RUTHFULLY YOURS

There was heavy breathing this week from House Republicans regarding Attorney General Merrick Garland’s abominable October 2021 directive that the FBI harass and intimidate parents who object to the woke indoctrination of their children by progressive school administrators. Garland’s memo echoed the suggestion of left-wing activists that the parents could be investigated as if they were domestic terrorists.

Garland’s actions are as condemnable as ever. GOP efforts notwithstanding, though, the only significant development in this story in the past six months is that the FBI has performed well. Director Christopher Wray has refused to let the bureau be sucked into the Biden Justice Department’s weaponizing of federal law enforcement.

Back in November, I explained that Representative Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, had prematurely leapt from the correct premise that the FBI had opened a category of investigations, known in bureau parlance as a “threat tag,” to the unfounded conclusions that (a) the bureau had employed against parents such national-security authorities as the PATRIOT Act, whose investigative measures are meant for (mainly foreign) terrorists, and (b) Garland had committed perjury during congressional testimony when he denied that the FBI had either resorted to such measures or labeled parents as “domestic terrorists.”

Our Zachary Evans has the latest news about the investigations and, despite the renewed efforts of Jordan and Representative Mike Johnson (R., La.), what we’re learning is somewhat comforting.

To repeat what I said six months ago, the abomination here, about which Republicans are right to keep reminding people, is that the Justice Department brandished its awesome investigative powers in an effort to stifle parental dissent. It was a nakedly political gambit. There is no federal jurisdiction to monitor relations between parents and schools. There is no surge in violence against school administrators. Given the vastness of our country and the importance of education, it is inevitable that there will be occasional incidents of potentially criminal threats or assaults. But such incidents — in which school officials are often more at fault than parents — are not federal crimes; they are the concern of state and local law enforcement.

Yet, in its desperation to mollify the radical Left, the Biden administration quietly collaborated with progressive activists at the National School Boards Association on a letter to Garland, which depicted parents as domestic terrorists and implored the Justice Department to act on supposed threats. This served as the pretext for Garland’s October 4 memo directing district U.S. attorney’s offices throughout the country to work with the FBI in addressing this purported crisis.

FBI director Wray has tried to walk the line between distancing the bureau from this lunacy and openly defying the attorney general, who himself has pretended that the memo doesn’t say what it says.

Naturally, the FBI’s managerial ranks did what bureaucrats do. In response to the AG’s directive, they created a category for the investigations that Garland called for — in bureau-speak, a “threat tag.” The FBI has threat tags for all kinds of investigations; they help the agency organize its resources, and analysts can detect patterns of criminal behavior that are peculiar to the category, which then helps agents better conduct their investigations. But to be clear, a threat tag is not a grant of authority to use any particular investigative measures, much less confirmation that such measures are in fact being used. It’s just an organizing device.

The threat tag in question is “EDUOFFICIALS.” According to unidentified FBI sources whom Jordan and Johnson describe as “brave whistleblowers,” the bureau created a tip line for complaints and opened “dozens” of investigations under that heading.

The congressmen assert that the threat tag was “created by the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division” and suggest that “counterterrorism resources” were deployed in the relevant investigations. Both claims are misleading. The first is contradicted by the letter itself, which elsewhere acknowledges that both the Criminal and Counterterrorism Divisions established the threat tag. This is standard administration: The then-bosses of the two divisions agreed on the EDUOFFICIALS category. But the congressmen deduce from the counterterrorism chief’s participation in this bureaucratic exercise that the investigations must have been deemed counterterrorism cases. In point of fact, it appears that they were barely “investigations” or “cases” at all (I’ll come to that).

Jordan and Johnson’s claim that the investigations used “counterterrorism resources” appears to be a further untenable deduction from the fact that the counterterrorism chief participated in the establishment of the threat tag. They offer no evidence of this. Significantly, the term “counterterrorism resources” is very different from counterterrorism authorities or counterterrorism investigative measures. Despite the information from the whistleblowers, the congressmen make no claim that the FBI has exploited the PATRIOT Act, FISA, or any other counterterrorism laws against parents or other EDUOFFICIALS subjects.

