Attorney General Merrick Garland and others ignored stark warnings from the DOJ’s own attorneys against sending the FBI to investigate concerned parents who opposed leftist school policies as potential domestic terrorists.
In a scathing new report, the Department of Justice’s Weaponization Working Group concluded that the Biden administration worked together with the National School Boards Association (NSBA) in 2021 to target parents who opposed local school board policies and ignored warnings from their own attorneys that their actions were political and likely a blatant violation of the Constitution.
The 273-page report, released on Monday, comes five years after the DOJ labeled parents expressing their free speech as potential domestic terrorists. At that time, parents were increasingly frustrated over policies governing COVID, teaching Critical Race Theory (CRT) and other Marxist ideas, and boys in girls’ sports and private spaces. They were voicing these concerns, often loudly and in large numbers, at school board meetings, as well as in writing.
In response, the NSBA sent a letter to President Biden claiming that schools and education leaders were “under an immediate threat” from parents who were participating in the equivalent of “domestic terrorism and hate crimes” and committing “acts of malice, violence, and threats” against school board members, school staff, and students and asking for “immediate assistance” to protect schools, school board members, and educators. It suggested that charges could be brought under a slew of federal terrorism and hate crime laws, including the Patriot Act and the Conspiracy Against Rights statute.
Examples of criminal behavior that they said warranted a federal response included an individual throwing a Nazi salute in protest of the school’s masking requirement; another referring to a school board member as a “filthy traitor” and a “Marxist” who should lose their pension; and another who “prompted the board to call a recess over opposition to CRT.” The letter also stated that school boards and educators were being “confronted by angry mobs” and threatened in person and through hate mail, all because of “misinformation.”
One incident mentioned in the letter was an arrest at a Virginia school board meeting of Scott Smith, whose story is now famous. The Loudoun County School Board was holding a meeting discussing a proposed policy to allow students to use the locker room or bathroom of their chosen gender identity.
Former Superintendent Scott Ziegler dismissed parental concerns about safety in bathrooms, saying, “To my knowledge, we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms…. I think it’s important to keep our perspective on this, we’ve heard it several times tonight from our public speakers, but the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist.”
Smith stood up to say that, in fact, his teenaged daughter had been sexually assaulted in the school bathroom by a male who claimed to be gender-fluid, a crime that Ziegler himself had reported to the board the day it happened.
But the Loudoun County School Board had Smith arrested and dragged out of the meeting and voted to adopt the policy. Ziegler was later fired and indicted for covering up the sexual assault.
The NSBA letter specifically asked the Biden administration to task the DOJ; the FBI and its National Security Branch and Counterterrorism Division; the Department of Homeland Security; the U.S. Secret Service and its National Threat Assessment Center; the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and other federal law enforcement agencies to work together with state and local law enforcement to “intervene” against “individual and hate groups who are targeting our school boards and educators.”
Five days after the NSBA letter was sent to President Biden, then-Attorney General Merrick Garland did just that. He signed off on a memorandum setting up processes for the DOJ and various federal law enforcement agencies to investigate and prosecute parents, as well as “open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response.”
The weaponization report found that the FBI opened 25 threat assessments — including 6 that were run by the Counterterrorism Division and 2 by the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate — into parents and others who were reported through the dedicated “snitch line.” These led to actual investigations, including face-to-face interviews with the FBI.
According to whistleblowers, among those investigated were a mother who owned a gun and “belonged to a right-wing mom’s group,” known as Moms for Liberty and a Republican state legislator, who was reported by a Democrat legislator through the tip line for inciting “violence” after expressing displeasure with vaccine mandates.
The announcement of the Garland memorandum in October 2021 caused an immediate firestorm among parents and conservative politicians. It has since been rescinded, but key questions remained. How the NSBA came to send such a brazen letter, which has since been retracted with an apology, has since been a point of intrigue and investigations.
NSBA officials, for example, launched their own investigation, concluding that Chip Slaven, NSBA’s then-interim executive director and CEO, had unilaterally drafted the letter with little oversight from NSBA officials and sent it to President Biden without their approval. Slaven later claimed that he was “betrayed” by NSBA officials and that he followed procedures in drafting and sending the letter, which also was signed by President Viola Garcia.
There were also claims, drawn in part from the NSBA’s report, that then-Secretary of the Education Miguel Cardona had asked for the letter as a pretext for investigations into concerned parents.
