Internal emails were uncovered recently that cast a new, negative light on Attorney General Merrick Garland’s record in targeting parents over school board controversies. The communications show that various Justice officials raised alarms over the effort pushed by Democratic allies and the National Association for School Boards. Career officials condemned the Biden Administration proposal by objecting that “If they do this, they might as well rename the damn thing the Anti-MAGA Task Force.”
As parents organized against COVID and woke policies being implemented by school boards, Democratic allies and the National Association for School Boards called upon the Biden Administration to crack down. Garland agreed and implemented a plan detailed in an October 2021 memo to treat these parents as engaged in potential “domestic terrorism.”
There was public outrage, but Garland defended the action, declaring “The obligation of the Justice Department is to protect the American people against violence and threats of violence and that particularly includes public officials.”
As the outcry grew, the Biden Administration was forced into a retreat and an apology:
“On behalf of NSBA, we regret and apologize for the letter. There was no justification for some of the language included in the letter. We should have had a better process in place to allow for consultation on a communication of this significance. We apologize also for the strain and stress this situation has caused you and your organizations.”
We now know that rank-and-file officials opposed the effort, but decided to go forward anyway. The Justice Department in October 2021 issued a memo to coordinate a response to what it described as an “increase in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence against school board members, teachers and workers in our nation’s public schools” by parents.
Newly released emails raised all the objections later made by critics after the policy’s release. One deputy assistant attorney general wrote that:
“I don’t think it’s possible to state how strongly I object to this. It will completely and totally nuke our election threats efforts, and will damage the reputation of the Public Integrity Section into the bargain. It’s like they’ve affirmatively trying to make this thing not work and look political.”
When officials said that the Biden Administration was about to create an “Anti-MAGA Task Force,” officials responded, “Exactly! Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
Another principal deputy assistant attorney general wrote,
“We will not do this. There is no conceivable connection to [public integrity] (indeed, I’m not seeing a federal interest of any kind.). And if they’re going to make the AG’s memo to the field about this and election threats, I’m going to strongly recommend that they not send it.”
The Public Integrity section chief agreed, saying the memo could turn the Justice Department and the FBI into the “threat police” and that it contained “no limiting principle at all.”
The question is how such an ill-considered, excessive memo could be issued in light of such internal opposition. The answer focuses new attention on the record of Garland, who seemed at times to be a virtual pedestrian in decisions at his own department.
In 2022, I wrote a column titled “The Incredible Shrinking Merrick Garland” to express my disappointment in his developing record as someone who supported his nomination. Citing the school memo and other decisions, I wrote that Garland appeared increasingly “immaterial” to the running of the department:
“Garland sometimes looks more like a pedestrian than a driver on decisions in his own department. Top positions were given to figures denounced as far-left advocates on issues from defunding the police to racial justice. For the moderate Garland, these did not seem like natural choices.”
As Special Counsel Jack Smith took a hatchet to preexisting DOJ policies and the First Amendment in his crusade against Donald Trump, Garland seemed little more than a figurehead in refusing to exercise any moderating or supervisory influence. Likewise, as his department pursued a “shock and awe campaign” against citizens who joined the January 6th protests, Garland remained passive.
By 2023, I was writing columns that Garland had become an “utter failure” as Attorney General. He had become the kind face of a department weaponizing charges and targeting opponents. While the same charges have been leveled at the current Administration, that does not alter the troubling legacy of Merrick Garland.
The school board memo reflects how political rather than legal or institutional priorities prevailed under Garland. The merits of these controversies can be left to history. However, what is most striking is the absence of any discernible control or direction from Garland. Unlike his predecessor, Bill Barr, who was famously “hands-on” in his leadership style, Garland delegated authority to powerful subordinates, who carried out these measures with little apparent restraint.
As discussed in my 2022 column, Garland seemed to morph with the character Scott Stuart in the cult classic, “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” in which Stuart delivers a strikingly profound line: “The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet — like the closing of a gigantic circle.”
That may be the final epitaph of Merrick Garland’s record as United States Attorney General.
Re. Garland:
Tis but just one small fart in a Hurricane of treason the Democrats committed.
At some point the People are going to cook those Fkers in a Dutch Oven until their meat falls off the bones.
Well it is just ‘lovely’ that career DOJ officials objected to Biden weaponization BUT there ZERO resignations by these BIG VIRTUE CAREER TYPES over these policies and efforts weren’t there? The big virtue signalers only come out when they dislike TRUMP policies evidently. So hypocrites on staff.
Can’t argue that Biden wasn’t consistent across the board even to selecting a V.P. candidate who called him every name in the book. What is disconcerting is the number of voters who bought the package, and still would. Therein lies the rub.
You assume those voters were real.
Ignoring all the actual evidence against Fraud – Trump got 10M more votes in 2020 than 2016. He only got 5M more in 2024. Harris got 6M LESS than Biden in 2024 But Biden got 16M MORE than Clinton in 2016.
