A group of conservative parental rights activists is calling for the resignation of Attorney General Merrick Garland following the release of an internal FBI email that showed the agency actively monitored threats against school board members.

Ian Prior, the executive director of the political action committee Fight for Schools, and the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo were among those calling for Garland’s resignation after House Republicans disclosed an internal FBI email that showed the agency’s counterterrorism office organized possible threats against school board officials under a “threat tag.”

View Comments (4)

The revelation sparked widespread outcry from conservative activists and politicians who said the email proves the FBI is investigating parents as domestic terrorists, contradicting previous testimony from Garland to Congress.

“I can’t imagine any circumstance in which the PATRIOT Act would be used in the circumstances of parents complaining about their children, nor can I imagine a circumstance where they would be labeled as domestic terrorism,” he testified last month.

Garland had issued a memo on Oct. 4 forming a task force between the FBI and the Department of Justice to investigate threats and harassment against school board officials at the request of the National School Boards Association, which petitioned the Biden administration to look into parents protesting at board meetings.

After public backlash, the NSBA apologized for the letter. Meanwhile, Garland refused to rescind his memo and defended it in testimony to the House and Senate judiciary committees, saying the apology “does not change the association’s concern about violence and threats of violence.”

“The attorney general needs to resign,” said Prior, who worked at the DOJ as a political appointee from 2017-2018. “He has completely lost the trust of the American people in the impartiality of the justice department.”

In a tweet, Rufo urged Garland to resign, calling him “a menace to truth, justice, and law.” . . .

On Tuesday, an FBI spokesperson said the use of the threat tag “is merely a statistical tool to track information for review and reporting. The creation of a threat tag in no way changes the long-standing requirements for opening an investigation, nor does it represent a shift in how the FBI prioritizes threats.”

Prior blasted the FBI’s explanation, saying it sounded “like the kind of excuse Joseph McCarthy would have given,” referring to the Wisconsin senator who led congressional investigations into alleged communist activities in the 1950s, often based on scant evidence.

“They’re making lists of parents speaking at school board meetings,” Prior said. “The most concerning part of this is not the threat language but the harassment and intimidation language. That is constitutionally vague and overbroad, and it has a chilling effect.”

“What they are doing now, all seems to be focused on having a chilling effect for political reasons,” he added.

What are your thoughts on this article? Let us know in the comments below!

(Excerpt from Washington Examiner. Article written by Jeremiah Poff. Photo by UnSplash)