David Daleiden is the anti-abortion activist from California who, six years ago, released undercover videos accusing Planned Parenthood of running a “criminal baby body parts enterprise.”
In these videos, released in the summer of 2015, Planned Parenthood doctors around the country were shown casually discussing fetal-tissue donation pricing and presenting Daleiden with the remains of a freshly aborted fetus, thinking he was a buyer with a biomedical company. The resulting blowback threatened to cost Planned Parenthood its federal funding.
Enshrining Christian precepts in the law has been a goal of the religious right for a long time.
All of this went according to a plan that GOP lawmakers were in on from the start, determined to “permanently damage Planned Parenthood’s brand.” The videos launched more than a dozen Congressional and criminal probes into the reproductive health-care provider ahead of the 2016 election that gave the nation Donald Trump.
The videos, as it turned out, were heavily doctored and swiftly discredited. Planned Parenthood was cleared of any wrongdoing, and authorities in two states ended up filing criminal cases against Daleiden, one later dismissed by a Texas judge and one still pending in California. But a civil jury in 2019 found that Daleiden and other activists affiliated with his anti-abortion group, the Center for Medical Progress, violated laws against racketeering, wiretapping, trespassing, and fraud. They were ordered to pay Planned Parenthood $2.4 million in damages and $13.8 million in attorneys fees and costs, money they still owe.
Now, newly unsealed court records from Planned Parenthood’s 2016 civil suit against Daleiden and his co-defendants show that those politicians were bit players in a broader drama. The documents indicate that three dozen religious-liberty lawyers, conservative consultants, and Washington insiders worked with Daleiden to bring his video campaign against Planned Parenthood—dubbed the Human Capital Project—to fruition, some since 2013.
When Daleiden proposed a shock-and-awe campaign against Planned Parenthood to some of these lawyers in mid-2013, suddenly everyone wanted a piece of the action. They ran his proposal up to the highest levels of the Republican Party, and they seemingly ignored the law to get the result they wanted, as expressed by the Christian nationalist writer Gary North: to construct “a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.”
Enshrining Christian precepts in the law has been a goal of the religious right for a long time. Rightwing Christian legal advocacy groups are doing it through the courts; they’re launching religious-liberty cases and advancing conservative judges to give them the rulings they want. They almost got the Supreme Court to rule that businesses have a Constitutional right to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people based on religious beliefs, and they convinced it to let private-sector employers shirk responsibility to provide women with federally mandated birth control coverage.
At the heart of this transformative effort is a man named Leonard Leo, a conservative Catholic activist and co-chair of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group. Leo has been called “one of the most powerful conservatives in the country.” Leo and the Federalist Society have played a key role in putting 234 conservative judges on the federal bench and flipping three federal appeals courts for Republicans during the Trump Administration. The group has been involved in appointing and confirming five of the current Supreme Court’s six conservative justices, including Amy Coney Barrett, whom Leo “hand-picked” to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last October.
Leo has done this by fundraising an estimated $400 million from undisclosed donors and funneling millions of these funds through a sprawling network of tax-exempt nonprofits to CRC Public Relations, a conservative public relations firm in Alexandria, Virginia. It’s run by Leo’s friend and business partner Greg Mueller, who also worked on the Human Capital Project.
According to the unsealed records, Leo and Jonathan Bunch, also a Federalist Society alum, advised Daleiden in June and July 2015 on “how to ensure successful prosecutions” against Planned Parenthood, and gave him legal advice regarding his undercover methods. They also appear to have discussed coordinating the Texas criminal probe with state law enforcement officials, who were shown video footage before Daleiden posted it online.
“Is there any progress in bringing the Texas AG on board?” Daleiden asked Leo and Bunch in a July 2015 email. “It sounds like the [Arizona attorney general] is prepared to do something very soon. [Michigan] is very motivated but simply has a very long timeline.”
“Happy Independence Day!” Daleiden added, before hitting Send.
In the end, it was Daleiden who was charged over the videos, first in Texas (the charges were later dropped on a technicality), and then in California, where he and another defendant, Sandra Merritt, face multiple felony counts for recording confidential conversations without permission.
Leo and the Federalist Society helped pick all three of Trump’s Supreme Court picks: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.
“I have been arraigned a few times now,” Daleiden said in an email to The Progressive, “and each time it’s a little hard to believe this is actually happening.”
