DOJ investigating Biden-era prosecutions of anti-abortion protesters, draft report shows

The Trump Justice Department is expected to release a report as early as next week concluding that the prior administration politically targeted abortion opponents because of their religious beliefs when prosecuting them for blocking access to abortion clinics, according to three people familiar with the report and a draft reviewed by MS NOW.

The nearly 60-page draft seeks to justify President Donald Trump’s pardons of two dozen defendants who were convicted during the Biden administration of blockading abortion clinics, threatening violence and verbally assaulting patients and staff. The report argues those defendants’ convictions under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act — a 1994 law that prohibits interfering with people trying to access reproductive health clinics — were unjustly motivated by what the report characterizes as the targeting of people “with traditional Christian views.”

“Upon assuming office, the Biden DOJ shattered the public’s trust by weaponizing the FACE Act to advance a pro-abortion agenda, and DOJ’s Civil Rights Division was at the forefront of this weaponization,” the draft states.

The report does not reconcile its claims of Biden-era weaponization with the fact that Trump’s DOJ has unsuccessfully sought to prosecute several of the president’s political enemies, and is currently trying to bring FACE Act charges against former BLN anchor and independent journalist Don Lemon and protesters who entered a church in Minneapolis earlier this year.

A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment on reports or findings that are not yet public but pointed to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s remarks at a Tuesday news conference that the public should expect the results of DOJ weaponization investigations soon.

The draft criticizes the work of Sanjay Patel, a longtime Civil Rights Division attorney who has been a target of Republicans for prosecuting all but four of the 24 people Trump pardoned. The report alleges Patel prioritized prosecuting cases against anti-abortion protesters while comparatively ignoring violence against churches and anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers — an allegation two former DOJ employees who worked with Patel denied to MS NOW.

The draft also criticizes Patel for suggesting prosecutors bring additional charges against violators of the FACE Act to ensure longer jail sentences — though Trump’s DOJ is doing just that in its case against Lemon and the Minneapolis protesters.

Last month, the department put Patel on administrative leave, according to two people who have knowledge of the move but are not authorized to speak about sensitive matters.

Patel did not respond to a LinkedIn message and emails from MS NOW and could not be reached by phone.

Word of the report and Patel being placed on administrative leave comes as the DOJ  has removed experts and installed loyalists who are committed to advancing Trump’s agenda. That has included emboldening anti-abortion protesters — even as abortion providers have faced hundreds of incidents of trespassing, obstructions and death threats in recent years — and pledging to combat what it describes as the previous administration’s anti-Christian bias.

Days after Trump pardoned the two dozen protesters last year, the Office of the Associate Attorney General released a memo announcing that the office would roll back abortion-related FACE prosecutions except in circumstances involving “death, serious bodily harm, or serious property damage.”

The memo also demanded the immediate dismissal of three federal cases brought under FACE charges, in which defendants were accused of barricading themselves inside abortion clinics, refusing to leave and verbally harassing patients in PennsylvaniaFlorida and Ohio in 2021 and 2022. The draft report reviewed by MS NOW characterizes these dismissed cases as involving “peaceful, pro-life demonstrators.”

The FACE Act report also comes in the run-up to the midterm elections, and would mark a rare win for abortion opponents who have been upset with the Trump administration for not taking stronger action to restrict access nationwide.

The law was passed in 1994 to deter mounting violence — including murders — against abortion providers. Trump’s DOJ has focused on a lesser-used provision of the law that prohibits blockading or invading houses of worship, which prosecutors are using in both the Minneapolis case and against pro-Palestinian protesters who demonstrated at a New Jersey synagogue in November 2024. The report states that Patel previously argued that provision of the law was “unconstitutional because it lacks a jurisdictional hook.”

Patel worked as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division’s Criminal Section beginning in 2011, according to a short biography available online, and has prosecuted FACE Act cases against people charged with threatening to bomb abortion clinicsassaulting a clinic escort and threatening to kill an abortion patient. Patel prosecuted all but one of those cases under Biden. He also prosecuted two FACE Act cases during the Biden administration against people who vandalized anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers.

Patel also served as the director of the DOJ’s National Task Force on Violence Against Reproductive Health Care Providers, a group that was formed in the wake of a murder of an abortion provider in the late 1990s to provide security tips to abortion providers and clinics and coordinate prosecutions of people who enact violence against them.

A former DOJ employee who prosecuted a FACE Act case with Patel described him to MS NOW as a “good guy” whose prosecutions were not politically motivated.

“He was by-the-book, in my experience with him,” the former DOJ employee said. “He followed the facts and the law.”

The defendants who Patel helped prosecute under the Biden administration — and who Trump later pardoned — include people who entered abortion clinics, blocked doorways and refused to leave; verbally harassed patients and staff;  injured multiple clinic staffers; and livestreamed their actions on social media. But the report paints a largely sympathetic picture of them, characterizing them as “nonviolent, pro-life demonstrators, including a Catholic priest and elderly people.”

Although the report suggests that the DOJ previously only brought FACE prosecutions for “violent conduct [and] repeat blockaders,” it fails to mention that many of the people Trump pardoned were repeat offenders themselves. Several of the people Trump pardoned have since been rearrested multiple times for blockading abortion clinics, as MS NOW previously reported.

According to the draft, Biden’s DOJ charged more than 45 anti-abortion defendants in more than 20 cases with violating FACE, which it characterizes as “a significant increase … compared to prior administrations” that was motivated by the administration’s desire to preserve abortion access in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overruling of Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

The Biden DOJ prosecuted only five people for damaging anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers — which the report says saved “the lives of numerous unborn children” — and did not prosecute any cases for damages against churches, the report states. Testifying before Congress in 2023, former Attorney General Merrick Garland said the department “put full resources” into investigating vandalizations of crisis pregnancy centers, but that those centers were more often attacked at night, making them harder to prosecute than blockades of abortion clinics, which were more often done during the day.

Patel argued in 2022 that prosecutors should bring other charges against FACE Act violators that “may provide stronger penalties,” such as conspiracy against rights, a charge punishable by up to a decade in prison that was originally intended to prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan. The report critiques this argument, yet Trump’s DOJ is charging Lemon and the Minneapolis protesters under both the FACE Act and conspiracy against rights.

Laura-Kate Bernstein, a former DOJ prosecutor who also worked on FACE Act prosecutions, said claims that she and fellow prosecutors pursued these cases for political or religious reasons is “outrageous.” She called Patel a “stellar” prosecutor focused on facts, not politics. She pointed to the office’s prosecution of protesters who blocked one devout Christian woman from getting medical care at a clinic that provides abortions and other services — a case discussed in detail in the report.

The woman and her husband had been trying to have a baby, but when she had a miscarriage in her second trimester, the woman’s doctor urged her to undergo a medical procedure to remove the fetal tissue and staunch her bleeding for her own safety.

“She’s bleeding and crying in the back of her car,” Bernstein said. “People who blockaded doors and prevented this woman from getting access to the health care she needed were prosecuted and found guilty by a jury of their peers.”