Treating Parents Like Terrorists? New DOJ Memo Revealed

Today on Sekulow, a whistleblower reveals a DOJ memo from the Biden administration treating parents like terrorists. We'll talk about that more today on Sekulow.

Keeping you informed and engaged, now more than ever, this is Sekulow. If you read that leaked email, what you see is that they are drawing up lists of crimes. They're saying, is there any crime that we could go after these parents for? Is there anything that we could prosecute them for? Federal. Federal crimes we're talking about.

They're definitely trying to target parents. It does contradict Garland's sworn testimony, and now he's going to have to answer as to what the difference is. We want to hear from you.

Share and post your comments. Or call 1-800-684-3110. We asked Chairman Nadler yesterday, when will you bring back the Attorney General to answer questions?

After all, it sure looks like he misled the American people when he gave the answers that he did. And now your host, Jordan Sekulow. Welcome to Sekulow.

We are taking your phone calls at 1-800-684-3110. So as you remember, there was a controversial memo put out by the Attorney General October 4th of 2021 about the partnership between the FBI and local law enforcement to go after parents because of school board meetings. The Attorney General, I held that in my hand right now, the Attorney General was then questioned by the Committee on the Judiciary on October 21st and testified that they were not using counterterrorism statutes and resources to target concerned parents. He said he could not imagine any circumstance in which the Patriot Act would be used in circumstances of parents complaining about their children, nor circumstances would they be labeled as domestic terrorists. Well, a whistleblower has come out with a memo that was sent around the FBI, which the DOJ and Garland oversees, the day before he testified.

The day before he testified that he couldn't imagine parents would be treated this way. Well, here's what it says to do. As a result of what's been happening to school boards, the counterterrorism and criminal divisions of the FBI have created a threat tag. EDU officials, education officials, to track instances of related threat.

Here is what they're looking for. Is there a federal nexus to the action? So could they get involved as the FBI? Are there potential federal violations that they can investigate and charge?

What's the motivation? Let me tell you before I go to my dad, this is signed off by the Assistant Director of Counter Terror at the FBI and Assistant Director of Criminal Activity at the FBI. So these are top officials, exactly opposed to what Garland was testifying, he could never imagine happening.

Well, let me say a couple things. We have seen this scenario before, and the specifics of seeing this scenario before. Is there a federal nexus? Are there potential federal violations that can be investigated and charged? What is the motivation behind the criminal activity?

Let me tell you what that all means. That is the same thing that the FBI, Department of Justice, Department of the Treasury, and the FEC, when Lois Lerner sent out that email saying, gee, if we can find one thing to charge here, we could really do something. Can we find one charge against one of these groups? That'll shut them down. And that's exactly what the FBI is doing here, or the Department of Justice, except its parents at a school board meeting. Now, if there was harassment and problems at a school board meeting, you know what you can do?

You can call the local police. But to turn it into the counter-terrorism unit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to handle local parents at a local school board meeting is not only ridiculous. I think it's illegal. I don't think they have any federal nexus if they want to answer that question. And I think, frankly, they're putting parents in jeopardy and make, what are they going to do, start getting warrants, subpoenas?

The local police were able to handle any emotions that were running high during the COVID situation. You're going to turn that into a federal counter-terrorism investigation. How about get the bad guys?

They're equating parents who care about their kids and actually show up at the school board meetings to, well, hey, this is what the FBI put out. We do these kind of tags like for drug traffickers and human traffickers. You mean federal criminals?

Those are federal crimes, clear federal crimes. As you're comparing these parents to drug traffickers, I'll say right off the bat, if a parent makes a physical threat of violence, local law enforcement should handle that easily. They should be in trouble. If they carry out any act of violence, of course they should be in trouble. But they should be able to have meaning behind their words if they get a little heated.

That's okay. That's why we have public debate in our country. Support our work at ACLJ.org. Share this broadcast with your friends and family.

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So I want to play this. This is Attorney General Garland. He is testifying. This is on the 21st of October before the House Judiciary Committee.

