The Biden DOJ knew it was violating civil rights when it targeted parents, documents show
Documents newly uncovered by America First Legal show that the Biden Justice Department targeted parents as domestic terrorists despite repeated warnings that it was violating their civil rights.
In January 2021, the Department of Education quietly leaned on the National School Boards Association (NSBA) to approach the DOJ about parents who were challenging COVID-19 mandates. In October 2021, the NSBA sent a letter asking the DOJ to root out parents who disagreed with COVID-19 restrictions on children, calling them “domestic terrorists.” The DOJ then issued a memo to the FBI, instructing the bureau's counterterrorism division to investigate such parents as domestic terrorists.
On Friday, America First Legal released documents showing that the memo—and the subsequent crackdown on parents—was orchestrated by the White House after officials were told they were violating the constitutional rights of private citizens.
Searching for justifications
On October 1, 2021, a counsel in the Attorney General’s Office named Tamarra Matthews-Johnson forwarded the NSBA’s letter to another DOJ official named Kevin Chambers, who worked in the Deputy Attorney General’s Office.
“Just checking that you were aware,” Matthews-Johnson wrote.
Chambers replied that he was aware of the NSBA’s letter about parents, but the DOJ so far lacked a legal justification under federal law to target them.
“We’re aware; 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,” Chambers wrote.
The next morning, an official in the Associate Attorney General’s Office named Sparkle Sooknanan took the matter to the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. She asked a group of attorneys there to identify “any authorities [the Civil Rights Division] enforces that could help address the issue.”
The response was negative.
No legal pretext
“I think this is the end of the line,” the Civil Rights Division’s Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Pamela Karlan told Sooknanan.
The next day, another attorney from the Civil Rights Division offered an in-depth explanation as to why the DOJ could not legally justify targeting parents who challenge COVID policies.
“I read the letter from NSBA, and looked at the links for a handful of footnotes, and it appears to me that the vast, vast majority of the behavior cited cannot be reached by federal law,” the attorney wrote in an email. “I only saw three stories that involved what sounded like a possible ‘true threat’ . . . Almost all the language used is protected by the First Amendment; the main issue seems to be the disruption and obstruction of school board meetings, which can be reached by local trespassing laws or disturbance of the peace laws, but nothing remotely federal. So it seems we are ramping up an awful lot of federal manpower for what is currently non-federal conduct.”
Parents rounded up
Nevertheless, the next day, the DOJ published a memo warning that parents who challenged COVID-19 mandates were domestic terrorists who were a threat to school boards. The October 4th memo was distributed to the FBI, U.S. Attorneys, and law enforcement agencies countrywide.
The crackdown that followed was unprecedented.
In one example, the FBI interrogated a father who opposed forced masking in his child’s school. The father was reported for being an “insurrectionist” who “rails against the government”, though the informant later admitted that the father had not committed any actual crimes.
In another state, a Democratic official reported several Republican elected officials for “inciting violence” by opposing vaccine mandates.
In another case, the FBI investigated a mother who warned the school board they would be replaced over their forced masking of children and said, “We’re coming for you”. The mother was reported for being part of a “right-wing moms’ group” called Moms for Liberty and for owning a firearm.
When hauled before the GOP House Judiciary Committee in October 2022, Attorney General Merrick Garland falsely testified that the FBI was not surveilling or investigating parents.
A conspiracy to ‘chill dissent across the United States’
“The Biden Administration appears to have engaged in a conspiracy that was ultimately aimed at depriving parents of two fundamental rights—the right to speak, and the right to direct the upbringing of their children,” America First Legal President Gene Hamilton said in a statement on Friday. “They did so with political intentions, most immediately by attempting to influence the Virginia gubernatorial election, and to more broadly chill dissent across the United States. America First Legal has been the tip of the spear exposing this wrongdoing for nearly four years, and we will not cease seeking to expose and hold accountable those involved.”
