Newly released documents show that Merrick Garland's Justice Department dispatched the FBI to investigate parents at school board meetings even after a civil rights attorney inside the department warned the day before that no federal law covered the conduct and that most of what parents were doing was protected by the First Amendment.
The warning was explicit and it was internal. On October 3, 2021, a career attorney in the Civil Rights Division told then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Robert Moossy that the department appeared to be "ramping up an awful lot of federal manpower for what is currently a non-federal conduct." The phrase "Nothing remotely federal" appears in the contemporaneous email chain, according to the Epoch Times, which reviewed documents obtained by America First Legal through public records requests. Garland signed his directive the next day.
A separate email chain from the same period shows DOJ staff were not just receiving warnings but actively searching for what they described as a "federal hook," a legal basis that would justify federal jurisdiction over conduct their own attorneys had concluded was a local matter, according to Fox News, which also reviewed the documents.
The documents make equally clear that the White House was not a passive observer. White House Senior Presidential Advisor Mary C. Wall asked National School Boards Association official Chip Slaven on September 21, 2021 to share the group's letter to President Biden before its public release, according to emails reviewed by Fox News and the Washington Examiner. Wall told Slaven she needed the contents in advance to prepare for a meeting the following morning with White House colleagues and Justice Department officials. "I'm meeting w colleagues from other WH offices and DOJ tomorrow morning to see if there might be any options we can pursue here," she wrote, per the emails.
The NSBA sent its letter to Biden on September 29. It compared parents protesting COVID mandates, critical race theory, and transgender policies at local school board meetings to domestic terrorists, and asked the administration to deploy tools including the Patriot Act against them. Within five days, Garland issued his October 4 memo establishing an FBI-led task force to address threats against school board officials. The document trail now shows that Wall had already previewed the letter, discussed its contents with DOJ, and that Justice Department attorneys were already looking for a legal rationale before the NSBA had even sent it publicly.
On October 7, three days after the memo dropped, Wall followed up with Slaven to tell him "we have your back, and we're exploring every avenue we can," according to emails reviewed by the Washington Examiner.
The Accountability Reckoning
The NSBA eventually apologized and retracted the domestic terrorism letter, calling it a mistake. Garland refused to rescind his directive when pressed by Republicans at congressional hearings in 2021 and 2022. Senator John Cornyn and other GOP lawmakers grilled Garland repeatedly, with Garland insisting the memo was a narrow response to credible threats. It took a new administration to formally end it. Attorney General Pam Bondi rescinded Garland's October 4, 2021 directive in a footnote accompanying her announcement of a "Weaponization Working Group," established to examine how Biden's DOJ used federal law enforcement against ordinary Americans, according to Just the News.
That working group is still active. The school board memo documents represent the most detailed accounting yet of how the directive came together: a White House advisor with advance knowledge of the NSBA letter, coordination with DOJ before the letter was publicly sent, internal legal objections the day before the memo was signed, and a department-wide search for a legal theory that its own career attorneys had already rejected. House Judiciary Committee Republicans led by Chairman Jim Jordan have pursued these records for more than two years. The new document release gives investigators a fuller picture of the decision chain, from Wall's inbox to Moossy's warning to Garland's signature, and the Weaponization Working Group will now have to decide what, if anything, that chain of events warrants beyond rescission.
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