Meanwhile, Leo and Bunch got to keep their names and communications with Daleiden out of the October 2019 civil trial, but Leo’s pal Mueller wasn’t as lucky. CRC Public Relations designed and executed a publicity campaign for the Human Capital Project, and Mueller was called to testify about it.
“Our job was to basically help get publicity for” the videos, Mueller said in a video deposition played during the federal trial in San Francisco. He acknowledged that another anti-abortion group, Students for Life of America, paid CRC Public Relations for the work on behalf of the Center for Medical Progress. The public relations company also worked on the campaign with the Judicial Crisis Network, an influential dark-money group with close ties to Leo. The Judicial Crisis Network spent a combined $34 million to get Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh onto the Supreme Court a few years ago, including its spending on efforts to block President Obama’s pick of Merrick Garland to the court.
What Mueller didn’t say was that he was on Students for Life’s board of directors, along with Leo, when CRC Public Relations worked on Daleiden’s campaign, or that Students for Life paid the company $158,912 in media consulting fees the next year, according to Students for Life’s 2016 tax filings. Nor did he say that Ray Ruddy, a key donor to the Center for Medical Progress, had joined them on the board of Students for Life in 2019.
Mueller, through a CRC Public Relations spokesman, tells The Progressive, “The full extent of my limited involvement in the Daleiden project is on record for all to see in sworn deposition testimony. There is nothing further to add.”
Tax filings show that Ruddy’s now-defunct foundation, the Gerard Health Foundation, paid CRC Public Relations $107,413 in fees in 2015, even though the organization didn’t engage in any charitable activity that year. Court records indicate that Ruddy offered to donate at least $20,000 to the Center for Medical Progress.
Mueller, Leo, and Bunch did not answer The Progressive’s detailed questions about these transactions. Daleiden also did not comment on them. Students for Life did not return multiple requests for comment. Messages left for Ruddy at a phone number associated with his personal attorney were not returned. Phone numbers associated with Ruddy’s charities were disconnected.
But Leo and Bunch, through a spokesperson, emphasized their limited involvement: “Any effort to characterize us as having more than cursory knowledge of or a passing connection to the Daleiden project is inconsistent with the facts, and a full and honest review of the court records makes that abundantly clear.”
As hard as it might be to summon empathy for a man who took part in a deliberate deception in order to chip away at the right of women to reproductive choice, Daleiden has a claim to being something of a wronged party.
Over and over, the documents, as well as 2019 testimony in the California criminal case, show that Daleiden, then in his early twenties, sought legal advice about his undercover methods. He was repeatedly assured that the methods were legal and that there was nothing to worry about.
Lawyers with rightwing Christian legal advocacy groups, like Alliance Defending Freedom and the Thomas More Society, told Daleiden that recording undercover in California—a two-party consent state where all parties must agree to being recorded—wouldn’t get him in trouble.
“I know I have returned to it many times with different attorneys over the past eight years,” Daleiden assured Center for Medical Progress colleagues in a July 2015 email of the advice he had received.
Legal Defense Foundation attorney Katie Short helped establish what Daleiden himself called a “front organization” named BioMax Procurement Services to infiltrate the abortion care conferences and clinics where he recorded medical personnel around the country, even roping in a church friend, Phillip Cronin, to serve as BioMax’s agent for service of process. A federal judge later deemed that the establishment of BioMax was fraudulent , although neither Short nor Cronin were implicated.
“David [Daleiden] & Co. don’t expect there to be anything served, because their corporation is not actually going to be conducting any business,” Short assured Cronin in August 2013. “They are going to toy with conducting business, but stop well short of signing any contracts or the like."
Lawyers in the Oklahoma Justice Department, including Trent Shores, then U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Oklahoma, appear to have coordinated with Daleiden on a possible investigation into Planned Parenthood before the first video release. In a March 2015 email, Chief Assistant Attorney General Megan Tilly confirmed to one of Daleiden’s legal advisers, Ovide Lamontagne, that she had received Daleiden’s footage, and said it “is being logged into evidence.”
Former Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt, who was the Oklahoma attorney general at the time, may have known about the footage too. “I very much appreciate your interest and that of your team, including General Pruitt, regarding the subject matter of our call,” Lamontagne told Tilly in March. Lamontagne was then general counsel of Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion legal advocacy group in Washington, D.C.
