I thought I saw all the Planned Parenthood sting footage. Turns out the tapes were edited.

An anti-abortion group has, over the past month, released five videos that it argues show Planned Parenthood profits from procuring fetal tissue for medical researchers.

A new Planned Parenthood report, released Thursday, now suggests those videos are doctored — and the evidence is pretty compelling.

Planned Parenthood hired a forensic research firm to analyze about 12 hours of footage that the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) secretly taped when it had actors pose as employees of a fetal tissue procurement company.

"This analysis did not reveal widespread evidence of substantive video manipulation, but we did identify cuts, skips, missing tape, and changes in camera angle," the report from Fusion GPS, the firm that Planned Parenthood hired, concludes.

CMP took no steps to hide the fact that it edited its shorter, more widely viewed clips of undercover meetings with Planned Parenthood. The group interspersed news clips and overlaid text on top of the video; there's clear evidence of production work.

But the group held that these "full footage" tapes were complete, unbiased presentations of its Planned Parenthood meetings. If CMP also edited these "full" tapes — ones that it told viewers were complete footage — then the group is guilty of deceiving the public the exact same way it deceived Planned Parenthood.

Timestamps reveal missing chunks of video

The Center for Medical Progress has, since early July, released two types of videos. Planned Parenthood has long argued that the short ones — about 10 to 15 minutes long — are highly edited.

There are also longer videos, which range from one to five hours, that CMP edited down to make the shorter pieces. CMP has described these videos as "full footage," creating the impression that they show a complete interaction with the Planned Parenthood employees.

The group is guilty of deceiving the public in the same way it deceived Planned Parenthood

The GPS Fusion report argues this isn't the case: The authors cite moments in the video that suggest the supposedly full videos were also doctored.

One of the most compelling examples is a few minutes into a five-hour video from a Planned Parenthood clinic in Texas. If you look at the timestamp in the lower left-hand corner, it jumps forward by nearly a half-hour (from about 7:46 to 8:18) in just a few seconds. You can watch it happen here, if you fast-forward to about eight minutes and 55 seconds into this video:

The Fusion GPS report finds at least two other instances of similar timestamps jumping in this video and about a dozen others spread across the other videos labeled "full footage."

There's this one from the first sting video, filmed at lunch with Planned Parenthood's medical director, Deborah Nucatola. If you watch the timestamp and the date in the bottom left-hand corner, you'll see the time jump forward by four minutes just after 14:32 and the date change from July 25, 2014, to July 25, 2013. It's not totally clear what the date change means, although the report suggests it indicates that the two videos were filmed on separate cameras set to different dates.

It's impossible to know what, exactly, is in those missing moments — that's the whole point of the new report that Planned Parenthood released Thursday.

"The blatant manipulation of this video renders it useless as 'evidence' and means it cannot be relied upon in official inquiries as a credible record of events unless the record is supplemented by CMP’s original unedited material," the report argues.

There are errors in the transcripts of the long videos, too

CMP has published, alongside its videos, what it has said to be full transcripts of each undercover meeting. It hosts those transcripts here. I relied on these transcripts for an article I wrote last week, particularly to double-check a quote I'd written down while watching the video.

The new report suggests, however, that the transcript has inaccuracies. Fusion GPS had an independent transcription agency make its own transcription. Comparing the two, it found that the CMP transcript had "over 4,000 words of dialog that does not appear in the independent transcript or the video." In that dialogue, a Planned Parenthood official "allegedly discusses her 'a la carte' budget ... and engages in a detailed discussion of intact fetuses and the use of medically induced abortions."

This could suggest a few things. Most innocently it could show that CMP did a sloppy job transcribing the long videos. Or it could show that there is either fabricated dialogue in the transcript, or possibly transcription of dialogue that did indeed happen but was cut from the video labeled as "full footage."

Anti-abortion group: We were just cutting out "bathroom breaks"

CMP posted a statement on its website that seems to agree that it did cut out chunks of the video, but describes the missing moments as "bathroom breaks and waiting periods between meetings."

Planned Parenthood’s desperate, 11th-hour attempt to pay their hand-picked "experts" to distract from the crimes documented on video is a complete failure. The absence of bathroom breaks and waiting periods between meetings does not change the hours of dialogue with top-level Planned Parenthood executives eager to manipulate abortion procedures to get high-quality baby parts for financially profitable sale. While even Planned Parenthood’s "experts" found "no evidence of audio manipulation" in the recordings, it is telling that Planned Parenthood is trying so hard to pretend that their staff did not refer to a dismembered fetus as "a baby" and "another boy." Planned Parenthood’s abortion providers are far more honest about the brutal reality of their work than the paid political consultants at the national office. If Planned Parenthood really wants to disprove the now-overwhelming body of evidence that their affiliates traffic in baby body parts, they should release their fetal tissue contracts with the for-profit company StemExpress for law enforcement, Congress, and all the world to see.

The CMP statement does not address the inaccuracies that Planned Parenthood found in the transcript. Nor does it specify what, exactly, is missing in the tapes. Take the first example I wrote about here, the meeting with the Texas Planned Parenthood clinic where the tape appears to jump forward a half-hour. In that case, nobody suggests a bathroom break. There's no change in meeting; when the video jumps forward, they're still sitting in the exact same seats.

Meanwhile, the longer videos show lots of small-talk footage that isn't especially relevant to the argument over fetal body parts. I know because I watched all of it. There are moments in a car, where directions are being given and all the camera footage is totally blurry, where people stand around in hallways, where they talk about the relationship between caffeine and headaches. Those moments weren't cut from the tape — and it's hard to know what would make those different from the bathroom breaks and other moments deemed irrelevant to the audience.

The real issue: Anti-abortion advocates said these tapes were unedited. And they weren't.

Planned Parenthood has long derided CMP's short videos as highly edited and deceptive — a charge that, after watching them and the supposedly "full footage" interviews, I agreed with. The videos were clearly edited with an agenda: namely, to make the case that Planned Parenthood profits from the sale of fetal tissue.

At the same time, CMP appeared to do something oddly transparent for a group that's spent a dozen hours taking undercover footage. It released what it called "full footage" of its Planned Parenthood meetings. It held these videos out as complete meetings. I trusted that I could watch these videos and see, from start to finish, the conversations that happened.

These videos were held out as full conversations. What if that's not the case?

The inaccurate transcript and the jumping timestamps make a pretty compelling case that I didn't get the full picture. CMP can't just wave away the missing footage as boring bathroom breaks; it's impossible to know what might be missing without complete video. If the group wants to present these as the full videos behind the sting operation, then it needs to actually provide the complete footage — however dull or boring those other parts might be.