FBI probed parents who challenged school boards, DOJ says

The Justice Department’s working group on government weaponization on Monday released a report chronicling federal investigations against parents who opposed local school board policies. Under the Biden administration, the FBI investigated an unspecified number of parents as potential domestic terrorists after they exercised their free speech rights, the report said. The investigation cited an Oct. 4, 2021, memorandum of former Attorney General Merrick Garland as instrumental in those investigations. 

The Justice Department said it would give parents who were investigated an opportunity to review the FBI’s files on them. It would also place a disclaimer on those files noting that they were compiled under a policy that raised serious constitutional concerns, the report said. If the department determined that the investigations violated parents’ constitutional rights, it would formally apologize, according to the report.

The report also stated that the Justice Department granted $1.5 million to a national school resource officers’ group to offer training on parental rights. An additional amount had been set aside to fund similar training for other school staff, according to the report. The department on Monday also sent a letter to all state attorneys general stating that federal law protected parents’ rights to know their children’s sensitive information.

How did we get here? The situation unfolded after several high-profile, contentious school board meetings in 2021. At one such June 2021 meeting in Loudoun County, Va., police arrested a father for disorderly conduct after he spoke angrily, confronting the board over its refusal to acknowledge his daughter’s rape in a girls’ restroom stall by a male student who identified himself as transgender. The National School Board Association subsequently sent a letter to the government referring to parents’ behavior as domestic terrorism. But the male student in the case was eventually convicted of charges for sexually assaulting the girl.

Attorney General Merrill Garland released a memo directing the FBI to investigate threats against school board members—and some of those investigations stemmed from parents’ speech at meetings. Although many employees at the Justice Department and FBI opposed the memo, the investigations went forward, according to the new report. The FBI investigated one woman because she was a member of the right-wing group Moms for Liberty and owned a gun. It also investigated a father because he spoke against the government, according to the report. 

Dig deeper: Read Mary Jackson’s report on the aftermath of the Loudoun County school board meeting.