Several top law enforcement officials expressed misgivings about the Biden administration Justice Department’s notorious Oct. 4, 2021, memo targeting parents protesting at school board meetings, new documents reveal.
Then-FBI Deputy Assistant Director Jay Greenberg raised concerns with the DOJ that the department was not on the same page as investigators in the bureau regarding that memo, internal communications obtained by America First Legal and shared with The Post show.
“We have some concern with the attached and would like additional time to engage with you before this messaging is released,” Greenberg wrote to then-DOJ officials Iris Lan and Kevin Driscoll on Oct. 4, 2021.
“I would ask for any assistance you can provide in helping us get time to find common ground we can all support.”
It’s not fully clear what specific qualms Greenberg had. Emails from the time indicate that they may have had a call.
The conservative legal group got ahold of the documents after a Freedom of Information battle with the DOJ.
The memo came against the backdrop of parent protests at school board meetings raising frustrations with COVID-19 pandemic policies, classroom instruction of critical race theory and more.
Those protests came after many parents had been stuck at home with their children and got a great peek into what they were being taught.
In the memo signed by then-US Attorney General Merrick Garland, the DOJ vowed to crack down on protests, claiming there had been a “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.”
GOP critics quickly argued that it sounded like the DOJ was targeting conservative parents.
On Oct. 8, 2021, Garland’s chief of staff raised concerns internally about a call he got from Jonathan Thompson of the National Sheriffs Association, noting that he had “not heard any concerns about threats to local school boards.”
Thompson pressed the DOJ about why it was wading into local issues.
“I read him the part of the memo that directed the FBI to coordinate/convene with state/locals, and he claimed that his sheriffs, ‘have not heard from anyone at the bureau, and it would have been nice to have a heads-up,’” Peter Hyun, then Chief of Staff in the Office of the Associate Attorney General, wrote in that email.
America First Legal, a group founded by White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller, previously obtained internal documents showing the Biden White House was involved with the DOJ’s crafting of the memo.
The latest batch of documents shows that then-White House Domestic Policy Council official Ephraim McDowell was in contact with the National School Boards Association (NSBA) and helped facilitate its sending of concerns about the school board protest activity to the DOJ.
DOJ officials used that NSBA material to help craft the memo.
Republican lawmakers in Congress repeatedly probed the Biden administration over the controversial DOJ memo, raising concerns that the government was being weaponized against conservative parents. Multiple red states had sued the Biden administration over that memo.
“These documents prove that the Biden Administration ignored explicit warnings from the FBI’s own leadership and the National Sheriffs Association to appease radical leftist activists,” Ian Prior, senior advisor at America First Legal, said in a statement.
“By placing concerned parents in the same threat category as those targeting judges and Members of Congress, Garland’s DOJ demonstrated the full extent of its weaponization,” he added.
The document dump also showed a list circulated internally of “28 cases of disrupting school board meetings,” which largely included rowdy behavior and anti-mask activity earlier that year.
“Parents speaking at school board meetings were never a national security threat, and the Biden DOJ knew it,” Will Scolinos, counsel at America First Legal, argued.
“These documents confirm that DOJ ignored the law enforcement’s on-the-ground threat assessments and continued with its vindictive, politically-driven weaponization of parents.”
