Sometimes, it takes five years for the U.S. federal government to even begin to correct a miscarriage of justice. On October 4, 2021, then-U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland issued an infamous memo vowing to commit federal resources to investigate, as domestic terrorists, concerned parents over constitutionally protected speech against local school board policies. On Monday, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Weaponization Working Group finally published a scathing report on the “Garland Memo,” along with proposed steps to provide justice for the parents whose constitutional rights were so egregiously ignored.

Over the past five years, independent and congressional investigations revealed that the Biden administration colluded with the National School Boards Association (NSBA) on a letter asking for federal pressure on parents, which preceded the Garland memo by only five days. It also revealed that federal law enforcement resources, including counter-terrorism resources, were devoted to compiling evidence against more than a dozen parents. All this promoted a manufactured “threat” built on zero evidence. The greatest contribution of the Weaponization Working Group report is to show that the Biden DOJ pursued this policy despite consistent and unanswered internal dissent.

“When requested by the Biden Administration to act on the NSBA Letter and to treat parents objecting to school policies and curriculum as federal criminals and potential terrorists,” the report described, “officials in the Department of Justice … initially pushed back on doing so. … Notwithstanding the internal pushback, the Department moved ahead with issuing the Garland Memorandum.”

NSBA Memo

On September 29, 2021, the NSBA published the NSBA Letter, which “demanded that President Biden direct federal action against parents and others who were allegedly threatening school board members,” the report described. The letter “labeled numerous instances of constitutionally protected speech and protest as ‘threats,’” the report summarized.

“The NSBA Letter failed to disclose that its authors had selectively chosen examples that were atypical and presented a skewed picture of parental activity nationwide,” it continued. Furthermore, it “encouraged the federal government to treat that speech as criminal. It requested ‘appropriate enforceable actions against’ those parents, including potentially prosecuting parents who protested school board activities as engaging in ‘domestic terrorism.’”

The backlash to these extreme and baseless allegations was swift. Within weeks, most state school board associations dis-associated themselves from the NSBA. On October 22, the NSBA was forced to publicly apologize to its remaining members, saying that “it ‘regret[ted] and apologize[d] for the letter,’ explaining that ‘there was no justification for some of the language included in’ it,” the report explained.

In spite of this, the NSBA memo met with far more success than it deserved. “We were called every name imaginable” and “portrayed as domestic terrorists,” one parent complained. Another became “enemy number one of” the school board. Some school boards compiled dossiers on parents who complained.

NSBA Collaboration with Biden Administration

Worst of all, the Biden administration lent public credibility to the NSBA by publicly granting its request for a task force and investigations only five days later — nearly a land speed record for a gargantuan bureaucracy.

The reason for this speed is that the DOJ was complicit in the NSBA’s game, the report details, and that it short-circuited is usual procedures to achieve the desired outcome.

“As the NSBA itself admitted, the NSBA Letter — and the subsequent Garland Memorandum — were the product of collaboration between NSBA leadership and high-ranking officials in the Biden Administration, including at the White House,” the report stated. “Simply put, the Garland Memorandum was an outgrowth of the NSBA Letter.”

According to documents reviewed by the working group, a draft of the NSBA letter, “in substance, the same as the final NSBA Letter,” was circulated to DOJ personnel by Ephraim McDowell, a Deputy Associate Counsel at the White House Counsel’s Office, as early as September 22, a week before the letter was publicly “sent to the White House.” The document eventually made its way to Associate Deputy Attorney General Kevin Chambers, “who oversaw the Criminal Division” and “ultimately took the lead on the effort,” the Working Group said.

Internal Dissent

From the start, staffers at the DOJ and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were skeptical about targeting parents. Chambers’ first reaction was that any criminal conduct alleged in the list of incidents compiled by the NSBA was “state/local in character.” Other attorneys in the Office of the Deputy Attorney General (ODAG) did not view the conduct as criminal, or suggested that federal involvement should be limited to providing grants or technical assistance programming,” instead of investigations.

One passage in the Working Group report can only be described as a genius of dry comedy. “ODAG also sought further clarity from the White House, which simply said its request was ‘to see if you have any ideas,’” they wrote. “However, the documents … indicate that the group at ODAG considering the White House’s request did not have many ideas — and certainly none that suggested that the NSBA had identified criminal conduct.”

“As they continued to struggle to identify an appropriate way for the Department of Justice to be involved, one attorney [Robyn Thiemann] said, ‘This is ridiculous,’” the report continued.

And there it should have ended. The White House asked the DOJ if it had any ideas for how to prosecute parents, and the DOJ lawyers responded to the suggestive raised eyebrows with a decisive shrug of their shoulders, as if to say, “we’re not magicians.”

As it turned out, a magical wave of the hand was just what the Biden administration wanted. The Working Group estimates that Chambers “likely … assumed leadership” of the NSBA portfolio at or around a September 27 meeting, even though “Chambers was still skeptical that the NSBA had identified a significant source of federal criminal conduct.”

