Here is the latest FBI horror story, where this supposed law organisation is becoming to resemble the private police force of the Biden regime. Fully armed FBI agents raided a Catholic pro-life activist, terrifying his children with their guns. The victim, Mark Houck, had allegedly violated the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act during his regular sidewalk counselling outside of an abortion clinic in 2021. The aim of the Act is to keep the abortions flowing. “The alleged violation the charges were from an incident in which he shoved a pro-abortion activist who had been harassing his 12-year-old son in front of an abortion clinic during one of his sidewalk counselling sessions. The charges were reportedly “thrown out of the District Court in Philadelphia” earlier this year only to later be picked up by Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice. Per LifeSiteNews:
On several occasions when Mark went to sidewalk counsel last year, he took his eldest son, who was only 12 at the time, she explained. For “weeks and weeks,” a “pro-abortion protester” would speak to the boy saying “crude … inappropriate and disgusting things,” such as “you’re dad’s a fag,” and other statements that were too vulgar for her to convey.
Repeatedly, Mark would tell this pro-abortion man that he did not have permission to speak to his son and please refrain from doing so. And “he kept doing it and kind of came into [the son’s] personal space” obscenely ridiculing his father. At this point, “Mark shoved him away from his child, and the guy fell back.”
“He didn’t have any injuries or anything, but he tried to sue Mark,” and the case was thrown out of court in the early summer.”
So, this was entirely cooked up by the Deep State as an act of political terrorism against conservatives. I hope the Republicans will have the guts to give a payback for all of this. The jails need to be full.
“The FBI subjected a Catholic pro-life activist’s children to a fully-armored SWAT raid this week under the order of the DOJ.
Mark Houck, the founder and president of The King’s Men — a group dedicated to helping men become better husbands, fathers, and leaders — was arrested at his rural Pennsylvania home on Friday for allegedly violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act during his regular sidewalk counseling outside of an abortion clinic in 2021. Speaking with LifeSiteNews, Houck’s wife, Ryan-Marie, said that around 25 to 30 fully-armored FBI agents stormed their property early Friday morning, aiming their rifles as the children screamed in horror.
“They started pounding on the door and yelling for us to open it,” Ryan-Marie said of the raid.
Prior to opening the door, Mark allegedly tried to reason with the agents to calm them down for the sake of his children. “Please, I’m going to open the door, but, please, my children are in the home. I have seven babies in the house,” Houck allegedly told the agents.
The FBI agents allegedly “just kept pounding and screaming,” according to Ryan-Marie.
“They had big, huge rifles pointed at Mark and pointed at me and kind of pointed throughout the house,” Ryan-Marie said of the moment that her husband opened the door for the agents.
“Our staircase is open, so [the kids] were all at the top of the stairs which faces the front door, and I was on the stairs as well, coming down,” she said. “The kids were all just screaming. It was all just very scary and traumatic.”
Ryan-Marie then demanded that the agents present an arrest warrant before taking her husband, but they allegedly said that they would “take him whether they had a warrant or not.”
“You can’t just come to a person’s house and kidnap them at gunpoint,” she allegedly protested.
The agents agreed and went to retrieve the warrant. When Mark asked that she grab his rosary and sweatshirt, the agents had already loaded him into the vehicle upon her return. She told LifeSiteNews:
After they had taken Mark, and the kids were all screaming that he was their best friend, the [FBI agents on her porch] kind of softened a bit. I think they realized what was happening. Or maybe they actually looked at the warrant. They looked pretty ashamed at what had just happened.
Ryan-Marie said her children were “really sad and stressed” as a result of the raid and that she has already “reached out to some psychiatrists or psychologists to try and help us through this.”
“I don’t really know what’s going to come of it when you see guns pointed at your dad and your mom in your house when you first wake up in the morning,” she told the outlet.
According to Ryan-Marie, the charges were from an incident in which he shoved a pro-abortion activist who had been harassing his 12-year-old son in front of an abortion clinic during one of his sidewalk counseling sessions. The charges were reportedly “thrown out of the District Court in Philadelphia” earlier this year only to later be picked up by Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice. Per LifeSiteNews:
On several occasions when Mark went to sidewalk counsel last year, he took his eldest son, who was only 12 at the time, she explained. For “weeks and weeks,” a “pro-abortion protester” would speak to the boy saying “crude … inappropriate and disgusting things,” such as “you’re dad’s a fag,” and other statements that were too vulgar for her to convey.
Repeatedly, Mark would tell this pro-abortion man that he did not have permission to speak to his son and please refrain from doing so. And “he kept doing it and kind of came into [the son’s] personal space” obscenely ridiculing his father. At this point, “Mark shoved him away from his child, and the guy fell back.”
“He didn’t have any injuries or anything, but he tried to sue Mark,” and the case was thrown out of court in the early summer.
Local reports conveyed a different story, charging that Houck shoved the man, a 72-year-old, on two occasions, the second of which required “medical attention.” WHTM reported:
In the first incident, the man was attempting to escort two patients exiting the clinic when Houck forcefully shoved him to the ground. In the second incident, Houck allegedly confronted the man and shoved him to the ground in front of the Planned Parenthood center, causing injuries that required medical attention.
