FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Rep. Chip Roy, chairman of the subcommittee on the Constitution and limited government, is calling on FBI Director Christopher Wray to explain discrepancies between his testimony to Congress and Justice Department prosecution data.
Wray testified to Congress on July 24 that the FBI has focused more attention on pro-abortion violence against pro-life facilities since the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
“Since the Dobbs decision,” he said, “actually, more of our abortion-related violent extremism investigations have focused on violence against pro-life facilities as opposed to the other way around.”
Roy, a Texas Republican, reminded Wray in a Monday letter that since January 2021, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has charged 24 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act cases against 55 defendants, according to DOJ data first reported by The Daily Caller.
In the letter, first obtained by The Daily Signal, Roy emphasized that only two of those 24 cases originated from attacks on pregnancy resource centers. And those two cases involved only five defendants.
“This data is particularly troubling in light of the fact that there have been at least 90 individual cases of attacks on pro-life organizations and pregnancy resource centers since the May 2022 leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion for the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case,” he wrote.
President Bill Clinton signed the FACE Act into law in 1994. While FACE protects both abortion clinics and pregnancy resource centers, President Joe Biden’s DOJ has heavily enforced the law against pro-lifers since the June 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade.
“The fact that the Department’s own data shows that a mere 8 percent of FACE Act cases filed by the Biden-Harris administration are against agitators at pregnancy resource centers would seem to belie your assertion that a majority of ‘abortion-related violent extremism investigations have focused on violence against pro-life facilities’ following the Dobbs decision,” the congressman added.
Roy’s letter calls for Wray and the FBI to provide documents “sufficient to substantiate” his assertion that the FBI has undertaken more pro-abortion violent extremism incidents than otherwise since May 2, 2022.
Kristen Clarke, the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, heads up enforcement of the FACE Act. Following a report from The Daily Signal, Clarke recently admitted that she hid an arrest and its subsequent expungement from investigators when she was confirmed to her Justice Department post.
The president’s critics have accused the Biden-Harris administration and the DOJ of weaponizing the FACE Act against pro-lifers while failing to charge pro-abortion criminals for the hundreds of attacks on pregnancy resource centers since the May 2022 leak of the draft Supreme Court opinion indicating Roe would soon be overturned.
Some, among them Roy and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, have called for the repeal of the FACE Act, arguing that it serves no purpose but to target pro-life activists.
“The Biden administration is using the FACE Act to give pro-life activists and senior citizens lengthy prison terms for nonviolent offenses and protests—all while turning a blind eye to the violence, arson, and riots conducted on behalf of ‘approved’ leftist causes,” Lee told The Daily Signal in May, when a number of pro-life activists were sentenced to prison time.
“Unequal enforcement of the law is a violation of the law,” Lee added at the time, “and men and women who try to expose the horrors of abortion are being unjustly persecuted for their motivations.”
The FBI did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
