Attorney General Merrick Garland lied about not treating parents as domestic terrorists
After telling Congress that he wasn’t doing so, we now know that Attorney General Merrick Garland lied when he testified that he wasn’t treating parents concerned about Critical Race Theory and the explosion of Marxist ideology being taught in public schools as “domestic terrorists.”
This policy decision by the Department of Justice first made headlines in early October when Garland issued a memo in response to a letter sent to Joe Biden from the National School Boards Association asking him to use statutes such as the Gun-Free School Zones Act and the USA PATRIOT Act to stop threats and violence directed toward school board members over actions that could be “the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes,” according to the letter. (emphasis mine)
Some examples of “domestic terrorism” mentioned in the letter included differences between school boards and parents on issues like mask mandates, vaccine mandates, Critical Race Theory, and remote learning.
After catching heat for sending the letter, The National School Boards Association (NSBA) began losing members, so the association sent out a letter of apology. However, the apology was fake because not only did NSBA send the letter, bot they worked in tandem with the White House to create it.
In other words, the White House was responsible for creating the “domestic terrorism” language, and it was included because it fit Biden’s anti-free speech agenda.
With the NSBA letter and Merrick Garland’s subsequent memo making the headlines, Garland appeared before the House Judiciary Committee where he made a lame attempt to distance himself from the National School Boards Association and their use of the words “domestic terrorists” to describe parents exercising their free speech rights.
“I want to be clear. The Justice Department supports and defends the First Amendment right of parents to complain as vociferously as they wish about the education of their children, about the curriculum taught in the schools. That is not what the memorandum is about at all, nor does it use the words ‘domestic terrorism’ or ‘PATRIOT Act,’” Garland said before the House Judiciary Committee.
Garland added that he “can’t imagine any circumstance in which the Patriot Act would be used in the circumstances of parents complaining about their children,” nor any circumstance in which those instances “would be labeled as domestic terrorism.”
Based on a recently obtained internal FBI memo, Garland lied to Congress about not treating parents as domestic terrorists (via National Review):
An internal FBI email shows that Attorney General Merrick Garland was not truthful — or at least not accurate — when he insisted that the Justice Department is not using counterterrorist tools to combat parents who are unruly at school board meetings or who threaten school board members.
The email, signed by FBI Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Timothy Langan, says that the Counterterrorism Division and Criminal Division created a “threat tag” for FBI officials to use when monitoring potential threats against school board members, teachers, and other staffers. Bureau agents, wrote Langan, should also “attempt to identify” the motivation behind alleged threats and determine whether there are “federal violations that can be investigated and charged.”
“The purpose of the threat tag is to help scope this threat on a national level and provide an opportunity for comprehensive analysis of the threat picture for effective engagement with law enforcement partners at all levels,” the email reads.
Actual threats of violence against school boards and educators are crimes and merit police involvement. They do not merit invocation of the PATRIOT Act, however, and this email calls into question Garland’s Oct. 21 testimony that he could not “imagine any circumstance” in which the FBI would use its counterterrorism powers to monitor parents who might be deemed a “threat” to their local school boards. (emphasis mine)
Garland’s lie also provided cover for Biden’s desire to find new ways to use the PATRIOT Act to silence the dissenting voices of people exercising their God-given, constitutionally protected free-speech rights to protest government.
In his first address to a Joint Session of Congress back in April, Biden used a March report provided by the intelligence community under his orders to identify “white supremacists” and “militia groups” as America’s greatest domestic terror threat:
“They take on a variety of forms, from lone actors and small groups of informally aligned individuals, to networks exhorting and targeting violence toward specific communities, to violent self-proclaimed ‘militias’ who, despite legal prohibitions in all fifty states against certain private militia activity, assert a baseless right to take the law into their own hands.”
Back in August, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a terrorism threat advisory specifically targeting the dissenting voices of people protesting the government — calling them “terrorists” and pushers of “anti-government rhetoric.”
From the very beginning of his presidency until now, Biden’s police-state ambitions have helped him lump people who believe in small government and limiting its power together with domestic terrorists ala Barack Hussein Obama.
Joe Biden has been at war against against free speech and pretty much the rest of the Bill of Rights from the day he took his oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so Attorney General Merrick Garland’s willingness to lie in order to help his boss destroy it by using the Department of Justice to abuse the PATRIOT Act and deny parents their free speech rights should come as no surprise.
That is, after all, what living under tyranny looks like.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.
Follow the Strident Conservative on Twitter and Facebook.
Subscribe to receive podcasts of his daily two-minute radio feature: iTunes | Stitcher | Tune In | RSS
sp;
