Merrick Garland won’t leave conservative parents alone

Between the threat of a Trump Derangement Syndrome-addled New York DA’s unprecedented indictment of former President Trump on the most contrived of grounds, and revelations about President Joe Biden’s family’s dubious dealings with a Chinese energy company, you might’ve missed a new report from the House Judiciary’s Committee’s Weaponization Subcommittee on the Biden administration’s war on parents.

Recall that back in the fall of 2021, the National School Board Association delivered a letter to President Biden claiming — with little more than sketchy anecdotal evidence – that school board members and teachers nationwide were coming under assault from parents over masking policies, and the inclusion of Critical Race Theory in curricula. 

“Those acts of malice, violence, and threats,” the NSBA said, could be equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” 

Enter the DOJ, FBI, DHS, and other agencies to “examine appropriate enforceable actions against these crimes and acts of violence under…[among other laws] the Patriot Act in regards to domestic terrorism.” Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memorandum, clearly responding to the letter, mobilizing the national security and law enforcement apparatus against parents. 

Garland directed the FBI, the NSBA, amid a backlash, would apologize for the letter – albeit half-heartedly.  Documents would show that the NSBA coordinated with the White House on the letter – that this was clearly an orchestrated political hit job on parents. Yet Garland was unbowed.

He never rescinded the memo, and the FBI and DOJ pursued the policy. We’d learn that the FBI’s Counterterrorism and Criminal Divisions created an internal threat tag to track alleged threats against teachers and school board members – and that FBI field offices opened dozens of investigations across the country into parents expressing dissatisfaction with school board officials, and opposing mask mandates. Garland had previously testified the DOJ and FBI were not using counterterrorism tools to investigate alleged threats, potentially perjuring himself.

The Weaponization Subcommittee’s subpoenas of the DOJ, FBI, and Education Department have yielded documents bringing new disturbing revelations to light.

According to the Subcommittee’s latest report, “there was no compelling nationwide law-enforcement justification for the DOJ’s [memo, and] it is apparent that the Biden administration misused federal law enforcement and counterterrorism resources for political purposes.”

The FBI acknowledged that after dedicating resources including a snitch line for reporting of alleged threats, it “has not observed an uptick of threats directed at school officials.” Apparently it did no due diligence about the purported threat prior to hastily issuing the memo. The Subcommittee reports that the FBI opened 25 “Guardian assessments” – these are tips logged in the FBI’s Guardian database – and that the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division ran six of the associated investigations. A single case warranted a full investigation. Most were referred to state and local authorities.

“These admissions supplement whistleblower disclosures,” the report notes, that “the FBI investigated a mom because she belonged to a ‘right-wing mom’s group’ and ‘is a gun owner’ and a dad because ‘he rails against the government.’”

And zero, zilch, nada of these investigations resulted in federal arrests or charges – this despite a narrative that parents were domestic terrorists emphasized by our nation’s preeminent law enforcement apparatus in the throes of a 2021 election season in which public schools were on the ballot.

This was particularly true in Virginia, where there was a heated gubernatorial race, but also in New Jersey and other states, where parents were outraged at what they learned about their schools, and what their kids were learning in and out of those schools, during the pandemic. Literally the day before the NSBA issued its letter, 

Virginia Democrat gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, asserted, that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” He would lose his race. This was precisely the perspective that led parents to rebel against public school authorities – parents the Biden administration evidently felt they had to attack. Why? If parents, not left-wing unions and politicians, control public schools, progressives lose those schools as indoctrination factories, and with it control over the next generation of voters and activists, and ultimately the country.

The DOJ engaged in an information operation, framing concerned parents as domestic terrorists in the run-up to an election – colluding with progressive education groups who’d urged them to target parents, as the Weaponization Subcommittee report details. Worse, the DOJ and FBI went ahead and pursued parents accordingly – diverting valuable time and resources from real threats to the homeland, as opposed to threats to their power.

Siccing the secret police on parents for having the gall to be concerned about the education, health, and safety of their kids in schools is as chilling and despicable an act as one could possibly imagine – infinitely more egregious than the already egregious political act of smearing and slandering them as domestic terrorists for political ends. The Weaponization subcommittee report calls on Garland to rescind the baseless memorandum. 

I’d go further: He and every other senior official involved in this policy should be impeached. As a bare minimum, as a starting point. Those targeted can never be made whole. But we can start by bringing their attackers to justice.