The Department of Justice under former President Joe Biden "withheld evidence" and approved "aggressive arrest tactics" when targeting pro-life defendants -- and then slapped them with longer prison sentences than pro-abortion ones, according to an explosive internal review released Tuesday.
The DOJ revealed the stunning abuses in a nearly 900-page report after examining more than 700,000 records related to the Biden administration's prosecutions under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act.
The 1994 law was passed to protect access to houses of worship, religious institutions, abortion clinics and pregnancy resource centers.
But the Biden DOJ was found to have engaged multiple times in "biased enforcement" of it -- while also collaborating with and even seeking to fund pro-abortion groups, according to the DOJ Office of Legal Policy report.
Former Attorney General Merrick Garland set up a national task force to pursue cases against pro-lifers the month after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.
Emails show the task force, led by civil division trial attorney Sanjay Patel, worked closely with Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Feminist Majority Foundation and the National Abortion Federation (NAF) Security Team to initiate investigations and "monitor" pro-life activists -- sometimes for years -- before requesting arrest warrants and filing charges.
In a Nov. 17, 2021, email, before the task force was launched, Patel had already praised NAF's security director, Michelle Davidson, to colleagues as an "MVP" at "bringing incidents to my attention, often in real-time, which usually result in an investigation/prosecution."
The task force director was not nearly as chummy with defense counsel for one of the first pro-lifers indicted for illegally blocking access to an abortion clinic after the Dobbs decision, writing in a Feb. 22, 2023, email that he didn't "keep the kind of records" the lawyer requested about the total number of "prosecutions for vandalisms of pregnancy centers."
That was false, the Trump DOJ review found, since he had already forwarded "substantially identical information" to NAF.
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