A whistleblower has revealed that the FBI created a “threat tag” in order to track alleged threats made to school board members and teachers after Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a controversial memo last month.
An email from Oct. 20 was released Tuesday by House Judiciary Committee Republicans showing that federal counterterrorism tactics were being used in investigations of parents at school board meetings.
The email to the Criminal Investigative and Counterterrorism divisions told agents to use the threat tag “EDUOFFICIALS” to track threats related to school officials. It read ‘We ask that your offices apply the threat tag to investigations and assessments of threats specifically directed against school board administrators, board members, teachers, and staff”.
The purpose of the threat tag is to help scope this threat on a national level, and provide an opportunity for comprehensive analysis of the threat picture for effective engagement with law enforcement partners at all levels.
The email also asked FBI agents to determine if if there are potential federal violations of the criminal activity and what the motivation behind it is.
House GOP said it gave “specific evidence that law enforcement operationalized counterterrorism tools at the behest of a left-wing special interest group against concerned parents”.
Judiciary Republicans shared a letter to Garland saying his testimony to the committee on Oct. 21 was incomplete and requires new questioning or it “willfully misled the Committee about the nature and extent of the Department’s use of federal counterterrorism tools to target concerned parents at school board meetings”.
The letter was signed by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio who tweeted “We now know the FBI is ‘tagging’ parents they consider threatening. The Attorney General has some explaining to do”.
The FBI released a statement to Fox News saying the threat tag ‘in no way changes the long-standing requirements for opening an investigation, nor does it represent a shift in how the FBI prioritizes threats”.
House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy also commented on the issue, saying “In an egregious abuse of power with the potential to unfairly track Americans’ activities, President Biden’s Department of Justice is using FBI criminal and counterterrorism resources to target parents”.
Like others, McCarthy is calling on Garland to “return to Congress to address, under oath, in detail, the discrepancies regarding the directives he issued involving investigating America’s parents”.