Congress of the United States

Washington, DC 20515

January 22, 2026

Mr. Don R. Berthiaume Acting Inspector General
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20530

Dear Acting Inspector General Berthiaume:

Please find attached a letter sent to Attorney General Pamela J. Bondi detailing credible, and outrageous reports of preferential treatment, retaliation, and widespread sexual assault at Federal Prison Camp (FPC) Bryan in Texas. By this correspondence, we respectfully request that the Office of the Inspector General immediately initiate a criminal investigation into the reported staff misconduct at FPC Bryan, including but not limited to violations of 18 U.S. Code § 2243(c) (criminalizing sexual abuse of an individual in federal detention).

We also request that your office accompany a delegation of congressional Members and staff to FPC Bryan next month, and, prior to that visit, provide our Committees with a briefing and all documents related to your office’s oversight and investigations of FPC Bryan.

Jamie Rashi

Jamie Raskin
Ranking Member
House Committee on the Judiciary

Very truly yours,

Pai
Robert Garcia Ranking Member
House Committee on Oversight
and Government Reform

Encl.

CC:

The Honorable Jim Jordan, Chairman House Committee on the Judiciary

The Honorable James Comer, Chairman
House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

The Honorable Pamela J. Bondi, Attorney General U.S. Department of Justice

With the March for Life marking nearly three years since Roe v. Wade was overturned, Kentucky has launched an investigation into out-of-state groups advertising mail-order abortion pills, citing a post-Dobbs law that bans the drugs’ delivery into the state.

The march’s organizers now see new meaning in their annual demonstration following the landmark Dobbs decision, and states around the country are taking sides on whether abortion should be “safe, legal and rare,” as then-President Bill Clinton put it, or liberally permitted or strictly prohibited. In Kentucky, lawmakers responded by passing House Bill 3 in 2022, banning the mailing or delivery of abortion-inducing drugs.

Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman told Fox News Digital on Friday that he is citing the law in launching an investigation into organizations that could be participating in unlawful activity in that regard, as reproductive health groups have been advertising at gas stations in both the Bluegrass State and its Appalachian neighbor, West Virginia.

In recent months, a New York-based nonprofit called Mayday Health that advertises “abortion pills by-mail” announced it would buy advertising at more than 100 gas stations in the two rural states — with the phrase: “Pregnant? Don’t want to be?” and inviting customers to contact them.

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Coleman told Fox News Digital on Friday his probe is intended to discern whether the mail-order abortion ban and/or Kentucky’s consumer protection laws are being violated by these groups. 

“Out-of-state activist groups who are targeting the vulnerable here should be on notice: Keep your illegal pills out of our Commonwealth or face the full weight of the attorney general’s office,” Coleman said, issuing subpoenas to the various fuel stations as well.

“These deadly and unlawful pills cannot be allowed to continue flooding into Kentucky through the mail, and we will thoroughly pursue every lead to hold bad actors accountable,” he continued, adding the ads may also violate Frankfort’s consumer-protection laws.

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Coleman said that any resident who sees such ads should report them to his agency’s consumer-protection office.

Liv Raisner, executive director of Mayday, told Fox News Digital in response that “it turns out [Coleman] doesn’t like free speech as much as he says,” adding her group similarly advertised at South Dakota gas stations and won a temporary restraining order against that state.

“We think everyone in Kentucky, and South Dakota, and around the country, should know that abortion pills are safe and available,” Raisner said.

On the other side of the Tug Fork River, West Virginia itself previously took action to pass a near-total ban on abortion drug Mifeprestone — a policy that was later upheld by a court — along with hefty restrictions on abortions themselves.

Mississippi, where the Dobbs case originated, had passed the Gestational Age Act in 2018, banning most abortions after 15 weeks, which set up a legal battle after the Tupelo State’s only clinic sued. The result of that case before the high court opened the floodgates to other localized changes nationwide.

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Upon the decision in favor of Dobbs, Mississippi’s pre-Roe ban became enforceable once more, as did a slew of other states’ so-called “trigger laws.” Those include Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas and North Dakota. 

Other states moved in the opposite direction. Arizona lawmakers decided to repeal their state’s ban after the Dobbs decision came down, while the Wisconsin Supreme Court struck down a pre-Civil War law there that essentially provided for felony charges for anyone who “intentionally destroys the life of an unborn child.” Illinois moved to protect abortion pills and expand the roles of medical providers, while Montana voters passed a constitutional amendment enshrining abortion rights.

