For the last year, the FBI’s co–No. 2 has been an anti-abortion hardliner oddly preoccupied with the earning potential of aborted fetuses. Back when Andrew Bailey was still the attorney general of Missouri, he tried to thwart a pro–abortion rights constitutional amendment on the 2024 ballot by arguing that “aborting unborn Missourians will have a deleterious impact on the [state’s] future tax base.” Later, in a lawsuit against the FDA over the abortion drug mifepristone, Bailey and other attorneys general claimed that telehealth access to abortion pills is “depressing expected birth rates for teenaged mothers,” potentially leading to a “diminishment of political representation” and “loss of federal funds.”
As arguments against abortion go, these were “absolutely insane,” one of Bailey’s Democratic rivals for AG declared. But pronatalist-tinged lunacy is hardly disqualifying in today’s GOP. In the summer of 2025, Bailey became co–deputy director of the FBI, a position that gave him enormous power over the agency’s operations—including, potentially, investigations against abortion advocates, providers, and patients.
But on Monday, in a sudden move that was no doubt deeply disappointing to his ultra-right allies, Bailey announced he is leaving the agency at the end of the week. He reportedly told colleagues in an email that he needed to spend more time with his family and followed up with a post on X.
MS Now reported that Bailey was upset about the demotions of two senior counterterrorism agents in the FBI’s Washington field office, who were supposedly removed from their jobs because FBI leadership was dissatisfied with their handling of a threat assessment involving harassing phone calls made to Katie Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser Stephen Miller. MS Now also said Bailey was frustrated at not being named to replace Kash Patel as FBI director, “a proposal once floated [after Patel] made numerous missteps and generated headlines that were unfavorable to the administration.”
Even in the wake of his departure, Bailey’s history of aggressive investigations into abortion providers in Missouri offers a chilling glimpse into what might happen at the federal level, as the Trump 2.0 administration faces growing pressure to ban or even criminalize medication abortion. Newly minted US Attorney General Todd Blanche has all but confirmed that a crackdown is coming, saying he would review the government’s stance on enforcing the Comstock Act, a 19th-century federal anti-vice law targeting “obscene” items sent by mail or any other means of shipping. Although it has long been dormant, Comstock was never repealed, and abortion opponents—including Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas—insist it remains the law of the land. Bailey’s suit against the FDA claimed that allowing telemedicine prescriptions of mifepristone violates Comstock, and he warned CVS and Walgreens that they’d run afoul of the statute by dispensing abortion meds.
At the FBI, Bailey was in a position to direct criminal investigations into the distribution of those medications—whether prescribed by clinicians across state lines or mailed by human rights groups to patients. In March, a group of Senate Republicans urged the FDA to work with federal law enforcement agencies to clamp down on mail-order services selling mifepristone. That’s exactly the kind of investigation the FBI would likely have overseen, said former federal public defender Peter Moyers, who represented a New York woman prosecuted by the DOJ during the first Trump administration for selling abortion pills.
Patel has expressed openness to criminal probes. During a September 15 hearing, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley claimed that abortion-pill manufacturers are “actively coaching” people on how to use the mail and “other means of communication and commerce” to evade state abortion bans. “Without naming any of the companies—I’m not saying we’re not [investigating] already—but any use of the federal mail system is a federal crime that falls to the FBI to investigate, especially in conjunction with a violation of a state law that’s already on the books,” Patel said. “So we’re committed to that.”
Bailey didn’t have much of a public profile and had never run for office when, in 2022, he was appointed to replace newly elected Sen. Eric Schmitt as Missouri’s attorney general. The job has been a launching pad for many of the state’s best-known conservative politicians, from former Gov. John Ashcroft (President George W. Bush’s first attorney general) to MAGA showboat Hawley.
While Bailey lacked the Ivy League pedigree of many members of the state’s political elite, what he did share with other prominent Missouri conservatives—including President Donald Trump’s solicitor general, John Sauer; Trump White House counsel Will Scharf; and Ed Martin, the Stop the Stealer who helped write the GOP’s pro–fetal personhood platform in 2024—was an unwavering opposition to abortion. Bailey and his wife, Jessica, have four children, three of whom they adopted. In 2017, they lost a daughter who lived for only a few hours after birth. Bailey told the Missouri Independent that they’d received a fetal diagnosis “inconsistent with life” early in the pregnancy but chose to continue it anyway. “I have faith that God designs every human being in the womb,” he said then.
He also defended Missouri’s 2022 abortion ban that allowed the procedure only in the case of medical emergencies. “I want all kids to have an opportunity at life,” he said, arguing that the ban was “the proper policy position to protect life.”
“I have faith that God designs every human being in the womb.”
Nonetheless, based on his work in the governor’s office, reproductive justice advocates had expected him to be “reasonable,” says Katy Erker-Lynch, executive director of the LGBTQ+ advocacy organization PROMO. That assessment ended up being “absolutely wrong.” Within months of taking office, Bailey was among the first red-state AGs to target providers of gender-affirming care, demanding that they turn over unredacted medical records of transgender minors—a move Trump’s Justice Department would emulate in 2025. He followed up by issuing an emergency rule that would have drastically limited access to such care for patients of all ages, withdrawing it only after the legislature passed its own ban on care for minors.
His focus on abortion bordered on obsessive. In 2024, he joined a lawsuit by religious doctors against the FDA over its regulation of mifepristone—a move that ended up keeping the litigation alive after the Supreme Court ruled the doctors didn’t have standing to sue. That same year, Bailey accused a Kansas City–area Planned Parenthood clinic of illegally “transporting” minors to help them obtain abortions, citing a staged sting video produced by the far-right activist group Project Veritas.
