Attorney General Merrick Garland appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee to answer questions about his involvement in the drafting of a DOJ memo to the FBI requesting support for investigations of parents who attend school board meetings across the country.
While the topic is downplayed by U.S. corporate media, the specifics of the issue are pertinent in that they highlight the politicization of the Justice Department by DOJ officials throughout main justice and the various offices of U.S. attorneys.
Garland was prompted to write his instructions as an outcome of the White House coordinating with leftist political operatives within the education system, specifically the National School Board Association.
It seems apparent, from the questioning and responses today, that Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco was the central DOJ official who coordinated the political intent of the memo. Monaco was previously President Obama’s homeland security advisor and lawyer in the White House. Within the main justice structure, Lisa Monaco is now the head of the DOJ National Security Division, the agency given the prosecutorial power within the Garland memo.
The background of the memo involved parents becoming aware of Critical Race Theory (CRT), essentially Marxist lesson plans within various regional school boards. The parents responded to the information by confronting school boards across the nation. The left-wing political operatives were caught off guard by the massive assembly and grassroots organization of parents in almost all states.
The CRT and education issue galvanized across party boundaries as Republican, Independent and Democrat voters -who are also parents- united in a common cause against the Marxist indoctrination material that is akin to the same playbook that triggered the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
Quickly awakened parents and concerned citizens were confronting the issue, and their commonality became a political risk to Democrats. This triggered contacts from various left-wing organizations to the White House.
The Joe Biden White House -filled with Obama ideologues- responded to the threat of intense political damage, by organizing pushback against parent groups through the various educational organizations, teachers unions and community activists. Their assembled strategy resulted in the letter from the National School Board Association, to the DOJ into the awaiting hands of DAG Lisa Monaco.
Monaco, having previously seeded the discussion within Main Justice about the political threat, then organized and helped draft the memo quickly signed by AG Merrick Garland. The NSBA letter arrived on Friday, and the AG memo instructing the FBI to target parents was signed the following Monday. Everything in the background of the issue highlights how the political needs of the White House become the focus of activity by the U.S. Justice Department.
In essence, the Merrick Garland memo highlights how the DOJ is weaponized against the political opposition of the White House; this is the larger issue.
Given the recent examples of the DOJ being weaponized against their political opposition, the Garland memo is seemingly just another data point in an endless assembly of data-points that prove just how corrupt the U.S. system of justice has become. However, just because corruption is rampant and transparently obvious does not mean we should allow ourselves to become numb with anticipation of that corruption.
Action to address that corruption starts at the local level with a committed and engaged citizenry who actively address and hold accountable their local school board members and educational officials.
The intent of the Garland memo was to frighten parents away from the corruptions within the education system with the threat of the FBI investigating them. If you allow your behavior and expectations to change based on fear, those who count on fear to manipulate the outcome will win.
Many people view these confrontations by Senators as nothing more than public displays that amount to no accountability. In part, that is correct; however, it is not the responsibility of a senator, any senator, to confront the school board member where the origin of accountability needs to reside.
The role of a U.S. Senator is to hold the federal arm of the DOJ accountable and put them on notice. This is what they are doing. The role of the engaged citizen is to address the educational manipulation on a local level. You cannot abdicate your responsibility to confront corrupt activity in your neighborhood to Washington DC. It is the role and responsibility of the parent/citizen to deal with that corruption.
Snarking at Senators for confrontational hearings might feel like a good way to deflect our responsibility. However, all it does is erode the foundational principle behind our constitutional republic which is built upon individual rights and responsibilities that start at the local level. Those who believe the federal government should address local school board issues, are, by nature of their argument, asking for a larger system of centralized government.
One of the lesser highlighted aspects to Attorney General Merrick Garland using the FBI to investigate parents as domestic extremists when they attend school board meetings, is that Garland put the prosecutorial process in the DOJ- National Security Division (DOJ-NSD).
From the perspective of the general public, the DOJ-NSD has become a well known division within the DOJ in the past several years, because it was within this division where the lawfare alliance constructed their political targeting operations against candidate Donald Trump. The DOJ-NSD is where the secretive title-1 FISA applications are created and submitted to the FISA court.
As established by AG Eric Holder and DAG Sally Yates, the DOJ office of inspector general, the internal self-checking mechanism to act an a watchdog, was also blocked from having oversight into the DOJ-NSD throughout the era of Barack Obama. This lack of oversight was intentional to keep the DOJ-NSD political operations hidden from any review.
The DOJ-NSD was the home for John Carlin, Mary McCord, Andrew Weissmann and Bruce Ohr among others who conducted the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s classified email use and later into candidate Donald Trump via the FBI Crossfire Hurricane operation. It is the DOJ National Security Division that selects targets for prosecution (ex. FARA) based on political affiliation. In this round of questioning by Tom Cotton, the Arkansas senator focused on the use of the DOJ-NSD by Merrick Garland. WATCH: