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On September 29, 2021, the partisan “National School Boards Association” made public a “letter” demanding federal action under the PATRIOT ACT to stop parents from objecting to mask mandates and CRT. The group demanded Federal action because parents were engaged in First Amendment activities, including “posting watchlists against school boards and spreading misinformation that boards are adopting critical race theory curriculum and working to maintain online learning by haphazardly attributing it to COVID-19.”
On October 4, 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued his infamous memo to the FBI and all United States Attorneys, promising the Department would “protect all people in the United States from violence, threats of violence, and other forms of intimidation and harassment.” The press release announcing the memo also encouraged people to report to the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center.
Almost immediately, on October 7, 2021, AFL requested the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General investigate “whether the Attorney General’s memo was formulated and issued based on improper considerations.” AFL highlighted serious irregularities, including evidence demonstrating that the memo stated justification was a fabricated pretext by the Biden White House to chill parents’ speech and political action. Among other things, AFL pointed out that “the normal clearance process and standard order both within the department (including legal sufficiency review by the Office of Legal Counsel, the Civil Rights Division, the Criminal Division, the Office of Legal Policy, and other components), and between the department and the White House Counsel’s Office and the Office of Management and Budget, [had been] bypassed or corrupted.”
On May 21, 2023, the House Weaponization Committee released a report revealing that the FBI had opened 25 assessments with the threat tag “EDUOFFICIALS” and assigned seventeen of those investigations to the Criminal Investigative Division, six to the Counterterrorism Division and two to the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. Of those 25 investigations, the FBI determined that only one warranted a full investigation.
The Committee also revealed that the Attorney General’s memo was an attempt to silence parents critical of Democratic education policies (policies like school closures, Critical Race Theory, transgender bathroom, and locker room policies) ahead of the 2021 Virginia Gubernatorial election between Glenn Youngkin and Terry McAuliffe.
On December 21, 2023, AFL released additional records confirming that the Garland memo was the means by which leftist political officials weaponized the government against parents.
There was no place in Virginia where parents were more critical of far-left school policies than Loudoun County. AFL demands complete transparency in the FBI’s involvement and collusion in the unconstitutional attack on American parents defending their children from leftist ideology.
Statement from Will Scolinos, America First Legal Counsel:
“The FBI exists to protect everyday Americans from critical threats—not to target them for speaking out against injustice. AFL and Congressional investigators have established that the Biden-Harris Administration in Washington, DC, had weaponized the federal government to target parents without reason and contrary to law. This investigation follows up on our prior work by focusing on whether the FBI was directly or, through former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s wife Jill McCabe, indirectly involved in the whole-of-government assault on parental rights in Loudoun County,” said Will Scolinos.
Read the FOIA request here.
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