Meanwhile, he fought ferociously to keep Amendment 3, a voter initiative aimed at enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution, off the 2024 ballot, delaying the gathering of signatures and otherwise gumming up the process until even the GOP-dominated state Supreme Court ran out of patience. When he lost that campaign and voters went on to repeal Missouri’s abortion ban by a 52 to 48 percent margin, he litigated aggressively to keep restrictions in place, while accusing the state’s Planned Parenthood affiliates of providing medication abortions when they were not. Those efforts to subvert the amendment ultimately failed, despite a new state law that gave him special powers to intervene when courts blocked laws, and abortions have resumed. Now Missouri conservatives are trying to overturn the 2024 vote with their own ballot measure, also called Amendment 3, this November.
In one of his final anti-abortion initiatives as AG, Bailey sued the national office of Planned Parenthood for false advertising, arguing that it made misleading claims when it said that medication abortion is safer than Tylenol. Florida’s AG followed with a similar suit a few months later. Both cases remain active.
Records and internal correspondence obtained by the watchdog group American Oversight show that some of Bailey’s strategies may have come directly from anti-abortion organizations. For example, his claims that repealing Missouri’s abortion ban could lead to billions in lost tax revenue and federal funding echoed comments submitted to the state auditor’s office by Missouri Right to Life and the Heritage Foundation. Missouri Right to Life’s director also sent the Project Veritas sting video to Bailey’s office. Two years before Bailey filed the false advertising suit, his office received a memo from Students for Life of America outlining how state consumer protection laws could be used to attack access to medication abortion. Students for Life is now pushing the DOJ to revive the Comstock Act.
In response to questions about whether Bailey was present when Students for Life met with DOJ officials in May, the FBI said Bailey oversaw “a wide range of operational matters and interacts with a spectrum of stakeholders,” adding that he has “dedicated his career to upholding the constitution and enforcing the law.”
Bailey’s efforts on abortion didn’t distract from his fealty to the broader MAGA cause. He secured a “historic” $24 billion default judgment against the People’s Republic of China, among others, for misleading the public about supposedly starting the Covid pandemic, a legally pointless case he inherited from his predecessor, Schmitt. (China is now countersuing for $50 billion.) He tried to investigate the liberal nonprofit Media Matters for reporting on extremist content on Elon Musk’s X but was halted by a court. In a move that seemed calculated to prove his bona fides as a potential Trump attack dog, he sued the state of New York in the summer of 2024, arguing—unsuccessfully—that its prosecution of the once and future president for hush money payments to Stormy Daniels improperly interfered with Trump’s campaign.
After Trump’s victory, Bailey was reported to be on the short list to head the DOJ but, according to The New York Times, was deemed to be “too laid back” and “lackluster” for the president’s tastes. He lost out first to former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz—who was forced to withdraw after sex trafficking and drug allegations proved unacceptable even to his former congressional colleagues—and then to ex–Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. (Gaetz has denied the allegations against him.) Back in Missouri, Bailey doubled down on the kinds of cases sure to keep him on Trump’s radar, suing IBM over its diversity policies and Starbucks for allegedly discriminating against straight white men. IBM settled; Starbucks won a dismissal.
Eight months into Trump’s second term, Bailey finally got the nod to join the FBI as co–deputy director. It’s not clear why he was plucked for that role; what does seem clear is that far-right podcaster and ex–Secret Service agent Dan Bongino—who’d been doing the job solo for a few months—needed some adult supervision. (In response to questions for this story, the agency said Bailey’s “experience conducting complex investigations at the state level informs his management” in his FBI role.) After Bongino quit last winter, complaining about his long hours, career agent Christopher Raia became Bailey’s co-deputy.
In contrast with Patel, Bailey rarely made headlines in his FBI role. One notable exception was the agency’s raid in January on the Fulton County, Georgia, election office at the center of conspiracies around the 2020 election. Bailey, who has peddled election denialism, personally oversaw the raid, alongside then–Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Two Democratic senators called their presence during the search “unprecedented.”
The timing of Bailey’s resignation seems especially odd given his role in overseeing election-related matters at the FBI during the critical midterm elections. The Wall Street Journal noted that Bailey is stepping down amid massive staff turnover and other turmoil at the nation’s most important law enforcement agency.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, we have delivered historic results in our mission to Make America Safe Again,” Bailey wrote on X. “I am confident Director Patel will continue to reform the FBI, combat violent crime, defend the homeland, ensure strong organizational accountability, and restore public trust in this institution of excellence.” In his own post, Patel said Bailey’s “fantastic contribution instituting critical reforms” to the bureau “will live on.”
There’s nothing to suggest that Bailey’s departure will deter abortion foes from continuing to press the Trump administration from clamping down on abortion pills. Federal agencies have a host of laws to weaponize should they decide to come after providers, including Comstock or even the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, according to Rachel Rebouché, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
Senate Republicans have called on federal agencies to work together to stop pills from coming into the country and being mailed between states, an effort the FBI typically would coordinate via a task force. Meanwhile, other diehard abortion opponents have been moving into influential positions in the administration, including pro–fetal personhood lawyer Josh Craddock at the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel and Dr. Heidi Overton, Trump’s new pick to lead the FDA. No one expects any big moves from the administration on the abortion front before the midterms. Then all bets are off.
A version of this story appeared on Autonomy News, a worker-owned publication covering reproductive rights and justice. Follow Autonomy News on Instagram, Bluesky, TikTok, Threads, and LinkedIn.
