Jim Harden oversees two CompassCare clinics in New York, including the Buffalo clinic that was vandalized and set on fire on the night of June 7, 2022. That fire injured two firefighters and cost approximately $150,000 in damage to the building, and the attackers have never been arrested.
Now comes the FBI, which is being compared more and more to the Stasi, the KGB and the Gestapo, which released photos of the alleged attackers this week and announced a $25,000 reward for information leading to their arrest and conviction. In all, the FBI said it is seeking information on 10 attacks nationwide and offering $25,000 for each incident.
In a statement, FBI Director Christopher Wray said the announcement reflects the FBI’s commitment to “vigorously pursue” investigations into crimes committed against the pregnancy centers and churches that were attacked over the summer.
Those incidents now hover at 200 nationwide, and qualify as acts of domestic terrorism, but the number of perpetrators frog-marched to a federal courthouse in handcuffs is zero.
“It’s a day late and dollar short," says Harden, who is investigating the CompassCare attack privately.
What sparked this sudden interest by FBI, he says, is politics. Republicans are now in control of the U.S. House and now Director Wray wants to “look the hero” before he sits in front of a GOP-led committee in the coming weeks.
“The FBI is embroiled right now in a battle with the House Judiciary Committee,” Harden says, “who is the constitutional, statutory authority to hold the FBI accountable.”
Over the summer and into fall, Harden and other pro-life activists watched the FBI, and even their local police departments, shrug off incidents that would cause an uproar in the Biden administration if an abortion clinic was damaged and targeted with threatening messages.
In previous stories, AFN reported the office of Wisconsin Family Action was hit with Molotov cocktails in a May 7 attack in Madison, Wisconsin. That attack, which came four days after a U.S. Supreme Court draft opinion was leaked, was carried out by a shadowy pro-abortion group named Jane's Revenge. It is unlikely, by now, the FBI doesn't know its members.
After her office was attacked, WFA president Julaine Appling eventually filed a public records request with the Madison Police Department after three months had passed without an update from local police, the FBI, and the ATF. In that city, famous for being a Marxist mecca, a statement from the city’s police chief sympathized with the attackers and “their beliefs.”
Just days after that attack, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson fired off a letter to the Department of Justice, the FBI, and Homeland Security, after none of them had commented publicly about the attack. The attack meets the definition of a "domestic terrorism incident," he wrote, but the federal agencies were silent.
Farther down in the letter, Johnson asked if the DOJ or DHS had designated Jane's Revenge a domestic terrorist group. To date, however, no one associated with the group has been arrested.
At the same time Harden and CompassCare were waiting for law enforcement to act, New York’s abortion-supporting Democrats allocated $10 million to improve security at abortion clinics.
New York's legislature also passed a new state law to investigate pregnancy centers for posting “misleading” pregnancy women about their services.
