Biden Admin Weaponized Law Enforcement Against Parents at School Board Meetings

Newly revealed internal communications from the U.S. Department of Justice show in full technicolor how the Biden administration weaponized law enforcement agencies against political opponents, even when those opponents were only concerned parents showing up to a school board meeting. The documents, obtained and published by America First Legal (AFL), show that in October 2021, the Biden Justice Department urgently and vainly searched for a “federal hook” with which to justify its plan to investigate parents at school board meetings.

The new information fills in one of the final puzzle pieces of the Biden administration’s comprehensive federal effort to punish parents for speaking up at local school board meetings. For the benefit of those who have blocked the Era of Mask Debates from their memory, the fall of 2021 was punctuated by parents pressuring school boards about nonsensical COVID policies that inhibited student learning (following a year of full lockdown), as well as pro-transgender classroom indoctrination.

On September 29, 2021, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) published a letter (since revoked) urging the Biden administration to intervene and investigate concerned parents for “domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” A House committee investigation later revealed that the Biden White House “collaborated” on the letter, in an attempt to manufacture an excuse to intervene.

HELP LIFENEWS SAVE BABIES FROM ABORTION! Please help LifeNews.com with a donation!

Five days later, Attorney General Merrick Garland published a memo on October 4, 2021, acknowledging “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff” and promising to do something about it. As a result of this memo, the FBI conducted at least 25 counterterrorism threat assessments related to school board controversies, the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government later discovered.

The latest documents published by AFL fill in the time gap between the NSBA letter and Garland’s memo, revealing just how the Justice Department had occupied itself in the interim.

‘Finding a Federal Hook’

On Friday, October 1, Kevin Chambers of the deputy attorney general’s office responded to a colleague regarding news of the NSBA letter. “We’re aware,” he said. “The challenge here is finding a federal hook. But WH [the White House] has been in touch about whether we can assist in some form or fashion.”

Two things are noteworthy about this email. First, it reveals that the White House — that is, non-career, political staff working directly under the president — were pressing the DOJ to open an investigation. Such pressure constitutes inappropriate political interference in the justice process. But it does add to the evidence amassed by House investigators that the White House orchestrated the whole scheme from beginning to end. If the White House had cooperated with the NSBA to produce the letter, why not with its own Justice Department to investigate the contents?

Second, the email admits that the DOJ’s authority to intervene was not immediately apparent, in that their challenge was “finding a federal hook.” This constitutes another procedural violation because law enforcement agencies are supposed to investigate real crimes, in their jurisdiction, to find the perpetrator. The Biden administration turned this principle on its head by selecting the people it wanted to investigate, then brainstorming how to possibly charge them with a crime.

Urgent Priority

Another shocking revelation was the urgency with which the Biden DOJ addressed the matter. Instead of adding “the school board case” to the pile and investigating the claims in the course of normal business, DOJ staffers literally worked overtime to craft a response over the weekend. Recall that, at this point, the Biden DOJ had neither a rationale to justify federal intervention nor any crimes to investigate, yet it still handled the package with rush-priority.

At 8:17 a.m. on Saturday, October 2, Sparkle Sooknanan of the associate attorney general’s office emailed four DOJ attorneys with “a quick-turn request” to help identify “any authorities [the Civil Rights Division] enforces that could help address the issue.” Sooknanan began by acknowledging the unusual nature of the request by providing “apologies for the weekend interruption.” (In 2024, President Biden nominated and the Senate confirmed Sooknanan, a native of Trinidad and Tobago, to the D.C. District Court.)

The discussion expanded over Saturday to include at least two other attorneys, but their investigation turned up nothing immediately usable to share. When attorney Shaheena Simons replied that she had found “nothing specific or public” to share, attorney Pamela Karlan told Sooknanan at 5:19 p.m., “This is the end of the line.”

On Sunday, yet another DOJ attorney, Paige Fitzgerald, expressed concern that “we are ramping up an awful lot of federal manpower for what is currently a non-federal conduct,” noting that “almost all of the language being used [by parents at school board meetings, as the NSBA letter catalogued] is protected by the First Amendment.”

Fitzgerald suggested the DOJ would be on more solid legal footing if there were a federal law prohibiting the conduct they opposed. “If they want to have an impact,” she wrote, “maybe they could try to fashion something like the FACE Act for schools and school board meetings. …Just a quick thought, and not sure how that would play out.”

