The head of a parents’ organization — consisting mostly of concerned mothers — that was reportedly targeted by Attorney General Merrick Garland’s FBI said Garland himself is “the terrorist.”
Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice told the Daily Caller she was concerned investigations into the group’s members might “intimate our moms” in a piece published Friday.
The remarks came two days after House Republicans said they’d found smoking-gun evidence the FBI was investigating parents’ groups that had engaged in protests at school board meetings, despite Garland’s protestations to the contrary.
(Here at The Western Journal, we’ve proudly supported parents standing up to woke ideology like critical race theory — and we’ve decried the interference at the federal level by President Joe Biden’s administration. We’ll continue fighting for parental rights. You can help us by subscribing.)
The letter to the Department of Justice, authored by Ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan and signed by other Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee, noted the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division had created a threat tag for investigations into parents’ groups — EDUOFFICIALS.
“We have learned from brave whistleblowers that the FBI has opened investigations with the EDUOFFICIALS threat tag in almost every region of the country and relating to all types of educational settings,” the letter noted.
“The information we have received shows how, as a direct result of your directive, federal law enforcement is using counterterrorism resources to investigate protected First Amendment activity.”
BREAKING: The Biden Administration has mobilized FBI counterterrorism resources to investigate parents, including at least one member of @Moms4Liberty, for expressing protected political speech at local school board meetings.
This is a grave abuse of power. pic.twitter.com/MdK0vm51VN
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) May 12, 2022
Garland had come under fire after an Oct. 4, 2021 memo directed the FBI to look into “threats” against school personnel.
Should critical race theory be removed from the classroom?
The memo came after a wave of parental protests and contentious school board meetings — particularly in Loudoun and Fairfax counties in Virginia — over critical race theory in the classroom.
“In recent months, there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation’s public schools,” the memo read.
“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.”
During testimony later that month, Garland insisted the directive only involved “concerns about violence, threats of violence, other criminal conduct.”
That doesn’t seem to be the case. The House Judiciary Committee’s letter notes the FBI interviewed a Moms for Liberty member after an investigation that began when a tip submitted to the bureau through the National Threat Operations Center hotline, claimed she told a local school board “we are coming for you.”
The snitch said the mother was a threat because she was part of a “right wing mom’s group” and “is a gun owner.”
Jordan then noted that when the FBI interviewed the mom, they discovered she only meant Moms for Liberty sought “to replace the school board with new members through the electoral process” because of their stance on mask mandates.
BREAKING: The Biden Administration has mobilized FBI counterterrorism resources to investigate parents, including at least one member of @Moms4Liberty, for expressing protected political speech at local school board meetings.
This is a grave abuse of power. pic.twitter.com/MdK0vm51VN
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) May 12, 2022
Justice told the Daily Caller that she was “sad to see” the FBI investigations “happening to people that care most about this country.”
The mothers who show up at school board meetings, she said, were “genuinely concerned about their children’s education” — but Garland’s DOJ sees them as “the enemy.”
“This should not be happening and we are going to do everything we can to ensure that it stops,” she told the Daily Caller.
In a statement, Justice and her fellow Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich said this was “proof of what many of us suspected and some of us knew: that the Department of Justice was using counter-terrorism authority under the PATRIOT Act to investigate parents of schoolchildren.”
“We at Moms for Liberty knew first hand of the first example Jim Jordan cited, because she was – as the whistleblower letter says – one of our members,” the statement read.
“The mother was terrified. She had been contacted by the FBI. She had been told by the FBI not to say anything about that call. She had also been told that there were many other mothers being investigated.”
The letter was more confirmation of what Garland has strenuously denied: that FBI resources are being used to treat parents as potential domestic terror suspects without any specific threat.
FROM THE WHISTLEBLOWER: pic.twitter.com/4IfJRPVKMk
— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) November 16, 2021
The House Judiciary GOP had already blown the whistle on the EDUOFFICIAL tag last November. We now have a rough idea of how promiscuously it’s being applied and how little threat there actually is.
While no sinister, violent, far-right threat against school boards has, as of yet, been uncovered, we now have credible reports of the FBI harassing a member of a conservative mothers’ group based off of a cardboard-flimsy rationale.
When Garland’s memo was released, it seemed clear the FBI was being weaponized against a widespread parents’ revolt in which wholly rational anger was being unleashed — in a constitutionally protected manner — against school boards that were adopting woke ideology or prolonging mask mandates beyond reasonable limits. This anger led to, among other things, a Republican sweep of statewide offices in off-year elections in increasingly blue Virginia, including for governor.
Perhaps when Garland was talking about investigating “threats,” he wasn’t talking about any hazard to the well-being of school-board members or educational employees. Instead, it was about the Democrats’ 2022 electoral chances.