Trump’s popular vote numbers follow a pattern for Republican presidential candidates that is consistent through the 21st century of steady increases –
This is a similar trend for Democrats – EXCEPT 2020 – Where one of the worst candidates EVER run managed to get the highest number of votes in History
26M MORE people voted in 2020 than in 2016 – but about 6M LESS people voted in 2024 than 2020.
On the basis of the extremely anomolous increase in total votes alone – there should have been a very serious investigation.
For gosh sake Jonathan, you’re a decent man, but in this entire article you still appear to be telling us that all these radical evildoers were just good moderate democrats. How wrong your were! Today the moderate democrat equals; one individual John Fetterman!
M<Merritt Garland is someone that most would have believed was a moderate Democrat.
I strongly suspect that he actually is. Garland was NOT a radical evildoer – but he DID enable radical evildoers.
Sadly, it seemed there were (are) school committees who think they own the children, which made many parents very angry, which then made school committees angry and more demanding, which made….(etc., etc., etc.) When I think of the incidents during that period in the Virginia school system where a young student was allegedly raped in the girls’ bathroom, and supposedly the student moved to another school and allegedly “did it again”, it is very troubling. Now there is a story in the Virginia schools of several girls allegedly being touched inappropriately. We need to get along better, try to understand the other person’s opinion. Hate has become so prevalent.
And as to Merrick Garland, I always felt he figure it was payback for not becoming a supreme court justice.
Re: “We need to get along better…” Seriously!! What we need is for responsible parents to wake up and smell the burnt coffee, toss the asses of the goody two shoes, self-righteous, self-aggrandizing, virtue-signaling and hubris ridden supporters of the Woke Volksinitiativ and its Cancel Culture Gestapo, who sit on their school boards and elsewhere, out the goddam front door into the street. More over, find out who voted for them!!! THAT’s what we need, and in more institutions than just public education, for that matter.!!!! Time to take the country back!!!
We need school choice. Free markets solve these problems.
It is far harder to remove a nut job from local public office than to move your child to another school under a school choice system.
Apparently the Bush U.S. Department of Justice uploaded “suspicious persons” from as far back as the 1980’s to be placed on post-9/11 blacklists.
A complete and total fraud. “Suspicious Persons” (weaker evidence standard not found in the U.S. Constitution) from as far back as the 1980’s, placed on blacklists with 9/11 suicidal terrorists and mass murderers.
How it could work in real practice: a guy dating the cop’s daughter in the 1980’s could be blacklisted by corrupt local police in the 1980’s.
Bush’s DOJ created federal “Preemption & Prevention Grants” (blatantly unconstitutional). The net result was local and state governments were PAID billions in federal tax dollars to upload “suspicious persons” onto federal and international blacklists. Totally bypassing judges.
In covert blacklisting cases, if officials start believing someone is guilty or there is outright fraud, government officials will frame innocent Americans themselves.
Is there anything more evil than punishing innocent persons for 40 years, by exploiting the tragedy of 9/11? There is nothing more evil than punishing the wrong people through covert blacklisting.
You were a lot more fun when you were Peter Hill.
As I read this Garland is characterized as a bystander to the political weaponization of the DOJ. The opposition to the memo by DOJ staff was that it put in jeopardy more strategically important efforts to thwart to the MAGA movement by bringing unwanted attention to their efforts. Thank goodness that he did not make it to SCOTUS.
The top oath-sworn duty of the Justice Department is to uphold the U.S. Constitution and protect individual constitutional rights.
25 years ago up to 40,000 innocent Americans (1 million worldwide) were covertly blacklisted (Cointelpro tactics) by the oath-sworn AGs and oath-sworn U.S. Attorneys at the U.S. Department of Justice.
Many (maybe most) of these 40,000 Americans blacklisted 25 years (or more) have been harassed for more than 9000 consecutive days by local police and so-called “homeland security” officials.
All of these local, state and federal officials are oath-sworn to protect the constitutional rights of the up to 40,000 Americans destroyed and denied all constitutional due process.
Covert blacklisting seems to be “profit-driven” – agencies falsely grabbing billions of federal tax dollars, having little to do with national security.
We simply need “loyal” government employees that are loyal to their oath of office and stop practicing foreign style nanny-state government. Not sure anyone can name a single AG in 25 years that have been loyal to their oath of office loyalty oath. Can anyone name just one loyal AG?
The lesson to take home from Garland, Mayorkas, and the CHAZ zone in Seattle is to fight hard against politicization of law enforcement, no matter whether left or right in power. Discretionary prosecution is a horrible concept, as it serves as a fig leaf for politicization of the law. We should replace it with random case selection so that all laws are being enforced, and no group starts to see themselves as exempt from the consequences.
Now the question is, can the DOJ Civil Rights Division pursue a case of criminal Civil Rights violations against all those involved in pursuing this speech intimidation Police program???????
I think the term is figurehead. With a rubber stamp. We now know the depth and breadth of the appointees to the federal bench by Barack Obama and the record is extremely poor, at least from a constitutional point of view. This is the poisoned gift of the Obama Administration that just keeps on giving.
