The Department of Justice published this Tuesday an extensive report in which it accuses the Administration of the former president Joe Biden unevenly applied the FACE Act to persecute anti-abortion activists, in what he calls an “instrumentalization” of the judicial system.
The document, prepared by the so-called Working Group on the “instrumentalization” of the Department of Justice, is based on the review of more than 700,000 internal records and constitutes the first of several planned reports on actions of the previous government.
As reported by CBS Facts, the report maintains that The Justice Department “violated the rights of Americans” by applying the law selectively, favoring those who defended abortion rights over pro-life groups.
The report questions the application of the FACE Law, passed in 1994 to protect access to reproductive health clinics, and claims that it was used to prosecute mainly anti-abortion activists.
According to the document, The Justice Department of the Biden generation “used the FACE Act as a weapon in various ways”including prolonged surveillance of pro-life activists and collaboration with pro-abortion organizations.
In that context, Acting Commonplace Attorney Todd Blanche stated that “no Department should carry out selective prosecution based on beliefs” and added that “the instrumentalization of justice that occurred during the Biden administration will not happen again.”
The report also notes that prosecutors sought harsher sentences against anti-abortion activists. According to data cited by CBS Facts, they called for “a median sentence of 26.8 months for pro-life defendants, compared to 12.3 months for pro-choice defendants.”
Among the most serious accusations, the document maintains that federal prosecutors engaged in misconduct during judicial processes.
The text states that some prosecutors “deliberately withheld evidence”attempted to exclude jurors “on religious grounds” and authorized aggressive arrest tactics.
Likewise, it denounces that there was close collaboration with groups such as Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation, which would have provided information to promote investigations.
According to CBS Facts, the report also accuses the FBI and the Department of Justice of “collaborating with abortion rights groups to obtain real-time information about the protests.”
However, Former Justice Department officials have questioned the document’s conclusions, among the voices is Stacey Young, a former attorney for the Civil Rights Division, who argued that the FACE Act “ensures safe access to reproductive health services” and called the layoffs a measure that “politicizes the department’s actions.”
For her part, former prosecutor Laura-Kate Bernstein stated that “this report does not correspond to reality” and stressed that the cases prosecuted involved people who “physically blocked clinics,” not peaceful protesters.
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