Imagine believing that speaking up at a school board meeting could get you branded as a “domestic terrorist” by the federal government. Imagine it could make you a target for arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment.

For parents who dared to challenge the Biden administration’s education agenda, this was more than a hypothetical scenario. It was a living nightmare.

A bombshell report by President Trump’s task force on the “Weaponization of Government Against Parents” in the Biden era exposes how federal authorities demonized parents who protested the teaching of radical “woke” ideology in the classroom.

In addition, the newly released report describes how the Biden White House pressured the DOJ and FBI into going after parents who opposed the forced masking of children. They also took aim at parents who fought against one of the Left’s greatest insanities –“woke” school administrations allowing boys disguised as girls to use girls’ restrooms.

The implications are staggering: a government entrusted with protecting its citizens was turning its power against mothers and fathers, whose only “offense” was demanding a voice in their children’s education and the protection of their children from harm.

Such tactics belong in the playbook of fascist and communist regimes that criminalize all who dare to challenge the ruling ideology as “enemies of the state,” and who weaponize government power to silence dissent.

As the report makes clear, this form of tyranny began to take hold under the Biden administration and was halted only when President Trump took office and rescinded the policies that enabled it.

How the Scandal Began

As with a string of recent revelations about government abuses during the Biden era, the disturbing details of the administration’s efforts to crush dissent are not new, although media outlets are treating them as if they have just been uncovered.

As reported in Yated’s pages almost five years ago, these facts were already emerging when Senate hearings grilled Attorney General Merrick Garland over his 2021 memo calling for the DOJ to mobilize against protesting parents.

Yet the administration’s media allies minimized or ignored these explosive hearings, keeping the story largely untold.  As a result, the public never realized how the federal government brought its overwhelming power to bear against parents seeking a voice in their children’s education.

The scandal began with heated confrontations at school board meetings across the country, as parents rose in protest against the hijacking of their children’s school curricula and the imposition of forced masking.

Their outspokenness alarmed the left-leaning National School Boards Association (NSBA), a powerful advocacy group closely aligned with teachers’ unions, which responded aggressively to the mounting criticism of school board policy in liberal states.

As Yated readers may recall, this paper reported on the NSBA’s heavy-handed response back in 2021, amid allegations that the association secretly teamed up with the Biden White House to crack down on dissenting parents.

In late September of that year, the article recounted, the NSBA sent a letter to President Biden urging federal intervention against families and community members who had noisily participated in school board meetings.

Instead of recognizing those events as the legitimate exercise of parental rights, the NSBA framed them as potential security threats warranting federal scrutiny. The letter referenced “a growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation occurring across the nation,” without offering details about any of the alleged incidents.

“As these acts of malice against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes,” the NSBA’s overblown rhetoric continued.

The letter asked the president to enlist the Justice Department, FBI, Homeland Security and Secret Service in investigating these “domestic terrorists” – an idea which the record shows clearly resonated with White House officials.

The NSBA suggested that activist parents could be found guilty of violating federal laws such as the PATRIOT Act and the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, and urged the government to subject violators to “arrest, prosecution and incarceration.”

Within days of the NSBA’s vicious letter going public, Attorney General Merrick Garland—largely remembered for his inept handling of the U.S. border crisis—sprang into action, swiftly translating its recommendations into federal policy, the Task Force report attests.

Acting as though he were carrying out the Biden administration’s orders, Garland issued a directive instructing the FBI to organize a task force and convene meetings with federal, state, and local law enforcement.

Their high-level mission? To devise a coordinated response to “harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” against school board officials.

NSBA Buckles

The incident sparked a nationwide uproar. Several educational groups, state school boards, and even some NSBA executive board members slammed the organization for involving federal law enforcement “in matters belonging to local state jurisdiction.”

Critics noted the disorder at school board meetings mostly involved people shouting and talking out of turn, perhaps an occasional scuffle—nothing local law enforcement could not handle.

In a blow to NSBA’s arrogant leadership, 19 member states cut ties with the organization over its inflammatory letter equating parents who sought more input in their children’s education with “domestic terrorists.”  Large school districts pay more than $8,000 annually; their membership cancellations resulted in a significant financial setback to NSBA.

Some federal prosecutors found the DOJ’s initiative clearly out of bounds. In a letter to Garland, AG Eric Schmitt of Missouri blasted his directive as “outrageous” and “unconstitutional.”

“Joe Biden is weaponizing his DOJ and using the FBI to pursue parents advocating for their kids at school board meetings,” Schmitt told The Heartlander, a Missouri paper. “It’s meant to quell dissent and intimidate. It’s dangerous and they have no jurisdiction. Not in Missouri. Not in any state.”

