforts to overturn the 2020 election and restore Donald Trump to the presidency.
So, I assume it’s possible that some of the money raised for Daleiden might end up supporting this effort to subvert democracy—or that some of the money you raise to subvert democracy might go to support anti-abortion advocacy.
In December 2020, your group’s Amistad Project filed a lawsuit seeking to give Republican legislatures in five battleground states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona—the authority to certify the results of presidential elections.
Not only was this suit not successful but the Minnesota lawyer who brought it, Erick Kaardal, was referred by a federal judge for possible disciplinary action.
“The relief requested in this lawsuit is staggering: to invalidate the election and prevent the electoral votes from being counted,” wrote U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg, an Obama appointee. “When any counsel seeks to target processes at the heart of our democracy, the Committee may well conclude that they are required to act with far more diligence and good faith than existed here.”
Instead, Boasberg found that Kaardal filed “a sweeping Complaint filled with baseless fraud allegations and tenuous legal claims to undermine a legitimate presidential election.” In March, a federal appeals court denied Kaardal’s effort to block the ethics probe against him.
The Amistad Project, on its website, appears to be channeling Trump himself when it declares that it is “uncovering hard evidence of election meddling through on-the-ground investigations and ongoing litigation, some of which was initiated months before the election.”
In other words, it knew about the fraud before it even happened.
Kaardal has since emerged as a key player in a thus-far-unsuccessful effort to turn up evidence of election fraud in Wisconsin being conducted by former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman. A recent article by the nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism found that “roughly half of the chapters in Gableman’s 136-page interim report are based on Kaardal’s work,” although the Thomas More Society-affiliated lawyer has no official role in the probe.
The article notes that taking on the issue of election fraud, the Thomas More Society has seen its contributions spike, from $9.6 million in fiscal 2019 to $17.4 million in fiscal year 2020, the latest available. And it quotes you, Mr. Brejcha, as disputing that there is any conflict in the role played by Kaardal or the Thomas More Society in this gambit to prove an issue you are raising money on, saying you got angry when pressed to clarify these relationships and eventually hung up.
The Amistad Project is run by Kline, who in 2020, has his license to practice law in Kansas indefinitely suspended for what the state’s supreme court determined was “clear and convincing evidence” of professional misconduct while investigating the late George Tiller’s abortion clinic in Wichita and a Planned Parenthood clinic in Overland Park.
“The complaint accused Kline of misleading judges and mishandling evidence as he investigated abortion clinics,” the Kansas City Star reported. It said that Kline “committed misconduct by instructing members of his staff to attach sealed documents to a publicly filed document in violation of a Supreme Court order. He also told staff to file a court pleading that contained misleading information.”
“The violations we have found are significant and numerous, and Kline’s inability or refusal to acknowledge or address their significance is particularly troubling in light of his service as the chief prosecuting attorney for this state and its most populous county,” the court wrote.
So, no, Mr. Brejcha, I will not be availing myself of this opportunity to contribute $35, $50, $100, or more. But thanks for asking.