Carly Fiorina’s fake Planned Parenthood claims are even faker than their previously-known fakeness

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One of the reasons Carly Fiorina is currently in the top tier of Republican primary polling is that, during the last debate, she went on a sound bite-worthy tirade against Planned Parenthood and all who would defend them:

Here’s the punch line:

I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes,…Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says, “We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.”

It was one of the biggest applause lines of the night. The only problem was that it was almost entirely false. The clip Fiorina’s referring to was a segment of stock footage that played over an audio clip of a former employee of StemExpress (a company that until recently partnered with Planned Parenthood) describing an abortion procedure. The fetus shown was not confirmed to have been an aborted fetus, and the footage was not said to have been filmed at Planned Parenthood.

Her claim was so false, in fact, that her super PAC had to step in to make its own video that squared with Fiorina’s account.

Yesterday, the full video of the clip Fiorina described was released, which again confirmed precisely nothing in Fiorina’s claims and subsequent double-downs.. As TIME reported:

[Center for Bio-Ethical Reform founder Gregg] Cunningham, an anti-abortion activist, declined to identify the date, location or authors of the video in an interview with TIME Monday night, saying his group makes agreements of confidentiality in an effort to acquire images of abortions. He also made no claim that the images shown in the video had anything to do with Planned Parenthood, the organization that Fiorina and others have targeted for federal defunding. “I am neither confirming or denying the affiliation of the clinic who did this abortion,” Cunningham said.

…

The full source video, which is extremely graphic, lasts about 13 minutes, and shows a fetus being extracted from the mother, placed in a metal bowl, prodded with medical instruments and handled by someone in the room. At times the fetus appears to move, and at other times it appears to have a pulse. There are no images on the full video of any attempt to harvest the brain of the fetus, and there is no sound. Cunningham said the jump cuts in the video are the result of the camera being turned off and on.

Cunningham also did not confirm that the procedure in the video was an abortion instead of a miscarriage, saying only that he was “confident” it was the former.

As Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum quipped, “So there you have it. The video was not taken at a Planned Parenthood clinic. The fetus shows some reflexive movement, but that’s all. No one says the fetus has to be kept alive. No one harvests the brain. But other than that, Fiorina was 100 percent correct!”

But Fiorina’s (and now Cunningham’s) claims weren’t done unraveling. Later in the day, Fusion reported that not were the pictures of aborted fetuses in the videos not taken at Planned Parenthood, but in at least one case the picture isn’t of an aborted fetus in the first place; its of a stillborn fetus. What’s more, the Center for Medical Progress did not have permission to use the photo in question, which has apparently been circulated widely in the anti-abortion community

Lexi Oliver Fretz has since granted CMP and Carly Fiorina permission to use the photos, which originally appeared on her blog while she was mourning her loss. Which is fine, if odd given that she never had an abortion (she is a committed Christian), and that the photos aren’t depicting what CMP and Fiorina are insisting they depict.

Every day, it seems like the conservative push to defund (let’s be honest, eliminate) Planned Parenthood intensifies, and every day it seems like a new lie emerges that directly undercuts their central claims about the organization. First it was deceptively edited videos. Yesterday it was deliberately nonsensical charts and misappropriated photos.

What’s next?

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