"Nothing remotely federal": Merrick Garland's NSBA Response Echoes a Major Theme of the Russia Collusion Hoax
In case you’ve been hiding under a rock, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has released a report documenting the invention of the pathetic Russia collusion hoax. One of the recurring themes of the report is that the top-down pressure to fake up a dumb story to hurt a political opponent was met, repeatedly, by the skeptical responses of career intel officials. Example here.
To see this same dynamic in action, showing the way that Democrats weaponized government against political opponents over the objections of career bureaucrats, let’s spend a few minutes with a set of documents obtained recently by the conservative non-profit America First Legal.
Quick background before we get to the documents: Back in 2021, facing a terrifying wave of Nazi parents disagreeing with them, much like literally Adolf Hitler, school board officials pissed and moaned to the National School Boards Association, which sent a shockingly stupid letter to the White House demanding that unhappy parents be treated like domestic terrorists. Bottom of pg. 2:
As I’ve written previously, the first draft of the letter was even more remarkable, and in its original form asked the White House to assign military police to school board meetings all over the country to deal with the crisis of Nazi parents disagreeing with them:
We must fight against the fascism of parental rights by assigning the military to arrest parents who disagree with local school officials, explained the warm and wonderful progressives. Hate has no home here! Military policing of citizens who criticize government, a powerful tool against Trumpian authoritarianism.
Because the Biden administration was a cultural sewer staffed by morons, the NSBA got their wish. Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memorandum directing federal law enforcement officials to explore avenues for treating disagreement with school boards as a federal criminal matter.
The immediate backlash was so intense that the National School Boards Association fell apart, as state school board associations departed from the national organization. BUT ALL VE VANTED VAS FOR ZE MILITARY TO ARREST ZE EXTREMIST TERRORIST NAZI PARENTS WHO DISAGREE VIS US, I guess.
Garland’s idiotic directive was rescinded by Attorney General Pam Bondi, more or less the moment she arrived at the DOJ.
Now, let’s look at the documents about the internal DOJ discussion leading to the Garland memo, obtained by America First Legal. You can find them here, or open the PDF file below:
The internal discussion starts with DOJ officials telling each other that hey, this involves a discussion with the White House, so “unfortunately this is a quick-turn request.”
And then a bunch of career officials start explaining that uh, wut. Bottom of pg. 11 and the top of pg. 12, with EOS being the Educational Opportunities Section of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, and CRM being the Criminal Division:
The first response at DOJ is a series of statements about these matters falling outside our jurisdiction and not falling under our purview. No one at DOJ said that hell yeah, let’s go kick ass on parental disagreement.
There are no authorities here, nothing that we enforce. And then, with great clarity, to a now-retired Deputy Assistant Attorney General on the career track, from a top prosecutor in the Civil Rights Division:
“…the vast, vast majority of the behavior cited cannot be reached by federal law…nothing remotely federal…ramping up an awful lot of federal manpower for what is currently non-federal conduct.”
That’s what career DOJ officials thought of the NSBA request. Note that this email was sent on October 3, 2021 — and then Merrick Garland’s memorandum making criticism of local school boards a federal criminal matter was issued the next day, October 4.
Career officials: There’s nothing here that involves any form of federal jurisdiction
Merrick Garland: Great, we’ll do it!
Democrats steamrolled career officials to weaponize the federal government against their political opponents. This was their instinct, their practice, and their increasingly clear pattern. We have evidence.
Thanks for covering this story Chris, and for linking to the Vindicating Parents press conference hosted by Congressmen Andy Ogles and Andy Biggs, and our grassroots group Parents Demanding Justice Alliance. We do, indeed, have evidence and we are providing it to the Department of Justice and the Trump Administration. Justice is coming for Merrick Garland and for every single public official who treated parents like “domestic terrorists” for standing up for their families. I won’t quit until there is accountability.
Nothing remotely legal, that’s for sure. Here’s another idea, Merrick: get the IRS to slow-walk 501(c)(3) applications from right-leaning, civil liberties organizations, leaving them high and dry during the election cycle. No one will suspect a thing!