Sixteen people affiliated with Americans United for Life helped Daleiden, including Charmaine Yoest, the group’s former president and chief executive officer.
In June 2013, Ruddy connected Daleiden with former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline, even though Kline was being investigated for professional misconduct and had his law license indefinitely suspended four months later. Kline, according to Ruddy, “found evidence of a body parts network and was prepared to prosecute. Evidently Phill is quite expert in this subject.”
Kellyanne Conway, who would go on to become a senior adviser to President Donald Trump, worked as a consultant for the Center for Medical Progress, where she devised messaging for the videos after they began trickling out online. “Had the resources been there,” Daleiden, in 2019, testified of Conway’s hiring, “we would have done it before.” Conway later sold her polling firm to CRC Public Relations.
In the spring of 2016, armed state agents executed a search warrant on Daleiden’s apartment in Orange County, California, seizing laptops and more than two years of undercover footage. They “filed out of [a] van and sprung out of surrounding police cars. Only half of them fit in my apartment to search it, the rest waited outside with their dogs and assault rifles,” Daleiden tells The Progressive.
“I felt powerless, like I was drowning, and it felt like the search lasted forever.”
But for Planned Parenthood, whose clinics were violently attacked and firebombed after the videos came out, it doesn’t matter if the powerful people around Daleiden influenced him a step too far.
“The fact is that David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress broke the law,” Planned Parenthood spokesperson Erica Sackin tells The Progressive. “Daleiden and his cohorts have made no secret that their end goal is to ban access to safe, legal abortion in America, and we have seen them stop at nothing in pursuit of that goal—no matter who gets hurt, what laws they break, or how many people they prevent from accessing health care.”
In January 2020, Leo stepped back from the Federalist Society to remold CRC Public Relations with Mueller into CRC Advisors, a conservative consultancy that “advises wealthy donors how to influence who becomes a judge or state Attorney General (AG) and how to hide that influence,” according to Lisa Graves of True North Research, a money-in-politics watchdog. Jonathan Bunch is the company’s president.
That same month, Leo told the news site Axios that the revamped PR firm planned to branch out beyond judicial fights to other causes, like deregulation. Leo, however, is already part of the conservative crusade to deregulate America. He’s on the board of the rightwing Catholic legal advocacy group Becket, one of the religious-liberty litigators that got the U.S. Supreme Court to extend religious exemptions from the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate to the private sector.
In 2014, the Supreme Court case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores extended the mandate’s exemptions for houses of worship to closely held, for-profit companies with religious objections to contraception. Two years later, in Zubik v. Burwell, the court vacated prior appellate court rulings affirming exemptions to religiously affiliated nonprofits; the exemptions required them to complete a form so employees could receive coverage elsewhere, something the nonprofits said still burdened their religious exercise. Finally, in a 2020 ruling, Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania, the court extended the exemption to any employer who doesn’t particularly feel like paying for birth control.
The religious exemptions were granted under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a federal law that guarantees religious free exercise.
This pattern could repeat itself in religious liberty cases regarding LGBTQ+ protections in the workplace. Last year, the Supreme Court, in Bostock v. Clayton County, extended Title VII Civil Rights Act protections to LGBTQ+ employees, a major milestone for LGBTQ+ rights. But as Amanda Hollis-Brusky, a politics professor at Pomona College, has pointed out, the ruling actually “opened a window” to LGBTQ+ employment discrimination.
That’s because the opinion penned by Justice Neil Gorsuch said the conservative-leaning court might in the future decide that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act “supersede[s] Title VII’s commands in appropriate cases” because it “operates as a kind of super statute, displacing the normal operation of other federal laws.”
“The opinion is an open invitation for legal groups to challenge just how big the ‘window’ for religiously motivated exemptions might be over the coming years,” Hollis-Brusky says in an email to The Progressive. Asked whether Bostock could lead to future employment discrimination against LGBTQ+ people in the private sector, she answered: “Emphatic yes.”
Hollis-Brusky also noted a second effect of religious-liberty cases like these: They erode the government’s regulatory powers.
