FBI Director Christopher Wray testified that roughly 70% of the bureau’s abortion-related violence or threat cases following the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision have anti-abortion victims.
Wray insisted to the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Thursday that the FBI was taking its investigations into attacks against anti-abortion groups seriously.
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Since the May leak of a draft of the Supreme Court’s opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, there have been heightened threats against Supreme Court justices and anti-abortion advocates, including attacks and vandalism targeting anti-abortion activist groups, pregnancy centers, and churches across the country.
The testimony came amid criticism from Republicans and anti-abortion groups that the Justice Department isn’t doing enough about these attacks. Republicans and conservative activists have alleged there is a double standard in how the Justice Department is deploying the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act vigorously against anti-abortion groups while using it laxly against pro-abortion ones.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) told Wray that “it appears that DOJ have become politicized with regard to pro-life things” as he noted “a recent rise in high-profile FBI investigations of pro-life Americans,” which he said “raises the concern” that the FBI is “weaponizing” federal law enforcement.
Wray said Thursday that the FBI was going after the perpetrators through the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces, through its criminal authorities, and through the FACE Act, with an estimated 20 field offices involved.
“I firmly believe that the FBI is going about its work doing the right thing in the right way,” Wray insisted, adding, “My view — plainly expressed to all of our people, including in the context of abortion-related violence — is that I don’t care what side of the issue you’re on, you don’t get to engage in violence. And we are equal opportunity when it comes to that.”
The conservative group Catholic Vote has a running tracker on such alleged incidents and says that “at least 75 pregnancy resource centers and offices of pro-life groups have been attacked and vandalized” since the leak of the decision overturning Roe. And the conservative Family Research Council pointed to “60 incidents related to pro-life organizations or pregnancy resource centers” as of early November, with dozens more targetings of churches and other groups.
The Justice Department says that more than two dozen anti-abortion defendants have been charged this year with violations of the FACE Act, while there have not been any known similar charges against pro-abortion offenders.
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The FBI said this summer that it was “investigating a series of attacks and threats” targeting anti-abortion groups across the United States, and Wray previously testified in August that “I can tell you we have opened a number of domestic violent extremism investigations using our Joint Terrorism Task Forces that are specifically focused on attacks or threats against churches, pro-life organizations, pregnancy resource centers, similar types of organizations.”
House and Senate Republicans repeatedly called on Attorney General Merrick Garland in June to investigate the attacks and vandalism targeting anti-abortion groups as acts of domestic terrorism.