Schmitt pointed out that the federal government lacks jurisdiction over local school issues and noted the potentially dangerous precedent this could set in restricting citizens’ freedom of speech.

The powerful backlash, combined with the loss of revenue from states that canceled or threatened to cancel their NSBA membership, forced the organization’s leadership to buckle.

Just two weeks later, a contrite-sounding NSBA wrote apologies to both the White House and member states. “On behalf of NSBA, we regret and apologize for the letter,” the leadership said, noting that “there was no justification for some of the language included in it.”

“[W]e deeply value not only the work of local school boards that make important contributions within our communities,” the board of directors said, “but also the voices of parents, who should and must continue to be heard when it comes to decisions about their children’s education, health, and safety.”

Collusion at the Highest Echelons?

But the genie was out of the bottle. Although CEO Chip Slavin, who had spearheaded the notorious letter, was shown the door, the damage had already been done.

Once the now-infamous “Garland memo” was issued, the FBI opened 25 “assessments” of parents, six of them launched by its Counterterrorism Division.

Consider the distorted priorities that lay behind these developments: FBI elite counterterrorism personnel—whose mission should be to track genuine national security threats, including terrorist networks and violent criminal organizations—were being deployed against parents who had done nothing more than vocally challenge the policies of their children’s schools.

Tellingly, of those 25 investigations, where federal authorities scraped the bottom of the barrel to find “a hook” to justify targeting school parents, not even one led to a prosecution. According to a 2023 House Judiciary Committee report, the FBI failed to bring charges against a single individual they had investigated on the basis of the Garland memo.

The DOJ operation was ultimately exposed as an intimidation campaign that public outrage had effectively collapsed.

During a dramatic 2021 Senate Hearing with AG Garland, Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Nebraska, voiced this very charge. He also alleged NSBA-White House collusion in co-opting the DOJ into using the NSBA letter as a basis for its own law enforcement memo.

Sen. Sasse to Garland: I’m pretty sure you believe that local law enforcement is more than able to handle some clowns at school board meetings, okay? But you made it a federal issue, and I don’t have any idea why. And at no point today have you offered us a shred of data.

Garland: I will be happy to get a report back to you, but this is not about American parents being targeted.

Sen. Sasse: No, it’s about the politicization of DOJ, and you decided to play along even though you know better.

Garland: Actually, we received a letter from the National School Boards Association—

Sen. Sasse: No, that is not what happened. You did not receive some anonymous letter.  White House political staff co-wrote that letter with this [NSBA] organization. You then wrote a memo, coordinating with political staffers at the White House. You exaggerated a threat so that you could be certain parents would feel intimidated, isn’t that correct?

During the hearing, senators repeatedly asked Garland whether, in view of the NSBA’s retraction of its letter, he regretted his law enforcement initiative against dissenting parents and would finally call a halt to the investigations.

“Will you rescind your letter?” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, pressed Garland during the stormy hearing. Garland sidestepped the question, saying the memo only applied to people who made violent threats.

Sen. Lee responded that he and his staff went through every news source mentioned in the NSBA letter and found no credible evidence of violent threats.

“Not every outburst or expression of concern by neighbors among neighbors, at a local school board meeting, warrants a federal investigation,” Lee said pointedly. “It certainly doesn’t warrant the involvement of 94 U.S. attorneys in a way that threatens and intimidates people for no good cause.

 ‘Thank G-d You’re Not on the Supreme Court’

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., went a step further, accusing Garland of abusing his power by “inciting” the FBI against law-abiding parents.

“Your memo, your performance is shameful,” Cotton said. “Thank G-d you’re not on the Supreme Court. [Obama had nominated Garland to the Supreme Court in March 2016.] You should resign in disgrace, judge.”

Garland continued to argue that his memorandum was not aimed at curtailing parents’ right to object at school board meetings. that as long as there are no threats of violence, “parents are completely protected.”

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., then exposed the truth—that “nonviolent parents,” far from being protected, were in fact being targeted for criminal prosecution. He cited a separate memo to this effect from the U.S. Attorney for the District of Montana, issued after Garland’s directive.

A passage from the Montana memo, which Hawley read aloud on the Senate floor, listed a range of nonviolent offenses for which parents could potentially face federal prosecution.

The “criminal” conduct included sending too many angry emails or making an excessive number of phone calls to school board officials. The memo explicitly encouraged prosecutors to enlist the FBI in their investigations of this conduct.