Take a listen. The Justice Department supports and defends the First Amendment right of parents to complain as vociferously as they wish about the education of their children, about the curriculum taught in the schools. That is not what the memorandum is about at all.

I can't imagine any circumstance in which the Patriot Act would be used in the circumstances of parents complaining about their children, nor can I imagine a circumstance where they would be labeled as domestic terrorism. OK, so really? I mean, that's what you're saying. And we've got a memo, a joint message from the Criminal Investigation Division and the Counterterrorism Division.

So dated October 20th, the day before you testified. Now, here's the problem. If this was Bill Barr who made that misstatement, could you imagine what they'd be calling for? So that's, Harry, you talk about a double standard here. This is beyond that. I think it is. I think essentially what we are witnessing is a form of collusion, base or conspiracy. So we have the Counterterrorism and Criminal Division basically asserting, along with national school board associations and some local school boards, that parents are effectively domestic terrorists. So the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the school boards have essentially entered into a collusive agreement to target parents. It all started with a letter sent by the National School Boards Association in late September. Then the Justice Department sprung into action around October the 4th. Then Attorney General Garland testified before Congress on October the 21st. And now a whistleblower has essentially revealed the scope of this attempt to target and intimidate parents to the extent that parents oppose school mass, to the extent that they oppose sexual assault in restrooms, to the extent that they oppose critical race theory.

That is a local as opposed to federal matter. So, Than, I want to go to you on this because I want to get a sense of what's going to actually happen. But having said that, can I say this?

I want to play Senator Lindsey Graham. He's been on this broadcast many, many times. Listen to what he said. If you go to a school board and you get unruly, you've got local law enforcement to deal with you. So here's what bothers me. What jurisdiction hook does the FBI claim to start following school board meetings? I can't think of a federal jurisdictional issue here.

So this is scary. If the FBI can just reach out and start tracking parents at school boards, then they're overstepping their boundaries. They're limited in terms of their charter.

When I hear that, when I hear that Senator Graham is saying, listen, this is not the job. This targeting is wrong. They're limited in their jurisdiction, their charter. This is where the jurisdiction limits.

There's not a federal conspiracy here across state lines. The things that they relate it to are human trafficking, which means you're taking people and taking them across state lines. That triggers federal investigations. For prostitution and for child abuse. And then drug trafficking.

That is, of all things, too. If you're talking about parents engaged in civil disobedience, which they're not really even here. They're talking about either you've made a violent threat against someone or you're raising your voice too much at the meeting.

But the idea here is that would the FBI be the right tool to go after that kind of, if it was civil disobedience, it would be the states and localities who would need to make sure that they can keep a well-run school board meeting. Look, I did this. You remember these kids.

You were young. When the federal government tried to regulate abortion protests, my argument was, wait a minute. If there's a violation of the state trespass laws here, right here. I mean, you bring in local law enforcement and you charge people with trespass.

You don't charge them with violations of the federal Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. That's why, by the way, six justices of the Supreme Court agreed with me. But I want to go to Than because you've got Lindsey speaking out. I know that Jim Jordan speaking out. Merrick Gartland made a total misstatement here.

And that is in the record right now. Absolutely, Jay. I mean, I think there's a substance point. That's the one that Senator Graham's making.

And then there's a process point. That's the one that Congressman Jim Jordan is making. On the substance of the conversation that you just had with Jordan. Look, the FBI wants to say that these are just like the tags we use for drug trafficking and human trafficking. Yeah, Jay, those are federal crimes. This is not a federal crime. They need to stay focused on their jurisdiction.

They need to let local law enforcement handle it. But on process, Jay, we played a clip during the break from Congressman Jim Jordan and he said, look, the attorney general was before us the day after this memo was issued. And he said, I can't imagine that this is taking place.

Well, here's the problem with that. It was taking place on the day he made that statement. So the point that Congressman Jordan is making is the attorney general, Jay, absolutely has to come back in front of Congress and clarify that record. In the absence of that, Jay, this is an incorrect statement to Congress.

