The Machinery of Injustice

The Biden Department of Justice turned the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act into a joint operation with Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation. Career prosecutors in the Civil Rights Division solicited targeting information from abortion-rights advocacy groups, used their dossiers to generate search warrants, withheld evidence from defense attorneys, attempted to screen Christian jurors from trial panels, and sought prison sentences for nonviolent pro-life defendants at more than double the rate they sought for violent pro-abortion offenders. Four of those prosecutors were fired Monday. Internal referrals for possible criminal prosecution have been made. And as of Tuesday morning, the government’s own files are public.

That is the finding of a report released by the Justice Department’s Weaponization Working Group, the investigative body established in the first days of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s tenure. It is the Working Group’s first product, built on a review of more than 700,000 internal records: emails, case files, prosecutorial memoranda, and communications between career attorneys and outside advocacy organizations. The report runs to nearly 900 pages, including more than 800 pages of exhibits released under a limited waiver of privilege. Two-tiered justice is an accusation frequently leveled and rarely proved. This report proves it with the government’s own paper trail.

The FACE Act was signed by President Clinton in 1994 with bipartisan support. Its text is symmetrical: it prohibits violent, threatening, or obstructive conduct directed at both abortion clinics and pro-life pregnancy resource centers. For three decades, the statute functioned as a relatively minor tool in the federal criminal code. Then the Biden Administration arrived, and within four years it filed nearly 25% of all FACE Act charges ever brought against pro-life defendants in the law’s thirty-year history. The enforcement surge was not matched on the other side of the ledger. Despite hundreds of documented attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers and churches following the leak of the Dobbs draft opinion in 2022, including firebombings claimed by the radical group Jane’s Revenge, the Biden DOJ brought fewer than ten FACE Act cases against pro-abortion offenders.

The sentencing data quantifies what the case selection suggests. The Biden DOJ requested an average sentence of 26.8 months for pro-life defendants. For pro-abortion defendants charged under the same statute, prosecutors sought 12.3 months. The law is identical. The disparity is a policy.

Begin with the architecture of collaboration, because this is where the report’s findings are most damning. The Biden DOJ did not independently identify targets for FACE Act prosecution. It outsourced that function to pro-abortion advocacy groups. The National Abortion Federation, Planned Parenthood, and the Feminist Majority Foundation maintained what the report describes as a sustained operational relationship with career prosecutors. These organizations compiled evidence dossiers on pro-life activists, tracked their travel patterns, monitored their constitutionally protected advocacy, and fed the resulting intelligence to federal prosecutors who used it to build criminal cases.

The relationship was not passive. Biden DOJ attorneys affirmatively solicited information from these groups about the movements and activities of pro-life individuals. Career prosecutors monitored specific activists for years before bringing charges. The standard investigative model, in which law enforcement identifies criminal conduct and builds a case, was inverted: advocacy organizations identified targets and the Department of Justice supplied the prosecutorial muscle.

The institutional capture went deeper. Sanjay Patel, the longtime Civil Rights Division prosecutor who led FACE Act enforcement, served as a reference on the National Abortion Federation’s application for a private grant. The report found no record of ethics approval authorizing Patel to take a financial interest in the outcome of an organization that had active business before his division. When defense attorneys in FACE Act cases requested data on the department’s historical prosecution patterns, Patel told them no such records existed and directed them to file Freedom of Information Act requests. He had the data on hand. He had already provided similar information to the abortion-rights organizations a year earlier.

Patel was fired Monday, one day before the report’s release, along with at least three other prosecutors. Among the terminated: Assistant U.S. Attorneys Frances Carlson and Sunita Doddamani from the Eastern District of Michigan. Doddamani, the report reveals, compared pro-life Christian defendants to cult members and described them as “culty” in internal case notes while drafting her rebuttal arguments. The department has made internal referrals for possible criminal prosecution where prosecutorial misconduct was identified. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche declined to specify which former officials, if any, have been referred.

The individual cases are where the machinery becomes personal.

On September 23, 2022, a contingent of armed FBI agents arrived at dawn at the home of Mark Houck in Kintnersville, Pennsylvania. Houck, a Catholic father of seven and founder of a men’s ministry, was taken into custody in front of his wife and children. His wife, Ryan-Marie, described agents with rifles pointed at the family, including the couple’s seven children, ages two to thirteen. The DOJ’s own Weaponization report now confirms what the Houck family alleged at the time: prosecutors “authorized aggressive arrest tactics instead of allowing pro-life defendants to self-surrender.” Houck’s defense attorney had previously informed the U.S. Attorney’s Office that his client would turn himself in voluntarily. The office never responded. His alleged crime: a shoving incident outside a Philadelphia abortion clinic in which Houck intervened to protect his twelve-year-old son from a clinic escort who was verbally harassing the boy. Local authorities had declined to press charges. The escort’s private criminal complaint had been dismissed when he repeatedly failed to appear in court. The Biden DOJ overrode all of it, secured a federal indictment under the FACE Act, and sent armed agents to execute it. A jury acquitted Houck on all counts.

