The Justice Department accused the Biden administration of unfairly prosecuting anti-abortion activists, according to a report issued on Tuesday, part of a broader effort by President Trump to counter what he has claimed were anti-conservative biases by federal law enforcement under his predecessor.
The report is the first of several expected to be released by the department’s Weaponization Working Group, which promised to scrutinize a range of issues, including the criminal investigations into Mr. Trump and what he has cast as anti-Christian and anti-Catholic biases under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
The 37-page report, featuring more than 800 additional pages of internal emails and other exhibits, comes at a tenuous time in President Trump’s relationship with the religious right. In recent days, Mr. Trump posted an image of himself as Jesus Christ, and attacked Pope Leo XIV, the leader of the Catholic Church, as “weak on crime,” drawing backlash from some of his own supporters.
Shortly before the document’s release, the Trump administration fired three career department lawyers who had worked on the cases at issue in the report, according to people familiar with the dismissals.
The acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, took aim at the previous administration in announcing the release of the report. “The weaponization that happened under the Biden administration will not happen again, as we restore integrity to our prosecution system,” he said.
Stacey Young, a former civil rights lawyer at the department who now leads a nonprofit group of former department employees, Justice Connection, denounced the firings. She described them as the latest instance in which the Trump administration had subverted the mission and intent of the Justice Department even as it claimed to be ridding itself of political interference.
Ms. Young criticized the department’s leadership over what she called “cruelty and hypocrisy” in its insistence “on zealous advocacy by career staff in advancing the president’s priorities, while shaming and firing those who did just that in the prior administration.”
The report centers on how the Biden administration enforced the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act against anti-abortion activists. The law, enacted in 1994, makes it a crime to physically obstruct or use threats of force to intimidate or interfere with a person seeking reproductive health services or seeking to participate in a service at a house of worship.
The Trump administration’s review concluded that while the Justice Department did pursue cases against those who vandalized and threatened anti-abortion counseling centers, it pursued more cases against those who campaigned against abortion, and sought longer prison sentences against them.
Kristen Clarke, who led the civil rights division during the Biden administration, said in a statement that the department “enforced the law evenhandedly and put public safety at the center of this work.”
The Trump administration used the same law to charge more than 30 people over a protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement in January at a church service in St. Paul, Minn. Among those was the former CNN anchor Don Lemon, who has denied wrongdoing and said he was there covering the event as a journalist.
The Justice Department’s efforts to end what it calls “weaponization” of law enforcement has moved on multiple tracks, some faster than others. Appearing at a conservative political conference in March, Mr. Blanche declared that “there is not a single man or woman” left at the department “who had anything to do with” the investigations of Mr. Trump. He estimated that more than 200 people had been fired or resigned as a consequence.
The Trump administration has also fired F.B.I. agents who knelt when confronted by racial justice protesters in 2020, agents who investigated corruption cases involving Trump allies, and agents and prosecutors who investigated and prosecuted Jan. 6, 2021, rioters.
Senior Trump officials have also been reviewing the actions of F.B.I. agents and analysts who produced what conservatives have claimed is an anti-Catholic memo in 2023 about developing useful sources to alert them to possible domestic extremists.
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
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