Federal authorities opened at least 25 investigations tied to parents who confronted school boards in 2021, after a push from the Biden administration.
No parent is known to have faced a domestic terrorism charge for joining a protest against school officials.
Emails the Justice Department released Monday now show how several of its own senior attorneys viewed that effort as it unfolded.
The department’s Weaponization Working Group published the messages.
Robyn Thiemann, an attorney in Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco’s office, reacted on Sept. 25, 2021. “This is ridiculous,” she wrote.
Corey Amundson, chief of the Public Integrity Section in the Criminal Division, went further. He called the effort “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
Kevin Driscoll, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Criminal Division, sent his note on Oct. 2, 2021. “It’s like they’ve [sic] affirmatively trying to make this thing not work and look political,” he wrote.
Kevin Chambers, then an associate deputy attorney general, raised a jurisdictional objection. He described the conduct as “state/local in character.”
Most department attorneys did not see the behavior as criminal.
Among the alleged “threats against public school officials” was the posting of public Facebook photos showing school board members’ children without masks.
The attorneys were responding to a Sept. 29, 2021, letter from the National School Boards Association.
Chip Slaven, the group’s chief, and President Viola Garcia both signed it. The letter said public schools were “under an immediate threat.”
It cited opposition to COVID-related mandates, along with “propaganda purporting the false inclusion of critical race theory within classroom instruction and curricula.”
Slaven urged the administration to use the PATRIOT Act to investigate “acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials.”
Some of those acts, he wrote, “could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
Administration officials had discussed school board incidents with the association and other groups since July 2021. Resistance inside the Justice Department surfaced once the Sept. 29 letter began circulating.
The association backed away within 18 days. On Oct. 22, 2021, it issued an apology letter that repudiated both Slaven and Garcia.
“[W]e deeply value not only the work of local school boards that make important contributions within our communities,” the association’s board of directors said, “but also the voices of parents, who should and must continue to be heard when it comes to decisions about their children’s education, health, and safety.”
The Weaponization Working Group suggested the association’s letter would have treated one particular incident as a possible domestic terrorism threat.
That incident involved Scott Smith, a Loudoun County, Va., parent whose daughter was sexually assaulted in a school bathroom by a transgender student.
Smith erupted at a Loudoun County School Board meeting in August 2021, angry that officials had failed to protect his daughter.
Media coverage of his case and of the district’s handling of the assault received credit for fueling Republican Glenn Youngkin’s surprise victory in Virginia’s 2021 governor’s race.
Federal prosecutors never charged Smith. Youngkin later pardoned him on local disorderly conduct charges, and Smith received the pardon in September 2023.
Smith then told Fox News that his outburst targeted a “radical” parent, not the board. He said she called him a liar and threatened to “ruin” him on social media.
“She looked at me dead in the face and said, ‘That’s not true, that’s not what happened.
You are lying.’ … I called her an expletive — the next thing I know, there are hands all over me, grabbing me from behind,” Smith told Fox News anchor John Roberts.
Attorney General Merrick Garland never rescinded his memo on the matter.
In later congressional testimony, he maintained that none of his subordinates had expressed disagreement with it in his presence.