A word about investigations. The FBI does not open a full-blown investigation every time it receives a tip or a complaint. Usually, unless there has obviously been a serious, prosecutable federal crime, the bureau will do some preliminary checking if, on first blush, it decides there is something worth looking into. Often, the agents quickly conclude that there is nothing to pursue — because there is no federal jurisdiction and/or scant evidence of criminal conduct serious enough to merit prosecution. They simply drop the matter.

At most, the three “investigations” related by Jordan and Johnson appear to be instances of this. I say “at most” because it’s not clear that enough was done to describe the preliminary checking as “investigations.” Hiding the ball, the congressmen don’t give you the bottom line until they’ve hyperbolically described these “investigations.” So let’s cut to the chase. After all the huffing and puffing about how “startling” all this is, the congressmen admit:

Although FBI agents ultimately — and rightly — determined that these cases did not implicate federal criminal statutes, the agents still exerted their limited time and resources investigating these complaints.

So what “investigating” did they do?

The only matter in which the congressmen say the FBI interviewed a potential subject involved a complaint by a school board after a mother made a threat — “we are coming for you” — which the nice progressives at the board took to be a threat of potential violence because the mother was conservative and “a gun owner.” An FBI agent interviewed the mother, learned that the mother was upset about school policy and was working to get the school board replaced through the normal electoral process. The bureau thus quickly closed the matter.

Now, to be sure, the board’s complaint was not the basis for a federal investigation. If, say, a parent were to attack a school administrator, that would be a state criminal assault, not a federal crime. It would thus have been better if the FBI had simply referred a complaint of this type to the local police. Still, the bottom line is that some law-enforcement official was almost certainly going to follow up, quickly see that there was nothing criminal afoot, and drop the inquiry. No, it shouldn’t have been an FBI agent, but that it was is hardly scandalous.

In the other two instances, it is not clear that the FBI even preliminarily investigated anyone.

In the first, the bureau got a patently politicized complaint, on what the congressmen derisively mock as the “snitch-line,” that a father who opposed mask mandates “fit the profile of an insurrectionist,” was a gun owner, etc. The bureau did not investigate the dad; the agents instead decided to question the complainant, who grudgingly conceded that he or she had no actual evidence. The FBI thus dropped the matter — and I imagine, after the visit from the agents, that complainant will think twice before doing something that stupid again.

In the other case, Jordan and Johnson claim that the FBI “opened an investigation of Republican state elected officials” because Democrats claimed that they “incited violence” by complaining about vaccine mandates. But it doesn’t appear that the bureau did anything active except close the case. The congressmen don’t allege that anyone was interviewed or that the bureau did any actual investigating.

It is all well and good for Jordan and Johnson to agitate over Garland’s directive and the likelihood that it spurred more complaints from professional leftists than might otherwise have been lodged. But the fact is: The FBI gets tips like this all the time, and would get them regardless of whether it had instituted the farcical bureaucratic category of “EDUOFFICIALS” cases. The thing that matters is what the FBI does with these complaints.

There has been plenty of bad bureau news over the past several years, so let’s take heart that this is a good bureau story. Under pressure from an attorney-general directive that is all too typical of a blatantly politicized Justice Department, the FBI has resisted pressure to be drawn into divisive politics. After AG Garland disseminated his demagogic memo, Director Wray had the bureau issue a statement: “The FBI has never been in the business of investigating parents who speak out or policing speech at school board meetings, and we are not going to start now.” Wray pledged a continued commitment “to preserving and protecting First Amendment rights, including freedom of speech.”

Happily, far from implicating the FBI in the abuse of counterterrorism authorities, the Jordan/Johnson letter indicates that Wray has been true to his word.