The Weaponization Working Group found that the truth was somewhere in the middle. Slaven coordinated directly with the White House on the letter before it was ever made public, and the DOJ pushed forward with efforts to target parents despite numerous concerns from career officials and attorneys within both the DOJ and FBI, who warned — before and after the Garland memorandum came out — that the move was political and targeting free speech.
Several attorneys noted that the parental activity cited by the letter, which was used as support for the DOJ’s actions, were protected First Amendment activity, and even the most serious incidents were better handled through local trespassing and disorderly conduct laws.
One attorney said that the Garland memorandum would be understood “as a partisan exercise aimed at those who do not support the Administration” and voiced his opposition “in the strongest terms.” He went on to say that the effort to tie alleged threats to school boards with work on election threats would “tarnish [their] reputation as an apolitical law enforcer.”
Internal communications, however, show that in spite of so many objections, the DOJ decided to act on the pressure it was receiving from the White House to target parents who opposed pro-transgender policies or curriculum the administration favored.
The DOJ also did not notify the FBI before publishing the Garland memorandum. Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI Jay Greenberg was asked in an email if he was told about the memorandum, to which he replied, “Not in time to stop it.”
None of the investigations led to a single charge or prosecution, but in interviews with the members of the Weaponization Working Group, parents said that the entire experience had chilled their speech.
One father noted that as a result of the Garland memorandum and the FBI’s actions, activists openly harassed his family, including a year-long online defamation campaign and hate mail sent to his house. A mother said that the most “troubling” aspect was that the government labeled concerned parents as “domestic terrorists.”
In response to the report, the DOJ announced steps to remedy the constitutional violations.
Parents and other participants at school board meetings who were investigated will be allowed to review the assessment. If a person’s constitutional rights were ignored, the DOJ will issue an apology and will be putting controls in place to ensure such violations do not occur in the future.
As part of such efforts, the DOJ will put controls in place to ensure such violations never occur again. This includes providing $1.5 million to train school resource officers on parental rights in education and additional funding to train teachers and staff on the rights of parents to guide the education of their children.
The DOJ also sent a letter to each state’s attorney general reminding them that schools cannot administer any survey or screening regarding students’ or their parents’ mental health, political affiliation or beliefs, religious beliefs, sexual behavior, and more — unless they have parental consent.
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet K. Dhillon stated,
“Parents are children’s natural providers and protectors. The Biden-Harris DOJ labeled concerned parents as threats for exercising their right to know what was happening at their kids’ schools. This Civil Rights Division stands with parents, and we will continue to partner with the Department of Education to enforce parents’ rights under federal law.”
In a world with an ever-changing smorgasbord of content, where each new headline clamors for our attention, it is important to stop and reflect on stories like this. No one should ever forget that five years ago, school boards, the Biden administration, and the U.S. Department of Justice went after parents simply for caring about their kids.
What makes this even worse is that the Biden White House and the DOJ knew they were targeting constitutionally protected speech, and even if they didn’t, they had more than enough warning from people inside the DOJ and the FBI.
They also knew what they were doing was politically motivated, that the real goal was to shut down criticism and truth about the woke goals of both the school boards and the federal government. One attorney said the DOJ “might as well rename” itself as the “Anti-MAGA Task Force” because everyone knew the motivations were nakedly partisan.
But this story isn’t just a reflection on a historic event; it’s a warning.
Despite the fact that the state of parental rights in education has improved drastically under the Trump administration, schools and states around the nation keep proving that they don’t care about the law or about students’ safety.
Loudoun County still lets students use their preferred bathroom and locker room despite sexual assaults and legal complaints from students who had their privacy violated. Schools are still fighting parents and the Trump administration and must be forced to protect students’ rights.
And all of this should tell Americans one thing: Elections have consequences.
When voters elect people — for federal offices or local school boards — who believe children belong to them and that student well-being and parental rights are secondary to their political and ideological whims, you will get leaders who abuse their authority and try to eliminate parental dissent through smears and weaponized law.
Proverbs 29:2 states,
“When the righteous increase, the people rejoice,
But when a wicked man rules, people groan.”
As the midterm elections are quickly approaching, parents would be wise to vote for candidates who will respect their rights to guide their child’s values and well-being, not try to silence them.
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