“Chambers stressed that he found it ‘unclear’ what the White House was asking, that the issue ‘seem[ed] mostly state/local,’ and that it was unclear whether the Department of Justice had any relevant enforcement authority over parental protests of school policies,” the report said. “At the same time, Chambers believed he ‘may not be thinking creatively enough.’” Chambers was assigned a task as impossible as squeezing blood from a stone, but he felt enough pressure from his political bosses to at least try.

Still, attorney dissent to the project continued. One subordinate raised concern that “[t]he constitutional right part is what appears to be missing from this picture.”

On September 29, the NSBA published the letter it had pre-choreographed with the White House, and on October 1 the Biden administration ramped up their pressure on the ODAG staff. McDowell communicated to Chambers that day “that others in the federal government considered the issue ‘as fairly urgent’ and that they were ‘interested to hear what DOJ is thinking about them,’” the Working Group reported. “The Chief of Staff to the Deputy Attorney General, Anita Singh, emailed “ODAG staff, including Chambers,” and demanded that they “respond ‘ASAP’ and ‘in the next couple of hours.’”

This left the DOJ attorneys with no choice but to employ the classic but usually immoral strategy, “show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” They looped in the civil rights division, the national security division, and even referenced “a list of federal statutes prosecutors use to respond to threats to members of Congress” in search of some legal ground against parents. But they came up empty because of one fundamental point: parents who speak out against bad school board policies are doing nothing wrong.

Still, under intense pressure to deliver something, Chambers turned to the FBI and “expressed interest in having the FBI treat school board threats as domestic terrorism,” the Working Group continued. “The FBI appeared leery of Chambers’ request.”

“This is potentially dangerous ground, to blanket label generalized activity that constitutes [domestic terrorism] regardless of federal violations,” wrote FBI attorney Steven Jensen. FBI attorney Kevin Vorndran also harbored doubts, “I get concerned when I see DoJ/CTS write ‘… politically … motivated threats.’ … The FBI has been focused on the violence or actions of the individual and to not broadly label an individual a [domestic terrorism] subject based on the fact s/he has a policy or political disagreement with elected officials.”

Political Override

All this dissent did nothing to slow the speed of the creation and release of the Garland Memo, although it may have forced one change. “On October 2, 2021, Chambers sent an email to a group of Department of Justice attorneys flagging that he would circulate ‘a draft memo from the AG’ that would address parental protests of school board members and ‘threats against election officials.’”

This reveals two points. First, the “Garland Memo” is appropriately named, as it seems to originate with his office, and not with any of the career DOJ attorneys tasked with applying the law. Second, the memo was originally designed to combine the school board issue with “threats against election officials,” although this point was later abandoned.

“Attorneys in the Criminal Division ‘strongly’ objected to merging the two topics, with one calling it ‘horrible,’” the Working Group reported. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” vented another. “They might as well rename the d*** thing the Anti-MAGA Task Force,” said a third.

“We did not sign up for this and object in the strongest terms,” complained Attorney Corey Amundson, who oversaw the DOJ’s public corruption division, “The partisan nature of this issue is already apparent.”

Such remarks raise the question of whether Amundson and other attorneys who dissented from the Garland memo simply belong to the minority of undercover Republicans in the federal workforce. However, Amundson resigned a week into Trump’s second term, making that theory far from likely. Another attorney, Paige Fitzgerald reaffirmed that “the vast, vast majority of the [parental] behavior cited cannot be reached by federal law” in the same email that she admitted to participating in student boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) protests against South African apartheid.

Despite the chorus of unaddressed dissent from both the DOJ and the FBI, Chambers invited “input on final ‘views/red-flag concerns’” on October 4.

That same day, “only five days after the NSBA sent its letter to President Biden — Attorney General Merrick Garland issued the Garland Memorandum, raising the specter of federal prosecution of parents, like Mr. Smith, who chose to speak out about school policies affecting their children’s health, safety, and education,” the Working Group reported. “After the Garland Memorandum, the FBI opened a number of investigations into school board threats with a whistleblower disclosing that the Bureau had investigated a mom because she belonged to a ‘right-wing mom’s group’ and ‘is a gun owner’ and a dad because ‘he rail[ed] against the government.’”

In other words, without any legitimate basis to investigate parents, the Biden DOJ eventually stooped to investigating them for activity protect under the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution.

The memo’s publication appeared to take other FBI officials, who had not been consulted, by surprise. When one official asked Deputy Assistant Director Jay Greenberg “if he was aware of the Garland Memo; Greenberg responded: ‘Not in time to stop it,’” said the report. Another FBI official “complained that the Department of Justice issued a press release about the Memo ‘without any coord,’ and said she wanted to ‘narrow the scope’ of FBI’s role ‘to something that makes sense.’”

“Even though the announcement of the release appeared to take FBI off guard, the Department of Justice made sure to reach out to the NSBA in advance,” the Working Group added, with more dry irony. “An official in the Office of Public Affairs emailed [NSBA interim executive director and CEO Chip] Slaven a copy of the memorandum on October 4, 2021, explaining that this was a very important issue to the Department.”