The fact that there were many Republicans Senators who were already signing up to vote for Garland when he was nominated for SCOTUS was extremely worrisome but we were saved by Mitch McConnell, no less. One wonders still if he really knew something or it was just hyper politics.
The most surprising thing to me were these memos and it does give me some solace that even in the Biden DOJ there was some sanity. But I noticed nobody said “I will not do this and then resigned and then said why they resigned”. That takes a little more courage.
There was no more corrupt, politicized “justice” department than the one run by Consigliere Garland. Disgusting. Anyone wondering how Fascism creeps in, look at that DOJ.
Personnel is policy and we have no idea who was running the WH while Biden was asleep at the wheel. Apart from the WH the people that the Biden team (whoever said team actually was) put people in positions of power who nominated far, far left wing judges and Justice Katanji Brown Jackson thereby continuing the assault on government from the radical left.
Who put Mayorkas in position to open the border to 10 million illegals in 3 1/2 years? How much damage has this done to our country?
Who named “Admiral” “Rachel” Levine to be Asst Sec of Health? Who nominated Sam Brinton, the bald guy in dresses and pearls to be in charge of nuclear waste? Who was the power behind these nominations?
Who decided to favor Iran over Israel? Who decided on all the unfit people that got pardons? Who decided that we should put a woman at the UN who doesn’t seem to be a fan of our country?
Who decided to name Scary Poppins as the person in charge of what is “officially ” disinformation needing to be censored? Who found her, he supported her and who almost foisted her on us like a Great (Mediocre) Britain type Tsarina.
Who decided that they should end the filibuster? Biden was a creature of the Senate and it is doubtful that a coherent Biden would have supported ending it. Who decided to ban voter ID nationally, a piece of HR1 and S1 that the left was trying to force on us nationally? Who wanted to add DC and PR as states? Who, who, who?
In a macro sense we must ask who decided that Biden should get the nomination in 2020 and that he should step away in 2024?
Garland was just another puppet of the radicals running the asylum under Biden, no different than Mayorkas or Jack Smith. They all worked in tandem to end Trump, end debate, end any chance of having two parties and any chance of freedom hanging on.
As bad as all that was, it will look like child’s play if this current cast of nut jobs get back in power.
@Bob
Agreed, and it was BAD. Insane. Unreal. They democrats will never be a viable party again, and they will continue to metastasize along with the globalist regime of which they are a part. We have to hold the line in this country.
Ah yes, the good times..
Well said, HullBobby!
I believe that when Garland lost his SCOTUS nomination, something in him snapped. His stiff upper lip cracked. His adherence to the law popped. Part of him was lost to emotion and part to seeking vengeance. This made him automaton-like—perfect for the Democrats. Like Biden, they gobbled him up. He got the big title but deferred the responsibility of managing it to others. As well, he was paralyzed by his own innate cautiousness.
Is it possible that the Biden goons had some dirt on guys like him and Mayorkas and forced them into submission?
Possibly. The taint of scandal is often the hidden motivator of treason.
Yes, I mean he had no other path in life to choose besides revenge as his career was over after he lost. I gotta give thanks to the people who defeated the crumb.
Makes sense. He’d spent his life building a resume that on paper would make him a good candidate for SCOTUS: Harvard College; Havard Law; clerked for a federal judge; private practice at Arnold and Porter; federal prosecutor; etc. – culminating in being named the Chief Judge of the DC Appeals Court – often referred to as the second most important court in the US and considered a natural stepping stone to SCOTUS.
I’m sure he was very disappointed to see his nomination to SCOTUS go down without a vote after having spent his life building a career that would seem to make him very qualified for the job.
Politics ain’t bean bag. Ask Miguel Estrada. He was highly qualified. But Democrats hold his nomination up in committee without a vote because they did not want Republicans getting credit for putting the first Hispanic on SCOTUS.
As always, thank you Professor for exposing the actual facts behind what our MSM are constantly characterizing as “crazy conspiracy theories.” Namely anything they don’t like.
Your work is invaluable. Thanks.
Sorry but not going to spent time reading an article that contains misspelled words in the title.
It’s a typo, not a misspelling. Meanwhile, physician, heal thyself.
So sorry for you, miss Karen
Well Billy what a good boy you are. Wouldn’t want a typo to force me into learning something is no way to go through life son.
Yet you will spend time commenting on what you will not read.
the liberal mind….all form….no function!
That’ll show ’em! nyah!
BillyG’s taking his ball and going home. and telling your mom on you.
Once again, thanks Mitch!
Garland fortunately did not get on the Supreme Court. We dodged a bullet there.
Nothing dodged, he left a legacy and Americans are paying for it.
What does it mean “Tarishes Record”?
It means there’s a typo. HTH
Democrats are fascists…and need to be DESTROYED!
guyventner is mentally ill.
Democrats when in POWER….refuse dissent!
Democrats jailed Republicans by the 1000’s!
Republicans have only begun to fight!