By Katie Yoder
Editor’s note. This is excerpted from a post at Newsbusters and is reposted with permission.
Taxpayer-funded Planned Parenthood is under federal investigation after videos exposed its trafficking of aborted baby parts. But Americans wouldn’t know that by watching the broadcast networks.
On Thursday night, The Daily Beast and Fox News broke the news that the Justice Department is investigating Planned Parenthood in regards to its practices with aborted baby parts.
In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Justice Department Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs Stephen Boyd requested “unredacted copies of records” following the committee’s own probe into America’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood, and others.
Boyd asked for the copies to “further the Department’s ability to conduct a thorough and comprehensive assessment of” the Judiciary Committee’s 2016 Majority Staff Report on “Human Fetal Tissue Research.”
“At this point, the records are intended for investigative use only—we understand that a resolution from the Senate may be required if the Department were to use any of the unredacted materials in a formal legal proceeding, such as a grand jury,” Boyd wrote.
Last month, rumors began swirling after The Hill reported sources said the FBI sought unredacted documents from the committee after its chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), “referred Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers to the FBI for investigation” last December.
This comes after the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) released videos, beginning in 2015, exposing the trafficking aborted baby parts by Planned Parenthood and others in the name of research. According to CMP, federal law “strongly prohibits the sale or purchase of aborted fetal tissue.”
ABC, CBS and NBC did not report on the current investigation the morning after the news broke during their news shows (but other major outlets, like The New York Times, did). As with this letter, the networks have a long history of censoring the CMP videos.