The Biden White House and then-Attorney General Merrick Garland conspired together to find a way to charge parents who spoke out against far left policies at school board meetings around the country, according to documents obtained by America First Legal, a watchdog group.
The group published memos and emails it obtained that looked for a "federal hook" to charge the parents with crimes, but DOJ lawyers pushed back on the requests and said any prosecution would "trample" the parents' First Amendment rights.
America First Legal said:
These never-before-seen documents—uncovered only because of AFL’s relentless efforts over the past three and a half years—expose not only the Biden White House’s involvement in pushing a weaponized DOJ, but also strong dissent from careers within the Department’s Civil Rights Division, who warned that there was no federal authority or legal basis to target these parents in the first place because their speech is protected by the First Amendment.
The emails took place between October 1 and 3, just days before the infamous memo from Garland that labeled the outspoken parents as "domestic terrorists."
Despite the DOJ lawyers telling the AG's office that the parents were merely using their First Amendment rights and nothing criminal was happening, the DOJ under Garland called them dangerous terrorists in an effort to threaten them into silence anyway.
The main reasons these parents were speaking out was because of policies around COVID, transgenderism, and critical race theory that were harming their children.
One case involved sexual assaults of two students and others involved biological males harming female students while playing girls' sports because they identified as girls.
Other parents didn't want their children exposed to critical race theory, which paints an entire race--whites--as racist and distorts American history.
Because the leftists in the DOJ and Biden administration favored these policies, they wanted to shut down dissenting parents and silence them.
These same leftists have been crying for months about President Donald Trump threatening democracy and being a tyrant, but their behavior was a direct assault on these parents' constitutional rights and an effort to circumvent democracy.
"It seems that we are ramping up an awful lot of federal manpower for what is currently a non-federal conduct,” a DOJ lawyer wrote the day before Garland published his memo, ignoring the advice that it was not legally sound to do so.
Democracy prevailed, however, when Garland's memo became public and provoked enough controversy to get him to back down and give up his intimidation campaign.
Some parents became even louder after the memo, because this is America, and people accustomed to freedom don't give it up without a fight.
If parents are ever too scared of federal charges to raise their concerns at school board meetings, democracy will indeed be dead.
