The National School Boards Association notified the Biden administration that the group would ask the Department of Justice to devote federal anti-terrorism resources to investigate threats against school board members, internal emails show.
The emails, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the government accountability organization Protect the Public’s Trust and reviewed by the Washington Examiner, detail the extent to which the NSBA coordinated with the White House and the Department of Education when it released its Sept. 29, 2021, letter that compared parents protesting at school board meetings to domestic terrorists and asked the Biden administration to use the Patriot Act to investigate threats against school board members.
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“We ask that the federal government investigate, intercept, and prevent the current threats and acts of violence against our public school officials,” the September 2021 letter said. “As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
The NSBA later apologized for and retracted the letter, but not before Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo on Oct. 4, 2021, establishing an FBI-DOJ task force to investigate threats against school boards. Months later, NSBA emails revealed that Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona had solicited the letter, a charge the Department of Education denies.
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In the emails, then-NSBA chief Chip Slaven informed White House official Mary Wall on Sept. 21, 2021, that the organization planned to send the letter — a full week before it was released. Wall forwarded the email to a number of Department of Education and White House staff.
“As I indicated last week, NSBA is also planning to send the President a letter requesting federal assistance to help school board members and public schools manage these threats,” Slaven wrote in the email to Wall. “We hope to have that letter ready to go by Thursday.”
Officials in the administration also celebrated Garland’s memo responding to the NSBA’s letter.
In an exchange with a Department of Justice official, Suzanne Goldberg, then the acting assistant secretary for civil rights at the Education Department, said she was “very glad to see the memo.”
Protect the Public’s Trust has filed a lawsuit against the DOJ, seeking to force the department to comply with a FOIA request for that agency’s communications with the NSBA.
In a statement to the Washington Examiner, Protect the Public’s Trust Executive Director Michael Chamberlain said the documents obtained by the organization provided a window into the federal government’s efforts to quash protests from parents.
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“This is a sad episode in a very frightening tale — a government ostensibly of the people, by the people, and for the people turning on its own people, turning on parents trying to protect their kids,” Chamberlain said. “While we all abhor the use of violence and threats to advance policy goals, the government has to clear a high bar to avoid trampling on the constitutionally protected rights to speech and protest. The documents we have uncovered in this lawsuit provide even more evidence that the federal government was a participant in creating a narrative to justify lowering that bar and chill the exercise of those rights.”
The Washington Examiner has contacted the Department of Education and the NSBA for comment.
