WASHINGTON — Top Justice Department lawyers balked at the Biden administration’s attempts to prosecute parents who protested mask mandates and critical race theory at school board meetings as potential domestic terrorists in the fall of 2021, ripping senior officials’ push for the criminal probes as “ridiculous” and highly “political,” according to emails released Monday.
Attorneys in Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco’s office expressed concern about the demand for federal criminal investigations at the behest of the National School Boards Association (NSBA), and mocked the partisan goals it would accomplish, messages published by the DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group show.
“This is ridiculous,” wrote Robyn Thiemann, an attorney in Monaco’s office, on Sept. 25, 2021.
Corey Amundson, chief of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section of the Criminal Divison called the effort, “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
“It’s like they’ve [sic] affirmatively trying to make this thing not work and look political,” added Kevin Driscoll, deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s Criminal Division on Oct. 2, 2021.
No parents are known to have been charged with domestic terrorism for partaking in demonstrations against school board officials, but at least 25 investigations were opened.
The Biden White House-directed effort followed a Sept. 29 letter from NSBA boss Chip Slaven, who declared that US public schools were “under an immediate threat,” and specifically cited outcry over COVID-related mandates and “propaganda purporting the false inclusion of critical race theory within classroom instruction and curricula.”
Slaven asked the administration to use the authorities of the PATRIOT Act to investigate “acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials,” some of which “could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
Eighteen days later, on Oct. 22, 2021, the NSBA issued an apology letter repudiating Slaven and organization President Viola Garcia, who also signed the Sept. 29, 2021, letter.
“[W]e deeply value not only the work of local school boards that make important contributions within our communities,” the organization’s board of directors said, “but also the voices of parents, who should and must continue to be heard when it comes to decisions about their children’s education, health, and safety.”
The Biden administration had been discussing school board incidents with the NSBA and other groups since July 2021, but attorneys inside the DOJ began pushing back after the Sept. 29 letter began circulating.
Then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Kevin Chambers initially described the request for federal criminal probes as unnecessary since the conduct was “state/local in character.”
Most DOJ attorneys also did not view the conduct in question as criminal — with alleged “threats against public school officials” including posting public Facebook pictures of school board members’ kids not wearing masks.
The DOJ’s weaponization task force suggested that NSBA’s letter would have viewed an incident involving Scott Smith, a Loudoun County (Va.) Public Schools parent whose daughter was sexually assaulted by a transgender student, as a kind of threat that may have risen to the level of domestic terrorism.
Media coverage of Smith — and Loudoun County’s mishandling of the bathroom sex assault — was credited with fueling Republican Glenn Youngkin’s surprise victory in the Virginia governor’s race in 2021.
Smith was never federally prosecuted, but eventually received a pardon from Youngkin for local charges of disorderly conduct after he erupted over school officials failure to protect his daughter at a Loudoun County School Board meeting in August 2021. After receiving the pardon in September 2023, Smith told Fox News that his outburst wasn’t directed at the board, but rather at a “radical” parent who called him a liar and threatened to “ruin” him on social media.
“She looked at me dead in the face and said, ‘That’s not true, that’s not what happened. You are lying.’ … I called her an expletive — the next thing I know, there are hands all over me, grabbing me from behind,” Smith recounted to anchor John Roberts.
Garland never rescinded his memo and maintained in subsequent congressional testimony that none of his subordinates had expressed disagreement with it in his presence.