Garland Memo

But the political leaders of the Biden DOJ were undeterred by the futile weekend fishing expedition. Even while DOJ attorneys were coming up empty on a rationale for federal intervention, someone forged ahead anyway and drafted a memo from Attorney General Garland. The emails show a draft of this memo was shared with DOJ staff at 7:26 p.m. on Sunday, October 3. After light edits, the DOJ published the memo the next day.

In light of the frantic weekend search for a “federal hook,” Garland’s memo appears even more lawless. The final product shows no concern for jurisdictional boundaries, nor does it show any anxiety over the lack of any justification for federal intervention. The memo simply identifies “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff” and declares “those who dedicate their time and energy to ensuring that our children receive a proper education in a safe environment deserve to be able to do their work without fear for their safety.”

The memo slightly hedged its bets by committing the federal government to no specifics besides “coordination and partnership with local law enforcement.” But it does commit the DOJ “to using its authority and resources to discourage these threats, identify them when they occur, and prosecute them when appropriate.”

Two weeks after Garland’s memo, the FBI Counterterrorism and Criminal Divisions created a new threat tag, “EDUOFFICIALS,” the House Weaponization Subcommittee later discovered. The FBI opened 25 assessments under that threat tag, although “the FBI determined that only one warranted opening a ‘Full Investigation,’” and it did not pursue that case to prosecution.

These new revelations further prove that the whole charade, from beginning to end, was a transparently political exercise to weaponize law enforcement against parents. The DOJ knew at the time that it had little ground and even less authority to investigate and prosecute parents for exercising their First Amendment rights. Yet it chose to do so anyway, in hopes of intimidating parents into silence.

Hypocritical Pretense

Even worse, internal communications prove the DOJ was weaponizing law enforcement while pretending to do the exact opposite. On Tuesday, October 5, Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Legal Affairs Joseph Gaeta shared talking points for DOJ employees, who were already fielding pushback.

“The Attorney General’s review … will determine how federal enforcement tools can be used to prosecute these crimes,” Gaeta wrote, omitting the fact that the DOJ had already conducted a rush review and found no reason for federal involvement.

Alternatively, he added, the DOJ would determine “ways to assist state, Tribal, territorial, and local law enforcement where threats of violence may not constitute federal crimes.” Of course, this category, mentioned as an afterthought, really contained the whole enchilada. DOJ attorneys had already concluded that there were no threats of violence and no federal crimes in the list of incidents compiled in the NSBA letter.

In the next bullet point, Gaeta added, “The Department encourages robust, civil discourse as part of our democratic process. Threats don’t encourage debate, they stifle it.” This was simply false, of course. Robust, civil discourse was in fact occurring at school board meetings across the country, and progressive activists were unhappy with the criticism they were taking. The Biden administration, led by Attorney General Garland, was working overtime to clamp down on this robust discourse by falsely describing it as threats of violence — and issuing their own not-so-subtle threat of prosecution.

“It makes me even more grateful that Mitch McConnell had the insight and the ability to stop Merrick Garland from ever getting on the U.S. Supreme Court,” exclaimed Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) on “Washington Watch.”

It should go without saying that the problem with weaponizing law enforcement agencies is that it undermines the authority of the law itself. By its very nature, laws must apply equally to all people, so that each person receives what he is due. If the law is applied unequally to different people, that is unjust. Therefore, whether the subject is Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Eric Adams, a Colorado baker, or parents at a school board meeting, the law should hold out the same protections and punishments to all.

While any unequal treatment is unjust, Walberg deplored the extraordinary distortion of persecuting parents for wanting to take an active role in their child’s education. To “make our education system work,” we must “get it right for the student, the parent, and the teacher,” he said. “The parent has to be the central focus. The parents are the ones that brought these children into the world. The parents are the ones that give the opportunity for schools to be in place and have a purpose.”

“To think that they would ever be considered as domestic terrorists, just because they stand up to speak for the best impact on their kids’ lives,” he exclaimed, “is ridiculous, it’s horrific, and it’s anti-American.”

LifeNews Note: Joshua Arnold is a staff writer at The Washington Stand, contributing both news and commentary from a biblical worldview. Originally published by The Washington Stand.

The post Biden Admin Weaponized Law Enforcement Against Parents at School Board Meetings appeared first on LifeNews.com.