Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee claim in a new report that local law enforcement pushback to a memo issued by Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2021 on threats to school boards around the country supports their conclusion that there was “no legitimate basis” for the directive.
House Republicans also claim in the report, which provides an update to their investigation, that the memo must have been issued for political purposes – but the report does not include any direct evidence to support the allegation that any decision made by the DOJ was politically influenced.
Democrats have been quick to criticize the House GOP report, saying it lacks evidence to back up its claims.
The top Democrat on the House Judiciary panel, Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler, criticized the committee’s chair in a statement to CNN, “Jim Jordan has cherry picked a few sentences from hundreds of pages of documents to manufacture a book report on a debunked conspiracy theory. As with all of his recent work, he has produced little or no new evidence to support his claims.”
The GOP report comes as Republicans have accused the Biden administration of targeting conservative speech at school boards, a claim that Democrats have pushed back on with Garland in the center of the political controversy. Republicans have also sought to elevate the issue of so-called parental rights in the classroom as a key priority for the party.
Garland’s 2021 memo, which ordered federal law enforcement to meet with local authorities around the country to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats” against education personnel, came after a spate of protests and other disruptions targeting school officials over Covid policies, school curriculum and other issues.
The National School Boards Association asked the Justice Department at the time to address…
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