On Tuesday, it was revealed that despite the FBI investigating over two dozen different instances of parents and parents’ rights groups protesting school boards, not a single credible or legitimate threat was discovered at any point.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, the House GOP released its findings on the FBI’s 25 different preliminary investigations, all of which were based on tips submitted to the National Threat Operations Center. Of these 25, six were assigned to the FBI’s counterterrorism division. In the end, only one of them led to a full investigation, and this single probe did not discover any serious threat to schools or school board members.
The House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government came to its conclusion after subpoenaing the FBI, determining that the Biden Administration abused its power by using counterterrorism tools to target conservative parents and parents’ groups, following the rise of a grassroots protest movement at school board meetings across the country. These protests were often in opposition to far-left curriculum, including the teaching of Critical Race Theory and transgenderism, as well as coronavirus-related mandates on masks and vaccines.
“The Administration’s goal seems to have been silencing the critics of its radical education policies,” reads the committee’s report. “This weaponization of law-enforcement powers against American parents exercising their First Amendment rights is dangerous.”
The findings will be further presented in a House hearing on Thursday titled “Free Speech: The Biden Administration’s Chilling of Parents’ Fundamental Rights.” Witnesses who will testify at the hearing include representatives from the watchdog groups Parents Defending Education (PDE) and Moms for Liberty (MFL).
The subcommittee had already determined in a previous report that there was “no legitimate basis” for the Biden Administration to target these protests, with the administration only doing so at the demand of the National School Boards Association (NSBA).