FBI Director Christopher Wray told the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that he doesn’t believe the Biden administration has been targeting pro-life activists, but has been focused on working to investigate violence against pro-lifers.
During Wray’s testimony, Rep. Chip Roy asked him if he thought it was “appropriate” for Paulette Harlow, “a 75-year-old woman who is praying at a clinic in D.C. to be put in prison for two years for that activity,” allegedly in violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act.
Wray said he could not answer because he didn’t know the details of the case, which Roy appeared to find shocking.
“Since I’m not familiar with the case, I don’t want to start weighing in because I don’t know all the facts,” he claimed. “But what I can tell you is that when it comes to FACE Act enforcement and abortion-related violent extremism, I think one of the things that gets lost — and I appreciate the opportunity to clarify it — is that really since the Dobbs decision, actually more of our abortion-related violent extremism investigations have focused on violence against pro-life facilities as opposed to the other way around.”
BREAKING: FBI Dir Christopher Wray answers questions from Rep Roy about the FBI’s complicity in jailing prolifer Paulette Harlow. Wray claims he isn’t familiar w the case + asserts that the FBI is heavily investigating violence against prolifers instead of the other way around pic.twitter.com/0GP2pcifjn
— PAAU (@PAAUNOW) July 24, 2024
Roy replied, “We’re still waiting on responses on letters that we’ve sent indicating data to the contrary. There’s been a significant amount of efforts in targeting of people who are pro-lifers, who go to clinics, and that they’ve been prosecuted.”
According to the Catholic News Agency, in 2022, 26 pro-lifers were sentenced under the FACE Act compared with just two in 2021. And only four pro-abortion activists have been charged with violating the FACE Act since 2022 — despite Wray’s 2022 statement that 75% of abortion-related threats and violence since Dobbs have been carried out against pro-lifers.
According to The Federalist, only five of the 60 cases brought by the Biden administration regarding FACE Act violations have been focused on pro-abortion violence. The other 55 cases have been against pro-lifers.
The FACE Act took effect in 1994, and by January 2021 (when Biden took office as president), there had been fewer than 100 FACE Act prosecutions. Roy said in 2023 that it “had never been used to indict individuals related to an attack on a pro-life pregnancy center or house of worship” unit Biden took office. Then the Biden administration began prosecuting people under the FACE Act, accounting for nearly 25% of all FACE Act prosecutions since the law took effect.
Since the Dobbs decision was leaked in May of 2022, at least 90 violent attacks have reportedly been carried out against pro-life organizations and churches, but it is pro-lifers who are now facing prison time for peaceful protest at or inside abortion facilities — including Harlow, who was sentenced to 24 months in prison.
