Exposing the Garland Memo: A Case Study in Government Weaponized Against Parents

On October 4, 2021, the Attorney General of the United States issued a directive that would rattle the very foundation of American civil society. Parents, concerned about their children’s education, found themselves recast not as civic participants but as potential threats to national security. According to a memo issued by AG Merrick Garland, the Justice Department would coordinate with the FBI and US Attorneys to address a supposed spike in threats against school board officials. But the underlying claim was a fiction. And now, thanks to newly released internal DOJ documents obtained by America First Legal (AFL), we can say conclusively what many suspected at the time: the Biden administration orchestrated this memo as part of a political operation, driven not by law or evidence, but by ideology and electoral calculus.

Let us begin with a question. Why did the Department of Justice, whose jurisdiction is meant to guard against actual federal crimes, insert itself into a public conversation dominated by non-criminal speech? The answer, as the documents now confirm, is that it did so at the prompting of the White House, which viewed parents not as constituents to be heard, but as dissidents to be managed.

The initial spark came from a September 29, 2021 letter sent by the National School Boards Association (NSBA) to President Biden. In this letter, the NSBA urged the administration to treat protests at school board meetings as akin to "domestic terrorism," citing the Patriot Act as a model for possible federal intervention. The invocation of such a statute was absurd on its face. Protesting mask mandates or objecting to Critical Race Theory, however forcefully, does not rise to the level of terrorism. But what is more damning is what followed: a flurry of communications within the DOJ, indicating that officials were under pressure to respond.

On October 1, just two days after the NSBA letter, Tamarra Matthews-Johnson of the Attorney General’s office flagged the matter for Kevin Chambers at the Deputy Attorney General’s office, stating that the White House "has been in touch" about how DOJ might assist. At 8:17 a.m. the next morning, Sparkle Sooknanan, then of the Associate Attorney General's office and now a federal judge, demanded an urgent review from the Civil Rights Division: were there any statutes, any authorities, that could justify a DOJ response? The request was extraordinary. It was a classic case of the tail wagging the dog. They had the political goal, and now needed a legal rationale to support it.

What followed was a quiet rebellion from within. Career attorneys in the Civil Rights Division, legal professionals whose job is to interpret law rather than bend it, pushed back. One stated explicitly that the behavior cited by NSBA "likely fall[s] outside of our jurisdiction." Another said, unequivocally, "there is nothing specific" that could be applied. The attempt to find federal jurisdiction was, in the understated phrasing of another DOJ attorney, "ramping up an awful lot of federal manpower for what is currently a non-federal conduct."

In other words, the law said no. But politics said yes. So politics won.

By the morning of October 4, a draft memo was already circulating. Language referring to election interference was quietly stripped out, after concerns that it would appear overtly partisan. But the core premise of the memo, that DOJ would mobilize against parents based on a manufactured crisis, remained untouched. The final version went out that day to the FBI, US Attorneys, and law enforcement nationwide.

To understand the magnitude of this decision, one must consider the federal apparatus being invoked. We are not speaking of a local school district or even a state attorney general’s office. We are speaking of the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the National Security Division. These are the institutions tasked with defending the United States from foreign threats, organized crime, and acts of terrorism. Now they were being mobilized against citizens speaking at school board meetings.

Some defenders of the memo have insisted that it was a neutral effort to ensure safety. But the internal documents tell a different story. Not only did the DOJ lack jurisdiction, but it also lacked data. One Civil Rights attorney reviewed the NSBA’s own sources and concluded that “the vast, vast majority of behavior cited cannot be reached by federal law" and that most of it "is protected by the First Amendment."

At this point, any good faith rationale should have evaporated. The legal authority did not exist. The facts did not support intervention. And the lawyers responsible for enforcing civil rights said as much. But Garland's DOJ, driven by political appointees, forged ahead.

Why? To chill dissent. To create a pretext for federal monitoring. And, most damningly, to tilt the political field in favor of Democrats ahead of the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election.

The timing is revealing. At the very moment when education was emerging as a major campaign issue in Virginia, the Biden administration intervened with a chilling federal directive aimed squarely at the parents who were driving that conversation. The effect, if not the intent, was to intimidate them into silence.

This was not merely a bureaucratic misstep. It was, as AFL President Gene Hamilton put it, an effort "to deprive parents of two fundamental rights—the right to speak, and the right to direct the upbringing of their children." And it was done under color of law, through an administration that promised to restore norms while quietly undermining them.

What is perhaps most distressing is the downstream effect. The FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, blindsided by the memo, was left scrambling to define what exactly it was being asked to do. Internal messages reveal confusion and concern, not just about the lack of legal basis, but about the very premise. Was this really what the federal government was now for?

A free society depends on more than the formal guarantees of its Constitution. It depends on the restraint of those in power. It depends on a culture of governance that distinguishes between disagreement and danger, between protest and threat. When that distinction is lost, freedom becomes a mere parchment barrier.

The Garland memo was not an isolated event. It was a signal. It told Americans that certain views, particularly those out of step with the educational elite, would not be tolerated without consequence. It told career DOJ attorneys that their legal advice could be overruled by political expedience. And it told the White House that federal power could be used to police ideology under the guise of law enforcement.

We must reject this approach categorically. Not because we are indifferent to the safety of public officials, but because we know that civil liberties are not things to be managed or balanced, but principles to be upheld. The right to speak at a school board meeting, however impassioned, is not a loophole in national security law. It is the beating heart of American self-government.

The documents released by AFL do more than expose a scandal. They illustrate the dangers of weaponized bureaucracy. They reveal a Justice Department more interested in political theater than legal fidelity. And they confirm, beyond dispute, that the October 4 memo was not about law enforcement. It was about silencing dissent.

In his inaugural address, President Biden claimed he would "restore the soul of America." But there is nothing soulful about suppressing speech, circumventing legal advice, and intimidating parents for participating in democracy. That is not restoration. It is repression, dressed in bureaucratic prose.

The Biden administration must be held accountable for its actions. Congress should investigate not merely the memo itself, but the full extent of White House involvement, the decision-making process within DOJ, and the broader pattern of targeting political dissent. And the American people must remain vigilant, lest today’s memo become tomorrow’s precedent.

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