Lila Rose, the head of the anti-abortion activist group LiveAction, decried Eric Holder’s statement on Tuesday that the FBI will not prosecute in connection with a LiveAction video “sting,” which was aimed at catching Planned Parenthood employees looking the other way on sex traffickers.
“An untold number of women, and possibly underage girls, are being exploited and likely in danger and the Justice Department is looking the other way,” Rose said in a statement.
LiveAction has released a series videos over the past few months showing actors dressed as pimps and prostitutes asking Planned Parenthood employees about getting abortions for underage girls. LiveAction secretly filmed the interactions.
The FBI launched an investigation into the potential sex trafficking ring after Planned Parenthood alerted them to the pattern (before the videos were released, and before it was revealed that LiveAction was behind the incidents), though they acknowledged at the time that it may have been a “hoax.”
“It is my understanding that the FBI actually has looked at that matter” and “prosecution was declined in that matter,” Holder said.
“We are extremely alarmed by today’s statement by the Justice Department regarding
Planned Parenthood,” Rose said. “We alerted the Justice Department, in writing, several weeks ago that Live Action conducted no activities in Indiana as reported by Planned Parenthood to the FBI. Therefore, unless there was another sting operation that we are unaware of, there likely was an actual sex trafficker in a Planned Parenthood clinic in Indiana, asking for their assistance.”
“The Justice Department has completely dropped the ball,” she said.
