Article by Elle Reynolds in The Federalist
Biden Education Secretary Planting NSBA Letter Takes A Page From Russia Collusion Hoax Playbook
If corrupt federal law enforcement agencies can run a covert smear campaign against a U.S. president, they can do it to you.
Biden’s Education Secretary Miguel Cardona requested the infamous letter from the National School Boards Association comparing protesting parents to domestic terrorists, emails published Tuesday revealed, demonstrating even further the Biden administration’s entrenched efforts to smear its political opponents as threats to national security.
In an Oct. 5 email obtained by Parents Defending Education, NSBA Secretary-Treasurer Kristi Swett wrote that NSBA interim Executive Director Chip Slaven “told the officers he was writing a letter to provide information to the White House, from a request by Secretary Cardona.”
That letter, which smeared concerned parents who showed up at school board meetings as domestic terrorists and urged the Department of Justice to use terrorism laws against them, was cited by Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland as the reason he directed the FBI and state attorneys to take action against “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.” The NSBA later apologized for the letter, but that wasn’t enough to keep dozens of state school board associations from distancing themselves from the national organization over the debacle.
This is a bomb shell report. This letter (which the NSBA later embarrassedly retracted) demanded that the Biden Adm. treat parents as domestic terrorists, and led to Att. Gen. Merrick Garland's threat of using the FBI. It appears that the Adm. actually manufactured entire thing. https://t.co/Tr3fCdC4mT
— Mike Gonzalez (@Gundisalvus) January 11, 2022
The idea that a member of the president’s cabinet secretly planted a political message in an outside organization, then acted on the request with the force of law under a pretense of neutrality, is scandalous. But it’s far from the only example of the Biden administration’s “domestic terrorism” smear campaign against its political dissidents.
On the same day these damning emails were revealed, the politicized Department of Justice announced a new “domestic terrorism unit” to deal with “an elevated threat from domestic violence extremists,” including “those who ascribe to extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies.” Read: anyone who challenges the regime, never mind the fact that the same “authorities” spent all four years of Trump’s term challenging the president’s legitimacy.
We’ve already seen the attempts by the Biden administration and its media cheerleaders, in the wake of Jan. 6 last year, to declare anything they disagree with a “threat to democracy,” up to and including democracy itself, the U.S. Supreme Court, and half of our bicameral legislature.
Declaring Parents a National Security Threat
Just last week, former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe used an event at the Univesity of Chicago to push a similar, discredited narrative, accusing participants at school board meetings of “political violence.”
“Political violence [is] not just confined to the Capitol,” McCabe said, according to reporting from Evita Duffy. “It’s going on in school boards around the country. It’s going on in local elections. It’s happening, you know, even to health-care workers.”
McCabe went on to call it “essential” to have a “rapid and complete response by law enforcement at the state, local and federal level to this sort of political violence.” Further, McCabe suggested the actions of concerned parents “serve[] to undermine our democratic process” and are “considered a threat to national security [that is] not tolerated.”
Discontent to simply target concerned parents, the disgraced FBI official also claimed that targeting the “fringes of the right-wing movement” was insufficient to “catch this threat,” and instead called for federal suspicion of “mainstream” conservatives.
“When the intelligence community and the law enforcement community looks out across this mainstream,” he said, “they didn’t assume [on January 6] that that group of people — business owners, white people from the suburbs, educated, employed — presented a threat of violence, and now we know very clearly that they do.”
A Page from the Russia Collusion Playbook
Not only does Cardona’s plant reflect the entire administration’s unilateral effort to discredit conservatives as national security threats, it also mimics the strategy Russia collusion hoaxers used to target the Donald Trump campaign and later his administration (in which McCabe played a key role).
In both instances, a political actor planted fake information to discredit a political opponent. In the Russia hoax, the Hillary Clinton campaign secretly bought and paid for the Russia collusion information operation, including a dossier full of lies and information that was weaponized by the media and federal agencies. In the case of targeting parents, Cardona pretended his anti-parents operation originated from a third-party player like the NSBA, in an attempt to target parents who challenge leftist school boards.
Additionally, both instances saw a government agency headed by a political hack use external groups to push its narrative. With the collusion narrative, James Comey’s FBI allowed corporate media actors to push the hoax to hurt Trump, “despite the fact the FBI knew as early as October 2016 that its primary piece of evidence, the Steele dossier, was tainted by Russian influence and disinformation,” as Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, noted in November.
Comey’s FBI used this baseless suspicion to weaponize the Justice Department against the Trump campaign. In Cardona’s assault on parents, the education secretary pressured the NSBA to push its narrative as a launch point from which to weaponize the DOJ against parents and conservatives at large.
We should be disgusted with the Biden administration’s shadowy efforts to smear American parents as enemies of the state, but we shouldn’t be surprised. If corrupt federal law enforcement agencies can do it to a U.S. president, they can do it to you.
