The latest report by the House Judiciary Committee declares that there was “no legitimate basis” for the Biden Administration’s efforts to label parents protesting at school board meetings as domestic terrorists and place them under federal investigation.
As reported by Fox News, the Judiciary Committee and its new subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government have completed an interim staff report on the matter of the federal government’s handling of parents’ rights groups, who were “voicing concerns about controversial curricula and education-related policies.”
“From the initial set of material produced in response to the subpoenas, it is apparent that the Biden administration misused federal law-enforcement and counterterrorism resources for political purposes,” the committee’s report declares. The committee has already subpoenaed several key figures in the scandal, including Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, and several members of the National School Boards Association (NSBA).
According to the report, the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) “own documents demonstrate that there was no compelling nationwide law-enforcement justification for the Attorney General’s directive or the Department components’ execution thereof.”
The investigation stems from a coordinated effort in 2021 between the federal government and the NSBA to crack down on such grassroots protest movements, which arose in response to the gradual exposing of far-left curriculum and indoctrination attempts in public education. Parents began protesting school board meetings across the country in opposition to children being forced to learn about such heavily political and biased concepts as Critical Race Theory or transgenderism.
Subsequently, the NSBA sent a letter to the Biden Administration demanding that such parents be investigated as “domestic terrorists,” with the DOJ initially agreeing to the demand and using this label in an October 2021 memo, before withdrawing it due to widespread backlash.
“After surveying local law enforcement, U.S. Attorney’s offices around the country reported back to Main Justice that there was no legitimate law-enforcement basis for the Attorney General’s directive to use federal law-enforcement and counterterrorism resources to investigate school board-related threats,” the report declares.
The school board protest movement brought the general focus on education to the forefront in 2021, with education becoming a top political issue in the off-year elections that November. Most prominently, the fight over education resulted in a red wave that swept the state of Virginia, with Glenn Youngkin (R-Va.) being elected governor, while Republicans also won the other two statewide executive offices and flipped control of the Virginia House of Delegates. The red wave also nearly flipped New Jersey, with Republican gubernatorial nominee Jack Ciattarelli losing to incumbent Governor Phil Murphy (D-N.J.) by less than three points.