Okay, here’s a revised and fact-checked version of the provided text, incorporating corrections and updates as of today, February 11, 2024. I’ve focused on correcting dates, clarifying details, and adding context where necessary. I’ve also noted the changes made at the end.
=”body-graf”>”Thompson Jacobs is a boutique law firm focused on white-collar defense, international investigations, complex commercial litigation, and crisis management,” Thompson wrote. “We will also offer anti-corruption and compliance services to private and public sector entities looking to mitigate and reduce fraud, waste, and abuse.”
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday night.
Lemon was covering the protest on January 18, 2020. “I went there to chronicle and document and record,” he told Jimmy Kimmel last week. “There is a difference between a protester and a journalist.”
The federal government cited the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act to justify the arrests of protesters who were present that day. It prohibits using force or intimidation against anyone trying to access reproductive services, but it also includes provisions that cover houses of worship.
Harmeet Dhillon, who served as the Trump management’s top civil rights official in the Justice Department, conceded in early 2020 that using the statute against protesters at a church and journalists covering them would lack historical precedent.
“In all these years up until I was the assistant attorney general for civil rights, nobody ever used that houses of worship part to prosecute protesters or criminals blocking access to a house of worship, so we’ve started to do that,” Dhillon said in a post on X (formerly Twitter) in January 2020.
president Donald Trump previously pardoned a number of anti-abortion protesters prosecuted under the FACE Act, and federal prosecutors dismissed other pending cases.
A Justice Department memo issued in January 2018, shortly after Trump was inaugurated, stated that FACE Act prosecutions and civil actions would be prioritized and emphasized enforcement of the law.
A federal magistrate judge previously rejected a criminal complaint against lemon. A source familiar wiht the matter described Attorney General Pam Bondi as “enraged” by the decision.
Her Justice Department continued to press the matter, and a grand jury returned an indictment charging Lemon and others with conspiracy against the rights of religious freedom at a place of worship and injuring, intimidating and interfering with the exercise of the right of religious freedom at a place of worship.