Free Republic

A constitutional battle is shaping up over whether the U.S. government can force the owners and top employees of small businesses to send their addresses and photo IDs to federal financial crime investigators. The Biden administration has appealed a decision by a federal judge in Alabama, who ruled this month the Corporate Transparency Act exceeded the powers granted to Congress by the Constitution. The government says the information collected from small businesses will ferret out shell companies and help law and intelligence officers foil human smugglers, drug traffickers and terrorists. The appeal has a good chance because courts rarely strike...

The House Judiciary Committee fired off its first subpoenas under the leadership of Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), targeting a trio of Biden administration officials including Attorney General Merrick Garland over a short-lived memo dealing with threats against school board members. The subpoenas, sent also to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, follow a series of more than 100 letters on the 2021 memo from Judiciary Republicans. Garland signed the memo in October of last year, noting a “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff” amid broader discussion...

A draft version of the infamous letter the National School Boards Association (NSBA) sent to President Biden likening angry parents to domestic terrorists even asked for the Army National Guard and the military police to be sent in to certain districts. 'We ask that the Army National Guard and its Military Police be deployed to certain school districts and related events where students and school personnel have been subjected to acts and threats of violence,' the draft letter, which was later amended, read, according to an independent review of the letter. The NSBA originally sent a letter to Biden in...

States accuse Biden administration of concealing and downplaying its 'culpability' in school board memo.. Thirteen states have signed on to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking Biden administration records on any FBI surveillance of parents protesting school boards. Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, a former member of Congress, has taken the lead in the lawsuit against President Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, citing a failure of U.S. officials to honor FOIA requests. The Indiana attorney general previously demanded all communications and records relating to the FBI's decision to investigate violent threats against local education...

We’ve seen this coming for a while now, like a slow-motion train wreck. After the National School Board Association (NSBA) sent a letter to the Biden administration comparing parents to domestic terrorists and even suggesting the PATRIOT Act might be used to reign them in. That turned out to be the last straw for a lot of parents and maybe also for the NSBA. The group apologized for the letter in late October but by that point the damage was done. Within days, five state associations canceled their membership in the national group. By early December the number of associations...

And the plot thickens. Newly released emails show that Education Secretary Miguel Cardona was behind the letter sent last September from the National School Boards Association which requested federal intervention against parents protesting at school board meetings, comparing them to “domestic terrorists,” the New York Post reports. An email shows that on October 6, NSBA Secretary-Treasurer Kristi Swett told NSBA board member Marnie Maraldo that Chip Slaven, then serving as interim CEO of the organization had admitted to fellow officers that “he was writing a letter to provide information to the White House, from a request by Secretary Cardona.” The...

While the battle over education has settled back into the trenches over the last few months following Glenn Youngkin’s big win in Virginia, we are beginning to learn more about how parents became so demonized.As RedState reported at the time, the NSBA sent a letter to the DOJ that urged action against parents speaking out at school board meetings under the guise of the Patriot Act. The DOJ then used that letter as justification to use its counter-terrorism division to add “threat tags” to parents.But as bad as that was, today’s news makes it all the worse. While we knew...

Internal emails prove that there was coordination between the White House and DOJ before the National School Boards Association (NSBA) released its letter describing parents as “domestic terrorists”. The emails show that the letter was weeks in the making. The letter wasn’t just some spontaneous reaction to some concerned parents heatedly speaking out at school board meetings. The NSBA sent the letter to Biden on September 29. Five days later, on October 4, the DOJ issued a memo directing law enforcement to investigate threats to school boards. The NSBA president, Viola Garcia, sent a memo to NSBA members on October...

NSBA's letter to the White House caused a political firestorm FIRST ON FOX: Newly released emails shed light on the discontent within the National School Boards Association (NSBA) after its letter to the White House suggested that parents might be engaging in domestic terrorism. Obtained by Parents Defending Education (PDE), the internal emails show multiple state-level officials expressing dismay over the now-infamous letter's content and the purported process for reviewing it. "Clearly, this was orchestrated and the letter contrived for political theater," reads an email from Sally Smith, executive director for the Alabama Association of School Boards. "If NSBA is...

Internal documents released Thursday confirm that the National School Boards Association coordinated with the White House before formally sending a letter to the Biden administration requesting federal intervention to probe and potentially prosecute parents for threatening school administrators. In an October 12 memo , obtained by the nonprofit Parents Defending Education, NSBA president Viola Garcia stated that the organization had been “actively engaged” with federal departments including the White House, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, before sending their letter to the president. Chip Slaven, NSBA’s interim executive director, wrote in a September 29 email that the letter, which...