The report did not mention Ryan-Marie’s claim that the case had been thrown out of District Court prior to the Department of Justice picking up the charges.
The FACE Act makes it a federal crime to intimidate, injure, or interfere with anyone attempting to provide abortion access. U.S. Attorney Jacqueline C. Romero said:
Assault is always a serious offense, and under the FACE Act, if the victim is targeted because of their association with a reproductive healthcare clinic, it is a federal crime. Our Office and the Department of Justice are committed to prosecuting crimes which threaten the safety and rights of all individuals.
“Put simply, violence is never the answer,” said Jacqueline Maguire, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Philadelphia Division. “Violating the FACE Act by committing a physical assault is a serious crime for which the FBI will work to hold offenders accountable.”
Houck could face up to 11 years in prison and fines up to $350,000 if found guilty.”
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/09/did_the_fbi_finally_go_too_far.html
“On reading about the Saturday arrest of pro-life activist Mark Houck, I thought the author at this alternative site had to be exaggerating. It struck me as beyond belief that two dozen or so armed FBI agents would swarm the house of a Catholic father of seven, rifles drawn, and arrest him in front of his weeping children for anything short of murder.
I have had to recalibrate my belief system. The “crime” fell quite a bit short of murder. On October 13, 2021, Houck brought his 12-year-old son with him for his weekly sidewalk counseling outside of a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Philadelphia. A volunteer escort at the abortion clinic reportedly called Houck’s son a “fag” among other insults and threatened him. Houck pushed the man away from his son, and the man fell. Houck, the founder of an organization that promotes Christian virtue among men, was not charged with a crime.
However petty the incident, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, had Houck seized at gunpoint nearly a year later and bragged about the arrest. Said PR hack Jennifer Crandall in a press release, Houck “assaulted a man because he was a volunteer reproductive health care clinic escort.”
Before proceeding, this sentence needs parsing. The most problematic word is “because.” Houck has had hundreds of opportunities to assault escorts if their offense in his eyes was to be an escort. Although the press release claims two incidents on that same day with the man, Houck had no prior or subsequent altercations.
Then there is the Orwellian phrase “reproductive health care clinic escort.” Ms. Crandall is somehow fusing the “reproductive rights” euphemism favored by abortion activists with the function of the escort, whose mission, of course, is to assure that no reproduction takes place on his watch.
“Assault is always a serious offense, and under the FACE Act, if the victim is targeted because of their association with a reproductive healthcare clinic, it is a federal crime,” huffed U.S. Attorney Jacqueline Romero. Her piety was echoed by still another Jacqueline, Jacqueline Maguire, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's Philadelphia Division.
“Put simply, violence is never the answer,” said agent Maguire. “Violating the FACE Act by committing a physical assault is a serious crime for which the FBI will work to hold offenders accountable.” The DoJ has not only bastardized the language, but it has also weaponized the law to advance the interests of the Democratic Party. That this arrest took place in the politically contested state of Pennsylvania is not likely a coincidence.
GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano saw the raid for what it was. “This show of force was carried out by the Biden regime against ordinary Americans is an abuse of power that stands against the fundamental principles on which our country was founded,” said Mastriano. “As Governor, I will not allow the police state of Biden to enforce his persecution against his political enemies on sacred Pennsylvania soil.”
For the record, FACE is short for “Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances.” As has become much too obvious, only one side of the abortion debate has been awarded federal protection. Since the leak of the Dobbs decision on May 3, attacks against pro-life entities and the Catholic church, already a problem, have only escalated.
The Catholic News Agency reports 97 such attacks in the months following the leak, 53 of them against pregnancy centers. These include vulgar pro-abortion graffiti, the beheading of statues, the desecration of altars, threats, theft, and even arson. Several have involved the disruption of church services and nasty confrontations with the police.
At least two of these incidents took place in the jurisdiction of the two Jacquelines. In May 2022, for instance, the glass front doors of Notre Dame de Lourdes church in Swarthmore were spray-painted with the unsubtle message: ‘You do not have the right to decide what people can do, #ProChoice.” In June, vandals defaced St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Philadelphia with pro-abortion graffiti.
As far as anyone knows, the DoJ has ignored all these incidents despite the implicit civil rights violations involved. For its apparatchiks, “extremists” like Houck are the enemy. “If convicted,” they tell us, “the defendant faces a maximum possible sentence of 11 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and fines of up to $350,000.”
The Twitter responses to Houck’s arrest suggest a widespread indifference on the Left to the rule of law and common decency. Here is a representative tweet from a woman named Mary, one of the few without any obscenities: “You’re REALLY leaning into the ‘Catholic’ part of this story, when the truth is that a professional ‘manly man’ who spends his days harassing vulnerable women physically assaulted a real man TWICE. Mark Houck makes his living as the leader of a toxic masculinity cult; arrest him.”
Has the FBI gone too far? For the Left, if the enemy is the right, it cannot go far enough.”