The prosecution of the Washington Surgi-Clinic defendants was worse. On October 22, 2020, a group of pro-life activists entered the clinic of Dr. Cesare Santangelo, an abortionist whom the group Live Action had secretly recorded saying he would allow a child who survived an abortion to die during the procedure. The activists sat in the clinic, linked arms and chains, prayed the rosary, sang hymns to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and live-streamed the demonstration. No one was injured. The Biden DOJ charged all of them with civil rights conspiracy and FACE Act violations, treating the prayer vigil as a federal crime comparable in statutory structure to a Ku Klux Klan raid.

The sentences mapped the disparity the report now quantifies. Paulette Harlow, 75 years old and suffering from debilitating health conditions, received 24 months in federal prison. Her sister Jean Marshall, 74, received 24 months. Joan Bell, 76, received 27 months. Lauren Handy, whom prosecutors cast as the conspiracy’s ringleader, received four years and nine months. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a Clinton appointee who presided over all the sentences, remarked that Harlow would “make an effort to remain alive” because that is a “tenet of her religion.” Harlow’s husband, John, told the court he would go to prison in her place if he could.

Set these penalties beside the treatment of pro-abortion violence. Following the Dobbs leak, Jane’s Revenge and affiliated actors claimed responsibility for firebombings and vandalism at pregnancy resource centers and churches across the country. The Biden DOJ’s response was functionally nonexistent. The same department that sent armed agents to arrest a father in front of his children for a shoving match could not find the resources to investigate arson. The FACE Act, written to protect both sides, became a one-directional weapon.

The report’s procedural findings are, if anything, more corrosive to public confidence than the sentencing data. Biden DOJ prosecutors knowingly withheld evidence that defense counsel had requested to prepare affirmative defenses. They attempted to screen jurors based on religious belief, flagging Christian jurors for peremptory and for-cause strikes. Trial notes reviewed by the Working Group confirm that prosecutors identified committed Christians in the jury pool and moved to exclude them. The same team subsequently asked the court to prohibit defendants from wearing “Jesus buttons” at trial. One prosecutor disparaged defendants’ religious beliefs and Catholic judges in internal communications.

Consider the cumulative picture. The department partnered with advocacy organizations to select targets. It withheld exculpatory material from defendants. It attempted to ensure that jurors who shared the defendants’ faith could not sit in judgment. It deployed aggressive arrest tactics against nonviolent individuals who had offered to surrender. It sought sentences more than double those requested for defendants on the opposite side of the same statute. And its lead prosecutor provided financial support to one of its partner organizations while that organization had matters pending before the department, without ethics clearance.

This is not prosecutorial discretion. It is the anatomy of a political prosecution.

The corrective actions are substantial. President Trump pardoned 23 pro-life activists convicted under Biden-era FACE Act prosecutions in January 2025. The DOJ has dismissed with prejudice three pending civil lawsuits against pro-life activists. A new directive requires that FACE Act charges may only be brought in extraordinary circumstances or cases involving significant aggravating factors. Four prosecutors have been terminated. Internal referrals for criminal prosecution have been made. And the report itself, with its 800-plus pages of exhibits, has been published under a limited waiver of privilege so the public can examine the underlying records.

“The behavior unearthed in this report is shameful,” said Assistant Attorney General Daniel Burrows of the Office of Legal Policy. “Lawyers who should have known better withheld evidence, worked to keep committed religious people off juries, and generally allowed the Department of Justice to be used as the enforcement arm of pro-abortion special interests.”

The bureaucratic language understates the finding. What the report documents is a federal law-enforcement apparatus conscripted into service as the investigative and prosecutorial arm of a political movement. The advocacy organizations supplied the targets. The prosecutors supplied the indictments. The judges supplied the sentences. And the defendants, many of them elderly, many of them grandparents, many of them people whose most dangerous implement was a rosary, supplied the years of their lives.

The institutional implications extend well beyond the FACE Act. This report is the Weaponization Working Group’s first release. Future reports will address the January 6 prosecutions, the handling of investigations into President Trump during his time out of office, and other matters the Working Group has been tasked with reviewing. The FACE Act case was, in a sense, the simplest to build: a single statute, a defined universe of prosecutions, a clear comparison set. If the internal records of this relatively narrow enforcement area revealed collaboration with outside interest groups, evidence suppression, religious screening of jurors, and sentencing disparities that no neutral observer could defend, the question that should concern every American is what the records of larger, more politically charged investigations will show.

Former Civil Rights Division attorneys have already accused the Working Group of cherry-picking from the 700,000 records. The accusation is predictable, and it fails on its own terms. The report comes with 800 pages of exhibits and a privilege waiver. The records are available. If the characterization is unfair, the evidence to disprove it has been published alongside the characterization. That is not cherry-picking. That is an invitation to read.

The FACE Act was designed to protect the constitutional right to protest at the most contested sites in American civic life. Under the Biden DOJ, it was redesigned to criminalize one side of that protest while ignoring violence from the other. The names of the prosecutors are now public. The names of the defendants have been public all along. Paulette Harlow’s husband told the court he would take her place. Joan Bell is 76. Mark Houck’s children watched armed agents take their father at dawn. These are the Americans whom the Department of Justice, under Merrick Garland, chose to treat as enemies of the state. The department’s own files now confirm what those Americans always knew: the law was not applied to them. It was aimed at them.