Biden Administration Pressed Garland to ‘Intimidate Parents’: Conservative Legal Group

The administration asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to direct the FBI to look into parents who spoke out at school board meetings, the group says.

Attorney General Merrick Garland looks on as President Joe Biden speaks about crime prevention at the White House in Washington, on June 23, 2021. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

The Biden administration pushed Attorney General Merrick Garland to issue a controversial memo to “intimidate parents” against speaking out against leftist policies in schools, a legal advocacy group says.

In October 2021, Mr. Garland issued a memo asking the FBI to investigate parents who spoke out at public school board meetings.

America First Legal (AFL) has obtained records from the Department of Justice (DOJ) confirming that the memo was part of “the Biden Administration’s ‘all of government’ assault on parents speaking up against critical race theory, mask mandates, and extreme gender indoctrination in public schools,” the group said in a Dec. 21 statement.

“The records support AFL’s allegations that the Garland memorandum was the result of pressure from the White House to intimidate parents and protect leftist political allies.”

Mr. Garland’s memo came after the National School Boards Association (NSBA) sent a letter to President Joe Biden on Sept. 29, 2021, asking for the “federal government’s intervention against individuals or hate groups who are targeting our schools and educators.”

The letter claimed that school officials were facing threats over COVID-19 masking policies and concerns about the inclusion of critical race theory in classrooms. NSBA called these actions “a form of domestic terrorism.”

Timeline of Events

The NSBA’s letter led to communication within the Biden administration about mobilizing federal law enforcement against parents, AFL states.

An Oct. 1, 2021, document obtained by AFL showed that Shaylyn Cochrane, the chief of staff to the associate attorney general for civil rights, contacted Myesha Braden, an official in the deputy attorney general’s office, and Suzanne Goldberg, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education, to “connect” them regarding “disruptions at school board meetings concerning COVID protocols.”

On Oct. 2, Ms. Goldberg contacted Ms. Braden, asking “whether there are plans within DOJ” to deal with the issue.

On Oct. 4, Ms. Braden replied to Ms. Goldberg and said the DOJ had received NSBA’s letter and was “running a process” led by Associate Deputy Attorney General Kevin Chambers.

Mr. Chambers left a voicemail for Ms. Goldberg on Oct. 4; the content of the message isn’t known. It was on that day that Mr. Garland issued his memo asking the FBI to set up meetings with federal, tribal, state, local, and territorial leaders to “address threats” against school administrators and staff.

On Oct. 6, Ms. Goldberg contacted Mr. Chambers, acknowledging the voicemail and saying she was “very glad” to see Mr. Garland’s memo.

The documents obtained by AFL “strongly suggest that Biden officials, including the Attorney General, have been lying to the American people about the origin, purpose, and execution of the Administration’s assault against parents.”

AFL is seeking all communications from Ms. Cochrane, Ms. Braden, Ms. Goldberg, and Mr. Chambers to be made available.

“It is abundantly clear that multiple federal agencies were working together to silence Americans who were standing up for their children,“ AFL senior adviser Ian Prior said. ”This is a shocking abuse of power and we will continue to investigate and expose it to the American people who expect better and deserve better from their government.”

Targeting Parents

On Oct. 22, 2021, less than a month after the NSBA letter, the organization apologized to its member organizations, saying “there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter.”

The memo came after school board organizations from at least 20 states distanced themselves from the NSBA after the letter became public. They cited disagreement with how the NSBA characterized parents concerned about their children. Some member school boards quit the NSBA following the incident.

In September, Mr. Garland was grilled by lawmakers during a House meeting that discussed his memo.

During the discussion, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) highlighted the experience of Scott Smith, a father from Virginia who was targeted by law enforcement after he called out the Loudoun County school district in a 2021 school board meeting for how it handled his daughter’s sexual assault case.

The NSBA’s Sept. 29 letter to President Biden had cited Mr. Smith’s case.

Mr. Smith, who was pardoned by Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, said in a statement that the “NSBA defamed me, impugning my reputation and that of other concerned parents who dared challenge our local school board.”

When Mr. Roy asked Mr. Garland whether he had apologized for issuing a memo that “implicated Scott Smith as a domestic terrorist,” the attorney general replied by stating that the memo “said nothing about him, nothing about parents being terrorists, nothing about attending school boards.”

In March, the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government published a report critical of Mr. Garland’s memo, calling it a “manufactured” issue.

“It is apparent that the Biden Administration misused federal law-enforcement and counterterrorism resources for political purposes,” the report said. “There was no compelling nationwide law-enforcement justification for the Attorney General’s directive.”

“It appears ... that the Administration’s actions were a political offensive meant to quell swelling discord over controversial education curricula and unpopular school board decisions.”

Officials at the White House and DOJ didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.