An Ohio man has been sentenced to serve five-and-a-half years in prison for threatening to burn down a Planned Parenthood clinic and engaging in money laundering.
Mohamed Waes, 33, confessed to calling the clinic and telling staff he would burn down the building.
Waes pled guilty in February to a misdemeanor charge under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE Act), a controversial federal law that enacts strict punishments for people who block entrances to abortion clinics or are deemed as being a threat to abortion facilities.
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“Using threats of violence to obstruct access to reproductive health care (abortion) is simply unlawful,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, as quoted in a DOJ press release.
“The Justice Department will continue to protect both patients seeking reproductive health services and providers offering those services, wherever and whenever these criminal violations occur.”
U.S. Attorney Kenneth Parker for the Southern District of Ohio was also quoted in the press release as saying that federal authorities “will continue our unified vigilance against such actions and remain prepared to hold accountable those who commit them.”
“Threats of violence against healthcare providers and deception against our financial system are acts that must be punished in our courts of justice,” said Parker.
Waes also confessed to attempting to launder approximately $1.97 million. The money was acquired via a business email scheme in which scammers make fake email domains that mimic legitimate domains and send emails to companies impersonating vendors to receive invoice payments.
In addition to the five-and-a-half years in prison, Waes will also have three years of supervised release and has been ordered to pay $273,982.08 — the amount of money he successfully laundered out of the $1.97 million — in restitution.
The FACE Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1994, coming in response to a reported uptick in violence against abortion providers.
The measure makes it a federal crime to block the entrances to abortion clinics or to use intimidation to prevent people from obtaining an abortion.
“We simply cannot — we must not — continue to allow the attacks, the incidents of arson, the campaigns of intimidation upon law-abiding citizens that has given rise to this law,” stated Clinton in 1994, as quoted by The New York Times.
“No person seeking medical care, no physician providing that care should have to endure harassments or threats or obstruction or intimidation or even murder from vigilantes who take the law into their own hands because they think they know what the law ought to be.”
Pro-choice groups, such as the National Abortion Federation, argue that the federal law not only protects abortion clinics, but allows pro-life activists to peacefully demonstrate from a distance.
“FACE protects protesters’ First Amendment right to free speech,” claimed NAF in a position paper. “Clinic protesters remain free to conduct peaceful protest, including singing hymns, praying, carrying signs, walking picket lines and distributing anti-abortion materials outside of clinics.”
Others, among them pro-life groups and Republican politicians, contend that the FACE Act is often used to unjustly punish people peacefully demonstrating at abortion clinics.
Last September, Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, introduced legislation that would repeal the FACE Act, with Roy arguing that “Biden’s Department of Justice has brazenly weaponized the FACE Act against normal, everyday Americans across the political spectrum, simply because they are pro-life.”
“Our Constitution separates power between the federal government and the states for a reason, and we ignore that safeguard at our own peril. The FACE Act is an unconstitutional federal takeover of state police powers; it must be repealed,” Roy said at the time.