Even once Chambers established a “Task Force dedicated to implementing the Garland Memo” on October 6, DOJ personnel continued to gripe that they “did not ‘see a need for a task force like this’ because federal law enforcement agencies can ‘simply investigate credible criminal threats that have a federal nexus.’” And again, the DOJ does “not ‘start a narrowly focused task force every time some group believes they are the subject of threats.’”

“Regardless of the continuing internal criticism, the Garland Memorandum resulted in investigations of parents,” the report found. As the House Judiciary Committee previously discovered, the FBI opened 25 total “Guardian assessments” against parents and 17 investigations under a special threat tag created for the purpose, named “EDUOFFICIALS.” Six investigations were run by the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, 17 by its Criminal Investigations division, and two by the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. One reached “Full Investigation” status. No charges were ever filed.

Post-COVID Context

The Garland memo followed an inflection point in American education. Involuntary at-home learning during the COVID-19 lockdowns clued in many parents to the Marxist indoctrination taking place in schools. As the restrictions began to lift, parents organized and spoke out at school board meetings against the teaching of ideas spawned by critical race theory and transgender ideology, as well as against the anti-student COVID policies that remained in place long after the absence of danger to young, healthy people was well established.

The hottest flashpoint came in Loudoun County, Va., an affluent county outside of D.C., where a partisan swing over education ultimately helped carry Glenn Youngkin (R) to victory in the 2021 governor’s race. That summer, parents opposed a district policy that allowed transgender-identifying boys to use the girls’ locker rooms and rest rooms.

“At a June 22, 2021 meeting of the Loudoun County School Board, Superintendent [Scott] Ziegler brazenly stated: ‘To my knowledge, we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms. … The predator transgender student or person simply does not exist.’”

However, the Working Group report added, this claim was false, and Ziegler knew it was false when he said it. On May 28, “a male student dressed in female attire” raped a disabled girl “in a girls’ restroom stall. … That same day, Loudoun County Public Schools Superintendent Scott Ziegler notified the Loudoun County School Board that a female student had reported being sexually assaulted by a male student in a school restroom.” The student was “convicted of sexual battery and forcible sodomy” on October 21.

The victim’s father, Scott Smith, was present at the school board meeting and tried to correct the school board’s false statements. “When Mr. Smith challenged this claim at the school board meeting, he was arrested and prosecuted,” the Working Group report recorded, “and his prosecution only ended after he received a gubernatorial pardon.”

Response and Redress

On his first day in office, President Trump issued an executive order “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government” that directed the administration to “identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to the weaponization of law enforcement and . . . the Intelligence Community.”

Pursuant to this end, Attorney General Pamela Bondi established the Weaponization Working Group, which has now released its report. On June 11, 2026, the Working Group held a roundtable at which it heard testimony from the very parents targeted by the Biden administration. And Bondi “formally rescinded the Garland Memorandum.”

The Working Group proposed five steps “to provide redress for parents who were targeted and intimidated and to deter such conduct in the future”:

“1) Parents and other participants at school board meetings who became the subject or target of an FBI Guardian assessment as a result of the Garland Memorandum will be offered the opportunity to review the Guardian [assessment].

“2) A disclaimer will be added to Guardian assessments associated with the Garland Memorandum. The majority of these Guardian assessments have been closed or discontinued, but this disclaimer will note that the Garland Memorandum raised serious constitutional concerns, and so any Guardian assessment resulting from it should be read with caution.

“3) The Department will review the files of anyone who was investigated under the Garland Memorandum to determine if their constitutional rights were violated. To the extent such a violation is found, the Department will issue a formal apology and institute internal controls as necessary to prevent repeating the violation.

“4) Through the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, the Department is partnering with the National Association of School Resource Officers and awarding them $1.5 million to develop and deliver a series of training and technical assistance directly to our nation’s school resource officers. The goal of this grant is to increase the organization’s capacity to inform school employees regarding the rights of parents in our primary and secondary educational system.

“5) Through the Office of Justice Programs, the Department is prioritizing additional funding to provide resources and training to schoolteachers and staff about the First Amendment rights of parents and the rights of parents to direct and guide the upbringing and education of their children.”

Conclusion

“The chilling effect of the Memorandum on First Amendment rights is plain on its face, was flagged by Department attorneys, and discussed during the Roundtable,” the Working Group concluded. Its errors include “the absence of evidence that internal concerns were fully vetted and resolved by senior Department leadership, the obvious issues with treating parental protests as potential violations of federal criminal law, the plainly political nature of the subject-matter of the Garland Memorandum, the rush to produce a product that would respond to the NSBA Letter, and the evidence of coordination between the NSBA and senior Biden Administration officials.”

“The initial skepticism of Department of Justice personnel proved well founded,” they continued. “It was the product of political pressure from outside groups and White House officials in the Biden Administration who pushed Department of Justice leadership to inappropriately weaponize the Department of Justice and to chill the constitutional rights of parents.”

The obvious issues with the scheme were buried under the political concerns of the moment. But, five years later, they look just as foolish and partisan as conservatives insisted they always were.