An FBI whistleblower confirmed suspicions about the federal agency targeting pro-life advocates during a U.S. House subcommittee meeting Feb. 10, according to transcripts obtained by Fox News.
Speaking with the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, FBI Special Agent Garret O’Boyle said he became concerned when the agency shifted its focus on abortion-related threats to “pro-life adherence” in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling Dobbs v. Jackson, Fox News reports.
O’Boyle, who served in the FBI Kansas City Field Office, told lawmakers that the FBI created a special tag “THREATSTOSCOTUS2022” last year to monitor threats of violence in connection to Dobbs.
At first, he said the threat tag seemed “legitimate” because “threatening a Supreme Court official is a violation of federal crime,” and the FBI has used tags in the past for similar situations.
However, O’Boyle said he began to notice the agency was focusing on pro-lifers instead.
“When this threat tag came out, it was like, why are you focusing on pro-life people?” he told lawmakers, according to the report. “It’s pro-choice people who are the ones protesting or otherwise threatening violence in front of Supreme Court justices’ houses.”
Then, O’Boyle said agents began receiving instructions to “look into” pro-life “pregnancy centers,” which puzzled him even more.
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It “struck me as odd at the time,” he said, the report continues. “If somebody is going to be getting threatened, it would be them, because people thought that abortion was suddenly outlawed, which, that wasn’t the case either, it was just remanded back to the states.”
After raising these concerns and voicing them to Congress, O’Boyle said the FBI suspended him and did not allow him take his personal belongings from storage. He said he believes the FBI is being used as a weapon “against agents or anybody who wanted to step forward and talk about malfeasance inside the agency prior to this,” according to the report.
In a statement to Fox News, the FBI said it investigates violence and threats “regardless of motivation or what side of an issue that person is on. We do not conduct investigations based on a person’s political or social views.” The agency also denied retaliating against whistleblowers like O’Boyle.
This week, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland faced questioning during a U.S. Senate hearing amid growing concerns about the Biden administration using the Department of Justice as a weapon against its political opponents.
U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, demanded an explanation from Garland about the prosecution of dozens of pro-life advocates compared to just two arrests of abortion activists despite the wave of violence toward pro-life organizations and churches in the past year. Lee mentioned the FBI raid on pro-life advocate Mark Houck’s home in front of his young children; a jury recently found the Pennsylvania father not guilty on all charges.
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, also criticized Garland during the hearing, pointing out how his department repeatedly has ignored a law that prohibits protests outside of judges’ homes, including the U.S. Supreme Court justices.
Increasingly, pro-life advocates have become targets of vandalism and violence. LifeNews counted about 250 attacks in 2022, including the shooting of an elderly pro-life woman in Michigan and ten arson/attempted arson attacks.
Many pro-life organizations are increasing security and Republican lawmakers are demanding action from the Biden administration to crack down on the growing pro-abortion domestic terrorism. But, while the Biden administration has been aggressively working to expand the killing of unborn babies in abortions, it has done little to stop the hostilities directed at pro-life advocates and churches.
Frustrated by the inaction, a New York pregnancy resource center recently launched its own private investigation into a June arson attack that caused more than half a million dollars in damage and injured two firefighters.
In November, FBI Director Christopher Wray admitted that most of the abortion-related attacks in the past year have targeted pro-life organizations. “Since the Dobbs decision, probably in the neighborhood of 70 percent of our abortion-related violence cases or threats cases are cases of violence or threats against … pro-life organizations,” he told a U.S. Senate committee.