WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — The Department of Justice (DOJ) tasked attorneys with proactively seeking a pretext for federal involvement in “monitoring” parents concerned about their children’s education, newly obtained documents reveal.

In October 2021, former Attorney General Merrick Garland instructed the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to mobilize a “partnership” between federal, state, and local authorities to discuss “strategies” relating to handling alleged “threats” to educators from parents protesting the use of controversial instructional materials based on “critical race theory” (CRT), which asserts that race is a “socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of color” through American institutions. 

Garland cited a letter from the National School Board Association (NSBA) to former President Joe Biden alleging that a smattering of examples of alleged unruly behavior at various school board meetings, all of which (if illegal) fell within the scope of local law enforcement, “could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” Later that month, however, it was found that NSBA officials collaborated with the White House on the letter, for which the NSBA later apologized.

The situation elicited a harsh backlash from Americans who accused the Biden administration of using the nation’s law-enforcement apparatus to intimidate concerned parents for exercising their constitutional speech and assembly rights, and it later came out that one of the letter’s chief supporting examples of “disorderly” parents, Scott Smith of Loudoun County, Virginia, was actually trying to confront school board members about the district allegedly covering up the rape of his daughter by a “transgender” student in the girls’ bathroom.

Now America First Legal (AFL) has obtained and released new emails shedding light on the behind-the-scenes deliberations. On October 1, 2021, Attorney General’s Office attorney Tamarra Matthews-Johnson emailed Kevin Chambers of the Deputy Attorney General’s Office about press coverage of the letter, to which Chambers replied, “We’re aware; the challenge here is finding a federal hook. But WH has been in touch about whether we can assist in some form or fashion” (emphasis added).

The next day, Sparkle Sooknanan of the Associate Attorney General’s Office sent several Civil Rights Division attorneys a Saturday morning email with a “quick-turn request” to find “any authorities CRT [sic] enforces that could help address the issue.” Two initial conclusions said no.

The day after that, one CRD attorney expressed reservations, writing that “it seems that we are ramping up an awful lot of federal manpower for what is currently a non-federal conduct.” Yet a draft memo was complete anyway on October 4, and was published later that day.

“The Biden Administration wanted Americans to believe that the October 4 Memo was a run-of-the-mill law enforcement response to concerns raised by teachers and threatened school board administrators. But America First Legal has said all along that this was a political operation,” AFL senior counsel Andrew Block responded. “Today, we have conclusively proven that this was not a routine law enforcement response, but rather a political agenda rammed through under the guise of an organic response. When asked for an authority on which to base targeting parents, senior and long-serving Justice Department officials told the Biden Administration there was no authority and this was First Amendment protected activity, but Garland’s weaponized Justice Department proceeded anyway.”

The politicization of justice was one of the defining controversies of the Biden years, from the prosecutions of pro-life activists and a gender “transition” whistleblower, to lax prosecution of pro-abortion violence, to another memo identifying “Radical Traditionalist Catholic (RTC) ideology” as a potential motivator for “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists.”