Trump DOJ Accuses Biden DOJ Of Weaponizing FACE Act

Department of Justice Headquarters Building — Source: J. David Ake / Getty

Trump supporters across the country might find it comforting to know that, while President Donald Trump’s deeply unpopular war in Iran gets more costly, deadly and, frankly, embarrassing for the Trump administration by the day, the MAGA-fied Department of Justice still has plenty of time to do the president’s bidding by engaging in lawfare while accusing others of the same.

In fact, the same DOJ that fired several seasoned prosecutors for refusing to take part in Trump’s retaliatory prosecutions of New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey because those cases were meritless, is now firing more DOJ attorneys just because they prosecuted cases under the FACE Act during the Biden administration. The firings came after a DOJ report accused prosecutors of engaging in “weaponization” of the FACE ACT against conservative, anti-abortion protesters.

But before we get into all that, what exactly is the FACE Act?

According to CBS News, “Congress passed the FACE Act in 1994 to address rising concerns about threats and intimidation that women were facing at reproductive health clinics.” Under the act, nonviolent and first-time offenses of the law are misdemeanors, while repeat offenses or violations that result in bodily injury or death can be charged as felonies.

“Congress passed the FACE Act with bipartisan support more than 30 years ago, and courts have consistently upheld the constitutionality of its provisions that ensure safe access to reproductive health services,” Stacey Young, a former Civil Rights Division lawyer who founded and leads the nonprofit Justice Connection, said in a statement to CBS. “Firing DOJ attorneys for zealously enforcing the law is unconscionable — it politicizes the department’s enforcement actions and punishes dedicated civil servants for doing their jobs.”

So, Trump’s DOJ is, once again, acting at the behest of the administration, which has claimed without citing evidence, as usual, that the Civil Rights Division under former Attorney General Merrick Garland used the Act to intentionally target conservative Christians who oppose abortion. CBS noted that the Justice Department even acknowledges that the department, under former President Joe Biden, also pursued criminal charges against abortion rights activists who were accused of trying to harm volunteers and workers at a crisis pregnancy clinic that counseled on alternatives to abortion, but it said those prosecutions were scarce compared to those of anti-abortion activists.

Now, it might occur to people who possess the capacity for even bare-minimum critical thought that if way more anti-abortion activists were being arrested and charged under the FACE Act, it’s likely because there were simply way more of them committing offenses or at least being accused of them.

To be fair, Black people have been making the argument for generations that the reason we’re arrested disproportionately is that we’re policed disproportionately, but that narrative is based on actual data related to racial profiling, specific police practices, and a historical pattern of racial bias. The DOJ appears to be deciding that conservatives are being unjustly targeted simply because they caught more charges under the FACE Act, and that the disproportionate prosecutions, in and of themselves, prove an anti-conservative bias.

As far as Trump’s DOJ’s claim that the department was “weaponized” under Biden, well, that’s pretty damn rich coming from an administration that has spent Trump’s entire second term so far tasking the DOJ with prosecuting the president’s enemies and political rivals just because he wants it done under now-former Attorney General Pam Bondi, with Bondi’s temporary replacement, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, recently justifying Trump’s “right” to do so.

Not to mention the fact that Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 1,500 violent Jan. 6 rioters — many of whom have gone on to be accused and arrested for egregious and horrific crimes — as part of his effort to rewrite the history of Jan. 6, which he and his “stop the steal” propaganda are directly responsible for.

Last year, shortly after Trump was sworn into office, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division saw a mass exodus of more than 100 attorneys, who resigned from the department due to its expressed agenda to steer away from (or outright gutting) cases involving civil rights protections for Black people, people of color and other marginalized groups in order to focus on white grievance and what it perceives as anti-conservative bias.

When it comes to this administration, every accusation is actually a confession. The DOJ wasn’t the president’s personal lawfare machine under Biden, as it has been every single day it has served Trump’s second administration. Its sudden beef with the FACE Act and how it was used under Democratic leadership appears to be nothing more than an extension that.

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