A federal judge in California issued a temporary restraining order Friday against the group that has released several undercover videos of Planned Parenthood leaders after it attempted to release secretly-recorded footage of a different abortion group.

A federal judge in California issued a temporary restraining order Friday against the group that has released several undercover videos of Planned Parenthood leaders after it attempted to release secretly-recorded footage of a different abortion group.

The Center for Medical Progress, an anti-abortion group, secretly recorded meetings of the National Abortion Federation, an international organization of abortion providers. The Center for Medical Progress has made headlines over the last month for releasing heavily edited videos — in addition to other clips that the group says are unedited — that allegedly show Planned Parenthood illegally selling fetal tissue.

District Judge William H. Orrick III in San Francisco issued the restraining order out of concern for the safety of National Abortion Federation leaders.

“NAF would be likely to suffer irreparable injury, absent an ex parte temporary restraining order, in the form of harassment, intimidation, violence, invasion of privacy, and injury to reputation, and the requested relief is in the public interest,” he wrote.

Never mind that virtually nothing in the last paragraph was substantiated by any finding and loss of reputation and irreparable injury are what happens when you are part of an ongoing criminal conspiracy.

[mc_name name=’Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT)’ chamber=’house’ mcid=’C001076′ ] subpoenaed the videos for an investigation he was conducting and they were turned over to him. Now they have been leaked.

Complete raw footage from the Planned Parenthood videos surfaced Thursday on the conservative website Got News?, whose editor said he had gotten it from a House staffer despite lawmakers’ pledge to keep it confidential.

Editor Charles Johnson released the full footage Thursday even after the National Abortion Federation got a temporary restraining order a day earlier prohibiting any dissemination. Johnson vowed to “contest any unconstitutional prior restraint of speech.”

The abortion providers group had gone to court after Johnson’s website put part of the video online earlier this week.
An anti-abortion group called the Center for Medical Progress — which had released the series of videos over the summer depicting Planned Parenthood profiting from fetal tissue donation — had previously provided the full video under subpoena to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Johnson told POLITICO in an email that he obtained the raw tapes from a high-ranking congressional staffer “who felt morally compelled to have them released.”

I’m not a fan of Johnson and GotNews. The guy has made egotism and monomania a life-style choice. I generally don’t use him because he’s one of the two or three websites that I’m afraid to quote without fact checking everything that is said. Having said that, he does occupy a useful place on the spectrum because he will do things, and by things I mean some incredibly f***ed up stuff, that many, and by many I mean nearly all, news organizations refuse to do. In that way he’s sort of like the lawyer in the old joke about lawyers and lab rats.

Johnson has been served with a bogus cease and desist order issued by the National Abortion Federation and has, rightfully, decided to ignore it. The videos are out there, on YouTube and on a torrent server, so anyone can see the unedited version that the left always wants to see.

We have been cowed into submission by a judiciary that has taken upon itself the authority to rewrite laws, interpret laws as they wish, and to reorder society in a way pleasing to a small number of federal judges. What Johnson has done in this case is a public service that goes a long way, in my view, to absolving him of the general creepiness that surrounds him operation.