The Justice Department on Tuesday released a nearly 900-page report alleging that Biden-era prosecutors selectively enforced the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act against pro-life Americans, coordinating with abortion-rights groups, withholding evidence from defense attorneys, and seeking prison sentences more than twice as long as those requested for defendants on the other side of the abortion debate.
The findings, produced by the Justice Department's Weaponization Working Group after a review of roughly 700,000 internal records, paint a picture of a federal law enforcement apparatus that functioned less like a neutral arbiter and more like the enforcement arm of Planned Parenthood and its allies.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche framed the report as a line in the sand, as Fox News Digital reported:
"This department will not tolerate a two-tiered system of justice. No Department should conduct selective prosecution based on beliefs. The weaponization that happened under the Biden Administration will not happen again, as we restore integrity to our prosecutorial system."
The FACE Act, signed into law decades ago, prohibits the use of force, threats, or physical obstruction against people obtaining or providing reproductive health services, or against those exercising their religious beliefs at a house of worship. On paper, the statute is neutral. In practice, under Merrick Garland's Justice Department, it was anything but.
During Biden's four years, DOJ charged more than 45 pro-life defendants in over 20 FACE Act cases, a significant increase from prior administrations, Breitbart reported, citing the DOJ document directly. The report argued that enforcement was lopsided, with authorities prioritizing cases involving abortion clinics while failing to adequately pursue attacks on pregnancy resource centers and churches.
The sentencing gap was stark. DOJ officials stated that prosecutors sought an average of 26.8 months in prison for pro-life defendants, compared to just 12.3 months for defendants accused of violence against pro-life organizations or facilities. The New York Post reported that judges ultimately sentenced pro-life defendants to an average of 14 months behind bars, versus just 3 months for pro-abortion defendants.
That disparity, more than four-to-one in actual time served, did not happen by accident. It happened because prosecutors asked for it.
Among the report's most serious allegations: Biden-era DOJ officials and FBI agents worked closely with Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Federation, and the Feminist Majority Foundation. These groups helped compile information on pro-life activists that was then used in investigations and prosecutions.
The pattern described in the report goes well beyond tipline cooperation. The Washington Examiner reported that DOJ officials and FBI agents worked with these groups to identify targets, track protests, and monitor activists' travel and online activity, in some cases for years before bringing charges.
That level of coordination raises a basic question: Were these federal prosecutions driven by evidence of criminal conduct, or by the institutional priorities of outside advocacy groups? The report's findings suggest the latter. And the implications for civil liberties, particularly the rights of Americans to protest peacefully, are difficult to overstate.
The broader pattern of coordination between the Biden DOJ and outside actors in high-profile prosecutions has drawn sustained scrutiny from congressional investigators and the current administration alike.
The report alleged that prosecutors withheld evidence from defense attorneys. One passage stated plainly: "The Biden DOJ prosecutors knowingly withheld evidence that defense counsel requested to prepare an affirmative defense." When the defense sought records, a DOJ official responded: "I do not keep the kind of records you requested and, as a result, I do not believe that we will provide them to you."
But the report said the information was "readily available." The official had it. The defense did not get it.
Separately, prosecutors allegedly attempted to screen out jurors based on their religious beliefs. In a country where the Sixth Amendment guarantees an impartial jury and the First Amendment protects the free exercise of religion, that allegation is not a procedural footnote. It is a constitutional red flag.
Assistant Attorney General Daniel Burrows was straightforward about the findings of the review:
"The behavior unearthed in this report is shameful. 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 DOJ's own internal review, in other words, concluded that its lawyers violated basic prosecutorial norms, norms that exist to protect every American, regardless of political belief.
The report singled out the case of pro-life activist Mark Houck. In that case, prosecutors declined a request for Houck to voluntarily surrender and instead authorized the FBI to arrest him at his home. The decision to send armed agents to a man's front door, when he had offered to turn himself in, became a flashpoint in the national debate over whether the Biden DOJ was treating pro-life Americans as domestic threats.
Houck's case was not an outlier. The report described a pattern in which aggressive arrest tactics were chosen over less confrontational alternatives. These were not drug kingpins or flight risks. They were Americans whose primary offense, in most cases, involved protest activity outside abortion clinics.
The federal enforcement posture toward religious Americans during the Biden years extended well beyond the FACE Act, as other DOJ actions during the same period made clear.
The Trump administration has already moved to reverse course. The Justice Department said it has issued pardons for pro-life activists convicted under the prior administration, dismissed several civil cases, and limited future FACE Act prosecutions to "extraordinary circumstances" involving significant aggravating factors.
Those steps represent a meaningful policy correction. But they also raise the question of accountability. Pardons restore freedom. They do not restore the months or years defendants spent under indictment, the legal fees they incurred, or the reputational damage they suffered.
The Weaponization Working Group, created under the current administration to examine whether federal law was used in a biased or politically motivated way, produced the report. Its work now stands as the most detailed internal accounting of how the FACE Act was deployed during the Biden years.
Whether any of the prosecutors named or implicated in the report face professional consequences remains an open question. The report documents conduct, withholding evidence, religious screening of jurors, coordination with outside advocacy groups, that, if proven in court, could amount to serious ethical violations.
The FACE Act report does not exist in a vacuum. It arrives alongside a growing body of evidence that the Biden-era Justice Department used its prosecutorial power in ways that tracked political and ideological lines. From the financial relationships between Biden's DOJ and state-level prosecutors to the aggressive posture toward parents at school board meetings, the pattern is consistent: the department under Garland treated political opponents as targets rather than citizens entitled to equal protection under the law.
The 700,000 records reviewed for this report tell a specific version of that broader story. Pro-life Americans were tracked by advocacy groups, investigated by federal agents who relied on those groups for intelligence, charged under a statute that was enforced unevenly, denied evidence they were entitled to, subjected to juries screened for religious belief, and sentenced to prison terms far exceeding those imposed on defendants who committed comparable acts against pro-life organizations.
Meanwhile, the current Justice Department's willingness to investigate Democratic officials signals a different institutional posture, one that at least aims to apply scrutiny without regard to political alignment.
The FACE Act was written to protect access to clinics and houses of worship alike. Under the Biden administration, it protected one side and punished the other. That is not law enforcement. That is politics with a badge.
