The Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), issued his first subpoenas to Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona over a letter that the National School Board Association (NSBA) interim President Chip Slaven sent to Joe Biden calling parents at school board meetings who objected to CRT being taught in schools “the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
Five days after the Sept. 29, 2021 letter was written, Attorney General Merrick Garland sent a memo to all 101 U.S. attorneys saying in part, “The Department takes these incidents seriously and is committed to using its authority and resources to discourage these threats, identify them when they occur, and prosecute them when appropriate. In the coming days, the Department will announce a series of measures designed to address the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel.”
It was later revealed that Education Secretary Cardona requested that Slaven write the letter and send it to the White House. And to this day, Garland refuses to withdraw the memo.
The FBI and Department of Justice have yet to reveal what steps they took in response to that letter. At the very least, the memo was designed to chill dissent, and we still don’t know what, if any, action the DOJ took against parents.
Democrats immediately pushed back on the effort, accusing Jordan of peddling conspiracy theories in attacking a short-lived DOJ effort designed to respond to violent threats.
“The conspiracy theories underpinning today’s subpoenas have been debunked with facts time and time again, but Republicans do not want to be bothered by this inconvenient truth. There is no amount of documents that will satisfy the MAGA obsession with conspiracies,” said Del. Stacey Plaskett (V.I.), the top Democrat on a Judiciary subcommittee established by the GOP to examine the “weaponization” of the federal government.
“Conspiracy theories”? Cardona requested the letter from NSBA asking for FBI assistance in squelching dissent, and AG Garland sent a letter to the 101 top law enforcement officers in the U.S. telling them to “facilitate” efforts to assist school boards in silencing objections.
Related: National School Boards Association Reviews Letter Comparing Parents to Domestic Terrorists
Local law enforcement was perfectly capable of addressing any threats to local school board members or teachers. The only reason to involve the FBI was for the purpose of intimidating parents and derailing their efforts to have input on their child’s education. The school boards didn’t want the input, so the Biden administration sicced the FBI on the parents.
That’s not a conspiracy theory.
“As Director Wray and other FBI officials have stated clearly on numerous occasions before Congress and elsewhere, the FBI has never been in the business of investigating speech or policing speech at school board meetings or anywhere else, and we never will be. Our focus is and always will be on protecting people from violence and threats of violence,” the agency said in a statement.
No one asked the FBI to “police speech.” Just the knowledge that they were watching was enough to chill dissent — an obvious fact that the bureau and its defenders are strangely unaware of.
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