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Virginia voters will decide on a similar amendment this year, after lawmakers in the Democratic-majority legislature passed such a resolution.

Several other states have expressly protected abortion in their state constitutions since the Dobbs decision, further expressing the Tenth Amendment dichotomy of regulating issues not expressly delegated to the federal government by the Constitution that the high court’s ruling indicated.

How do you know what you know?

Did you learn it in school, read it in a newspaper? Did you get your information on social media or though chatter with friends?

Even in an age of misinformation and disinformation — which we really need to start clearly calling propaganda — we continue to rely on old ways of knowing. We take it for granted that if we really need to get to the truth, there’s a way to do it, even if it means cracking the pages of one of those ancient conveyors of wisdom, a book.

But we are entering an era in America when knowledge is about to be hard to come by. It would be easy to shrug off this escalation of the war on truth as just more Trump nonsense, but it is much more than that. Authoritarians take power in the short term by fear and maybe force. In the long term, they rely on ignorance — an erasure of knowledge to leave people believing that there was ever anything different than what is.

This is how our kids, future generations, come to be controlled. They simply don’t know what was, and therefore are at a great disadvantage in imagining what could be.

This week, the White House altered a photo of Nekima Levy Armstrong, the civil rights lawyer arrested in Minneapolis for protesting inside a church.

The original photo shows Armstrong in handcuffs being led away by a federal officer with his face blurred out. Armstrong is composed and steady in this image. A veteran of social justice movements and a trained attorney, she appears as one might expect, her expression troubled but calm.

In the photo released by the White House, Armstrong is sobbing, her mouth hanging open in despair. In what is clearly nothing more than overt racism, it appears her skin has been darkened. Her braided hair, neatly styled in the original picture, is disheveled in the Trump image.

A strong, composed resister is turned into a weeping, weak failure.

“YET AGAIN to the people who feel the need to reflexively defend perpetrators of heinous crimes in our country I share with you this message: Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue. Thank you for your attention to this matter,”

That was the official White House response to inquiries about the photo, posted on social media.

The same week, the Trump administration began ripping down exhibits at the President’s House in Philadelphia that told the story of the nine Black people held in bondage there by George Washington. I’ve been to that exhibit and had planned to take my kids this summer to learn about Joe Richardson, Christopher Sheels, Austin, Hercules, Giles, Moll, Oney Judge, Paris and Richmond.

They are names that barely made it into American history. Many have never heard of them. Now, this administration is attempting to erase them.

How do you know what you know? I learned most of what I knew about these folks from that signage, which is probably in a dump somewhere by now.

The information we once took for granted on government websites such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is gone. Climate change information; LGBTQ+ information; even agricultural information. Gone (though courts have ordered some restored).

The National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, which tracked federal police misconduct, has been shut down.

The Smithsonian is undergoing an ideological review.

And now, our government is telling us it will alter in real time images of dissenters to create its own narrative, demand we believe not our own eyes, our own knowledge, but the narrative they create.

“I’ll end with this, we’re being told one story which is totally different than what’s occurring,” said Cumberland County, Me., Sheriff Kevin Joyce.

He was speaking specifically about an incident in his town in which a corrections officer recruit was detained by ICE this week. In video taken by a bystander, about five agents pull the man from his car as he drives home after work. They then leave the car running in the street as they take him away.

Joyce told reporters the man had a clean background check before being hired, had no criminal record, and was working legally in the country. The sheriff has no idea where the man is being held.

Joyce’s sentiment, that what we are being told isn’t what’s happening, applies to nearly everything we are seeing with our own eyes.

A woman shot through her temple, through the side window of her car? You don’t understand what you are seeing. It was justified, our vice president has told us, without even the need for an investigation.

Goodbye Renee Good. They are attempting in real time to erase her reality and instead morph her into a domestic terrorist committing “heinous” crimes, and maybe even worse.

“You have a small band of very far left people who are doing everything they can … to try to make ICE out to be the ultimate enemy, and engage in this weird, small-scale civil war,” Vice President JD Vance said this week.

Protesting turned into civil war.

Next up, artificial intelligence is getting into the erasure game. Scientists are warning that those who wish to destroy truth will soon unleash AI-run operations in which thousands if not millions of social media posts will offer up whatever alternative reality those in control of it wish. Under the pressure of that avalanche of lies, many will believe.

The message the White House is sending with Armstrong’s photo is that they control the truth, they decide what it is.

Our job is to fight for truth, know it when we see it, and demand it not be erased.