“The bigger issue is not that religious beliefs will be pushed onto secular Americans, but rather that religiously motivated exemptions to otherwise generally applicable rules and regulations can and often do undermine policy and regulatory objectives,” Hollis-Brusky says. “If we keep carving exemptions out of regulatory schemes, they start to resemble Swiss cheese.”
When this happens, there are “real consequences for the efficacy of anti-discrimination efforts, climate regulations, and even public health objectives” like containing the coronavirus pandemic.
But the shadowy network that helped engineer the coup attempt against Planned Parenthood may have its biggest impact on the nation’s courts. Leo and the Federalist Society helped pick all three of Trump’s Supreme Court picks: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. They joined three other conservatives with past nods from the group: Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito.
Some of Justice Barrett’s first votes since arriving on the Supreme Court last October have been in religious liberty cases over COVID-19, in which she voted to lift state restrictions on attendance at religious services meant to contain the virus that has killed more than a half million people in the United States so far.
As an ultraconservative Roman Catholic, Barrett is expected to be a reliable conservative vote on “culture war” issues like religious liberty, LGBTQ+ rights, and abortion. But there is good reason to fear that Barrett, a member of an authoritarian, charismatic Christian covenant community called People of Praise, will go too far and rule based on her religious commitments.
Barrett has said she won’t let that happen, but University of California San Diego anthropologist Thomas Csordas is skeptical. “She’ll try to disguise it, but I don’t think she’s harmless,” Csordas, who has studied groups like People of Praise, says in an interview. “I think she’s dangerous.” He says the group is part of a “sophisticated, educated, highly networked sort of community and network of communities” around the world.
People of Praise is governed by a hierarchy of what it calls “apostles, pastors, prophets, teachers, and evangelists.” Its apostles are anointed to “leadership roles” by God, according to a 1997 paper by former People of Praise member and University of Notre Dame philosophy professor Adrian Reimers. Barrett once held the group’s now-retired title of “handmaid,” a leadership position.
The New Apostolic Reformation, a dominionist branch of neo-charismatic Pentecostalism, also operates under a “fivefold ministry” of apostles, pastors, prophets, teachers, and evangelists. Its most visible followers today are a group of far-right “apostles” close to Trump, like his spiritual adviser Paula White-Cain, who in January 2020 called on “all satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now,” and former Trump campaign adviser and televangelist Frank Amedia, who claims he stopped a tsunami “in the name of Jesus.”
The movement’s self-proclaimed apostles made prophecies about Trump’s ascension to a second term and stoked hysteria about rigged votes, leading to the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. The rally that preceded it was organized by members of the Council for National Policy, a dominionist Christian group on whose board of governors Leo serves.
The New Apostolic Reformation envisions the violent overthrow of democracies for a worldwide theocracy, or “Kingdom of God,” over which apostles will rule until the return of Christ.
In the meantime, they’re preparing a debauched version of the Kingdom by targeting the LGBTQ+ community. As City University of New York sociologist Dominic Wetzel writes, pastors and missionaries from the New Apostolic Reformation are “widely credited with inspiring the infamous Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Act, known informally as the ‘Kill the Gays’ bill.’”
They’re likewise busy instating a stealth theocracy via the Seven Mountain Mandate, under which Christians are to take dominion over seven spheres of life, including government and law.
You might recognize some of these Seven Mountain dominionists in the GOP (though they have not identified publicly as apostles): Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow; former Energy Secretary Rick Perry and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee; retired three-star general and former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Jerry Boykin.
People of Praise did not return The Progressive’s requests for comment, so it’s not clear how the fivefold ministry functions within the group; whether the group is affiliated with the New Apostolic Reformation; whether Barrett is considered an apostle conquering the “mountain” of government and law; or whether People of Praise wants political power, though there is some evidence that it does.
Even if People of Praise isn’t technically dominionist, says Massimo Faggioli, a professor of historical theology at Villanova University, groups like these “tend to interpret the relationship between the secular realm and their mission in terms of transformation of the secular, in the sense of a reversal of the secular.”
“These groups express usually a very critical view of modernity and of secular modernity.”
Editor's note: This article has been edited to correct an error in the version as it was posted and published. It was a federal judge and not a jury who decided that a group called BioMax Procurement Services had acted in a fraudulent manner. Also, we have changed the wording to clarify that the reference to fraudulent conduct is in regard to BioMax and not to other named individuals.