Newly-released internal emails reveal that the National School Boards Association coordinated with the White House and the Department of Justice before sending President Biden the notorious letter that compared concerned parents to domestic terrorists. Emails provided to Fox News show that NSBA had coordinated with the White House for weeks beforehand. Viola Garcia, the NSBA president whom the Department of Education later named to a federal board, sent a memo to NSBA members on October 11 (but dated October 12), providing a timeline of the NSBA's interaction with the White House ahead of the letter to Biden, which the NSBA...

Backlash over the National School Boards Association’s (NSBA) decision to target parents has been felt far and wide. Even the NSBA is apologizing for its role. So, why won’t Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Arizona School Boards Association (ASBA) do the same? A little more than six years ago, I co-founded the House Freedom Caucus to push back on bullies in Congress who used their political power to pressure our colleagues to ‘fall in line’ rather than stick to their principles. I’m seeing similar attempts at intimidation again today, only this time the bullies are school board bureaucrats who...

MISSION, Kan. (AP) — School board races, once sleepy and localized, have become the new front in a culture war raging across the nation as resentments over COVID-19 restrictions and anti-racism curriculum reach a boiling point. On Tuesday, voters weigh in on dozens of races that have been dominated by debates over masks, vaccines, race and history. The outcomes will decide not just districts' policies but also whether the education fight has staying power as part of the national discourse and becomes a rallying issue for Republicans in the 2022 midterms. Conservatives have eagerly taken up the cause as they...

New emails reportedly show that a Massachusetts school board association executive was ecstatic about the National School Board Association’s letter calling for the Department of Justice and FBI to intervene with concerned parents. According to documents obtained by the concerned parent group Parents Defending Education and reviewed by the Daily Caller, the executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees (MASC) sent an email to the CEO and President of the NSBA stating that the committee was “very happy” that the national board “reached out to the FBI.” “We in MASC are all very happy that NSBA has reached...

On Thursday, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) took a swipe at Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), saying that Cruz was “defending Nazis” after Cruz referenced a parent who gestured with a Nazi salute at a school board meeting in order to point out that the incidents in the NSBA letter that seemingly precipitated Attorney General Merrick Garland’s memo targeting parents at school board meetings were largely non-violent incidents. Cruz fired back, “You are frequently a liar (when you’re not sleeping with Chinese spies).” He added, “But here, you’re (sic) lie is exactly 180 degrees false. I was defending the right of citizens...

Attorney General Merrick Garland declined to pull back a memo directing the FBI to help local police address reported harassment, intimidation and threats of violence against educators and school board members under questioning from Sen. Mike Lee on Wednesday. The Utah Republican pointed out that the National School Boards Association has apologized for a letter to President Joe Biden last month... “Will you rescind your letter?” Lee asked Garland during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.... ...Lee said he and his staff went through every news source mentioned in the school board association’s letter. “There was no explicit death threat and...

An ideologically-aligned cabal of people in various agencies of the federal government are working together to shut parents down.. a war on parents and every part of the government is getting involved. The latest front began with a letter from the National School Board Association ... the NSBA compared concerned parents speaking up at school board meetings to "domestic terrorists" and called for the "U.S. Departments of Justice, Education, and Homeland Security," the FBI, "including any technical assistance necessary from, and state and local coordination with, its National Security Branch and Counterterrorism Division" to step in .. using the Patriot...

One official with the National School Boards Association who penned a letter to President Biden likening some parental behavior at local school board meetings to “domestic terrorism” has been appointed to a federal post. The New York Post reports that Viola Garcia, the president of NSBA, was appointed by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to the National Assessment Governing Board, established in 1988 during the latter stages of Ronald Reagan’s second term. The organization “oversees and sets policy for the National Assessment of Education Progress,” the paper reported. Known as “the Nation’s Report Card,” the governing examines student performance on a...

A 14-year-old Loudoun County, Virginia, high school student charged with two counts of sexually assaulting a schoolmate in a bathroom has been found guilty in an adjudicatory hearing in Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court. During opening statements of the two-hour hearing, Loudoun County prosecutor Barry Zweig said the two teens chatted daily on the Discord app, in the weeks leading up to the May 28, 2021, incident at Stone Bridge High School, in Ashburn. The teens had “sexually charged conversations,” and had engaged in consensual sexual relations twice in weeks prior, in a bathroom at the school. On May...

There’s breaking news in the horrible case of the young girl who was sexually assaulted in the Loudoun County Public School system that drew so much public attention.A Judge ruled that the sexual assault that occurred on May 28 was “nonconsensual” and found the boy guilty on both charges that had been filed against him as to forcible sodomy and forcible fellatio by way of force, threat, or victim helplessness.🚨BREAKING via ⁦@EliciaBrand⁩ ⁦@ArmyOfParents⁩: Judge Brooks ruled the boy who raped Scott and Jessica Smith’s daughter engaged in nonconsensual sex. Sentencing will be next month. Lawyer says: “We are relieved that...