Even senior Justice Department attorneys under President Biden dismissed a push to treat school-board parents as potential domestic terrorists as ridiculous and political, and the memo still stood.
Top lawyers inside the Justice Department privately mocked the Biden administration’s drive to open federal criminal probes of parents who protested mask mandates and critical race theory at school board meetings, newly released emails show.
Messages published by the DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group capture career attorneys calling the effort “ridiculous,” “stupid,” and designed to “look political.” The New York Post reported the internal backlash after the National School Boards Association asked the White House to treat some parent protests as domestic terrorism under the PATRIOT Act.
No parents are known to have been charged with domestic terrorism for those demonstrations. At least 25 investigations were opened anyway. Attorney General Merrick Garland never rescinded his related memo.
In fall 2021, the Justice Department faced pressure to treat angry parents as a national-security problem. Attorneys in Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco’s orbit pushed back hard.
Robyn Thiemann, an attorney in Monaco’s office, cut straight to it on Sept. 25, 2021.
"This is ridiculous,"
Corey Amundson, then chief of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, was blunter still.
"Stupid, stupid, stupid."
Kevin Driscoll, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Criminal Division, emailed on Oct. 2, 2021, that the whole approach looked engineered for partisan effect.
"It’s like they’ve [sic] affirmatively trying to make this thing not work and look political,"
Then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Kevin Chambers initially flagged the request for federal criminal probes as unnecessary. The conduct at issue, he said, was “state/local in character.” Most DOJ attorneys did not view the behavior as criminal at all. Alleged “threats” included parents posting public Facebook pictures of school board members’ kids not wearing masks.
The trigger was a Sept. 29, 2021, letter from National School Boards Association leaders Chip Slaven and Viola Garcia. They declared U.S. public schools “under an immediate threat,” pointed to outcry over COVID mandates and “propaganda purporting [the false inclusion] of critical race theory,” and asked the administration to use PATRIOT Act authorities against “acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials” that “could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
Eighteen days later, the NSBA board repudiated Slaven and Garcia. The apology letter said the group valued “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.”
By then the federal machinery was already moving. Discussions between the Biden White House, the NSBA, and other groups had been underway since July 2021. The letter did not appear in a vacuum.
FOIA records later detailed how Education Secretary Miguel Cardona fit into that sequence. Breitbart reported that emails showed Slaven telling NSBA officers he was writing the letter to the White House at Cardona’s request, and that the association had already been engaged with the White House, DOJ, DHS, and the Education Department.
One of the flashpoints was Loudoun County, Virginia. Parent Scott Smith erupted at an August 2021 school board meeting after officials failed to protect his daughter, who had been sexually assaulted by a transgender student. He later faced local disorderly conduct charges. He was never federally prosecuted.
Smith told Fox News the outburst was aimed at a parent who called him a liar, not the board itself.
"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,"
The DOJ weaponization task force later noted that the NSBA’s framing could have cast an incident like Smith’s as the kind of “threat” that might rise to domestic terrorism. Media coverage of Loudoun helped fuel Republican Glenn Youngkin’s 2021 win for Virginia governor. Youngkin pardoned Smith in September 2023.
Parents who showed up to defend their kids’ schools were not the only ones watching how federal power got used. Readers tracking other suppressed paper trails have seen the same pattern in declassified records on FBI handling of Biden corruption evidence.
Despite the internal ridicule, Garland’s memo was never pulled back. In later congressional testimony, Garland maintained that none of his subordinates had expressed disagreement with it in his presence. The emails now in public view show disagreement was real, just not delivered to his face in the way he described.
That gap matters. Career prosecutors saw a local school-board fight dressed up as a national terrorism problem. The political leadership still left the directive in place. At least 25 investigations followed. The domestic-terrorism charges against protesting parents did not.
Document fights over Biden-era decisions keep surfacing in Congress as well, including Senate pressure to release FBI files critics say were misclassified to protect the Biden family.
The core dispute was never mysterious. Parents objected to mask rules and to curriculum they believed pushed racial ideology. School boards and their national association answered by inviting federal criminal authorities into the room. DOJ line attorneys recognized the mismatch: state and local disorder issues do not become PATRIOT Act cases because a trade group draft a heated letter.
When the same administration that talked about “threats” to democracy treated moms and dads at microphones as potential domestic terrorists, it told ordinary families exactly where they stood. The internal emails prove the professional rank-and-file saw the absurdity in real time.
Separate Biden-family record fights have followed a similar arc of delayed sunlight, from the path cleared for public release of Hur investigation tapes to other financial controversies that kept dragging on.
Hunter Biden’s own statements about Burisma income have only sharpened public focus on how influence and accountability diverged in those years, including his claim that board pay bankrolled a crack cocaine habit.
The school-board episode fits the larger record. Federal power was aimed at citizens exercising basic parental rights. Insiders called it ridiculous. Leadership left the policy standing. Families in Loudoun and across the country paid the price in chilled speech and opened files while the memo stayed put.
When prosecutors quietly call a case stupid and political, voters should believe them, and remember who refused to shut it down.