“You’ve testified today you’re focused only on violence. That’s not what your U.S. attorneys are saying,” Hawley pointed out. “They’re treating angry emails and phone calls as federal crimes.”

Garland insisted he hadn’t seen the memo in question before the Senate hearing “because no one sent it to me.”

“What do you mean no one has sent you the memo? You run the United States Department of Justice, do you not?”

“I’ll leave it at this, General Garland,” Hawley concluded. “Your attorneys are now cataloguing all the ways they might prosecute parents merely because they want to be involved in their children’s education. You have weaponized the FBI and the Department of Justice. This is wrong. It is unprecedented to my knowledge of the history of this country.”

Hawley called for Garland’s resignation, singling out his abuse of his position for political ends.

“Merrick Garland mobilized the FBI to intimidate parents without legal basis and, we now know, premised on misinformation he didn’t bother to verify,” Hawley posted online. “It was a dangerous abuse of authority that has badly compromised the Justice Department’s integrity.”

Dissent and Ridicule in DOJ Ranks

The DOJ report on the weaponization of government against school parents reveals a fact the Garland team carefully kept from the public: Garland’s memo provoked a sharp backlash—even ridicule—from within his own department. Career attorneys condemned it as politically motivated and a glaring example of government overreach.

As the report shows, more than a dozen DOJ and FBI personnel objected in writing–albeit quietly. Kevin Driscoll, a Biden-era deputy assistant AG, wrote to a colleague, “I don’t think it’s possible to state how strongly I object to this … (we) might as well rename the thing the Anti-MAGA Task Force.”

Civil Rights Division lawyer Paige Fitzgerald noted that “almost all of the language being used [by parents at school board meetings] is protected by the First Amendment.”

Another DOJ attorney whose emails were cited in the report concluded that “the vast, vast majority of the behavior cited cannot be reached by federal law. So, it seems we are ramping up an awful lot of federal manpower for what is currently non-federal conduct.”

The chief of the Public Integrity Section, Corey Amundson, slammed the Garland memo as “stupid.” Another called the Garland initiative “out of her lane,”    “a local issue,” and “ridiculous.”

While they did voice complaints–mostly to one another, according to the documentary record, these careerists ultimately yielded to Merrick Garland’s directive. The AG then sent the memo to the FBI, U.S. attorneys, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and police agencies nationwide.

Inside the FBI, officials greeted the AG’S directive with skepticism, the DOJ Task Force noted. On October 5, the day after it became public, FBI Deputy Assistant Director Jay Greenberg wrote: “DHS is writing what I think will be a politically charged paper on threats to school boards.”

He said the FBI should not contribute or be named as a participant, because the Homeland Security paper would quickly become “a political controversy.”

A senior counterterrorism official agreed, adding that his “initial preference” was for the FBI not to coordinate, comment, or be identified in the DHS paper.

The Parents They Interrogated

Despite reservations among senior officials, the FBI opened investigations as Garland had urged. The examples below from the Task Force’s report show how low officials set the bar for finding parents in alleged violation of the law.

In one example, the FBI interrogated a father who opposed masking at his child’s school. An informant had reported the parent as an “insurrectionist” who “rails against the government.” The informant later admitted the individual had committed no crimes.

In another example, the FBI investigated a mother who allegedly warned her school board it would be fired and replaced over the forced masking of young children. “We’re coming for you,” she had allegedly said.

She was reported for that “threat” and for belonging to a “right-wing moms’ group” called Moms for Liberty, and for (legally) owning a gun.

In another state, a Democratic official reported several Republican elected officials for “inciting violence.” Their offense? Opposing vaccine mandates.

In spite of the harassment from law enforcement, none of these parents or any others admitted to crimes and none were charged. The “Garland memo” ultimately became an embarrassment to the Justice Department.

***

‘Parents Were the Enemy’

Last Monday, the Justice and Education Departments sent a joint letter to state attorneys general pledging to protect parental rights, Fox News reported.

“Under the Biden Administration, parents were the enemy,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said. “They were labeled as terrorists, targeted, and investigated by a government weaponized against them.”

Acting AG Todd Blanche announced the DOJ is now notifying people whom the Biden team targeted. Anyone cited in the records can come and review their files. DOJ will review every file for constitutional violations by law enforcement and will issue “a formal apology” wherever it finds one.

Blanche added that the point of releasing the records is “to put the facts on the public record, so federal law enforcement is never used this way again.”

As the midterm elections approach, Americans would do well to heed the warning behind the DOJ’s disturbing revelations. They must recognize how perilously close the country came to accepting government tyranny as the new normal. And how easily their freedoms could once again be threatened under a socialist-style regime.