House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, representing Ohio’s 4th District, sent a warning shot over the bow of the Biden Administration on Friday, subpoenaing top officials to hand over documents to the committee relating to investigations of Americans who merely protest their local school board policies.
Subpoenas were sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, and others.
According to the subpoenas, the officials are “commanded” to produce documents to the Judiciary Committee by March 1. The subpoena comes as Jordan sent four letters to various officials Friday, calling for information and interviews the committee has been requesting, in a final warning shot before he sent the subpoena their way.
The subpoenas relate to a memo sent by Attorney General Garland, describing a “spike in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence” against school boards.
It’s a mission that Jordan has been on for months, after it was discovered that the National School Board Association was directing the actions of the White House, in order to criminalize parents who become school activists. In November, Jordan wrote to FBI Director Wray, saying that if the documents didn’t get turned over, there would likely be a subpoena during the 118th Congress, as control changed over to the Republicans.
“Over the past twenty-one months, we have made several requests for information and documents concerning the Biden Administration’s misuse of federal criminal and counterterrorism resources to target concerned parents at school board meetings. We reiterated and itemized these requests in our recent letter of October 17, 2022, which is enclosed for your convenience. To date, you have ignored these requests. Please be aware that if our requests remain outstanding at the beginning of the 118th Congress, the Committee may be forced to resort to compulsory process to obtain the material we require,” Jordan wrote in November.
In January, the Biden Administration told Jordan he would have to resubmit all of his requests for documents, now that he was going to be in the Republican majority in January. The Feb. 3 subpoena is the answer to the White House’s digging in of its heels.
In 2021, citing an increase in what it called harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school board members, teachers and workers in public schools, Attorney General Garland directed the FBI and U.S. Attorneys’ Offices to begin meeting with federal, state, Tribal, territorial and local law enforcement leaders to discuss strategies for addressing what it saw as a trend that may require the heavy hand of federal authorities.
“Threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation’s core values,” wrote Garland. “Those who dedicate their time and energy to ensuring that our children receive a proper education in a safe environment deserve to be able to do their work without fear for their safety.”
The White House and the National School Board Association were, that year, coordinating with federal officials to criminalize parents who have started to pay attention to what their local school boards are promulgating with critical race theory and gender ideology.
A report to the House Judiciary committee last year said that the FBI was artificially inflating statistics about domestic violent extremism in the nation.
“Whistleblowers have described how FBI leadership is pressuring line agents to reclassify cases as domestic violent extremism even if the matter does not meet the criteria. They also explained how the FBI is misrepresenting the scale of domestic violent extremism nationwide by categorizing January 6th-related investigations as organic cases stemming from local field offices, instead of all related to one single incident. In both ways, the FBI is fueling the Biden Administration’s narrative that domestic violent extremism is the biggest threat to our nation,” the report said.
“The FBI is abusing its counterterrorism authorities to investigate parents who spoke at school board meetings. Whistleblowers disclosed how, shortly after the National School Boards Association urged President Biden to use the Patriot Act against American parents, the FBI Counterterrorism Division set up a special “threat tag” to track school board-related cases. Whistleblowers provided evidence of how the FBI opened investigations into one mom for allegedly telling a local school board ‘we are coming for you’ and a dad simply because he ‘rails against the government’ and ‘has a lot of guns,'” the report said.
Read the Department of Justice memo on its investigations into threats against school officials.
Read the House Judiciary report on the politicization of the FBI’s investigation.