That's a very serious problem. Yeah, but he says he couldn't imagine it, that they would be treated like, you know, that counterterrorism would be used in the Patriot Act. But then the memo from his own department the day before said it was written by the Counterterrorism Director. And the former Counterterrorism Director, Strzok, take a listen to him trying to defend this on MSNBC Bite 16. It's a pleasure to get to ask you about stories about Russia or Iran or international terror threats. It is bizarre to have you here to ask you about the FBI having to protect school boards in America.

How does this land inside the FBI? Well, I think, Nicole, the first thing is people need to step back and say who in their right mind would oppose law enforcement looking into threats of violence against teachers? Here's the problem. No one in their right mind opposes local and state law enforcement officials looking into violence against local school teachers who work for cities and municipalities. We're talking about here the school boards.

They are an extremely localized part of representative government in America and they are the furthest away from the federal government. By the way, that's Peter Strzok. And I know that Nicole Wallace said, oh, I wish I was talking about Iran and Russia. He never focused on that. His whole job always at the FBI was going after Americans. First of all, he couldn't talk about Iran and Russia because he was part of the whole Russian nonsense to begin with. He's part of the promulgator of what we now know was a total fraud. The American people know and everybody knows that the media covered it for 28 seconds when it was finally for three years we litigated with Bob Mueller, two and a half years. The main source has been indicted. So Peter Strzok relied on him and I'm sure he was promoting the idea of continued counterterrorism, crossfire, hurricane, and then of course you had FISA warrants.

But I put all this together and say, why would you take federal resources, Harry, to do this? Well, I think for political reasons, and I think the Biden administration is not shy about using the weight of the federal government to target its political opponents. And so I think at the end of the day, there's a fundamental mistake that the Justice Department, that the Biden administration has made, and that is to deploy its resources to go after political opponents in a representative or democracy or republic. And so if you look, though, at the individuals who are targeted, these are individuals who oppose the progressive playbook. These are individuals who oppose, for instance, critical race theory, and the Biden administration, Department of Education, for instance, supports critical race theory.

If you look at critical race theory even more closely, what do we find? We find that Attorney General Garland's son-in-law runs a firm that profits from critical race theory. So at the end of the day, the Biden administration is quite willing to put its interest ahead of the interest of the American people. This, to me, Thanh, just quickly, I know we've heard a lot of outrage on the Hill, but now that we have all this information, is there any way Garland doesn't have to return and answer these questions? I mean, he clearly was not, at best, he didn't know what his own department was doing. He wasn't forthcoming, Jordan. He certainly did not tell the entire truth.

In my view, there's no way he can't come back and not testify. Just quickly, Jordan, I just can't help myself. Peter Strzok and MSNBC, I mean, imagine this conversation behind the scenes. Who can we find to ask about the proper role of federal law enforcement?

Oh, I know. Let's ask the guy who got caught abusing his power as a federal law enforcement. Let's have him come on and answer that question. Just unbelievable, Jordan. You know what?

Jordan's what you said earlier. Merrick Garland gets up there, makes a totally incorrect statement. Totally false statement. Because the day before, his own Department of Justice had a memo with the Counterterrorism Unit on it. And what is the accountability here?

I'll tell you what we're doing. We already have a team of lawyers at the ACLJ working on this. Because you know there are memos behind these memos. This final memo did not come out of thin air.

They didn't just come up with this. There's going to be a memo. And there's going to be a memo that led to these memos. And we're going to find out what was going on here. There's more from the DOJ and their Inspector General when we get back, but the overall takeaway from him is maybe to not be the most distrusted agency.

They're now almost the most distrusted. Need to be a little bit less political. That's seriously about your Department of Justice.

We'll be right back. Only when a society can agree that the most vulnerable and voiceless deserve to be protected is there any hope for that culture to survive. And that's exactly what you are saying when you stand with the American Center for Law and Justice to defend the right to life. We've created a free, powerful publication offering a panoramic view of the ACLJ's battle for the unborn.

It's called Mission Life. It will show you how you are personally impacting the pro-life battle through your support. And the publication includes a look at all major ACLJ pro-life cases. How we're fighting for the rights of pro-life activists. The ramifications of Roe v. Wade 40 years later. Play on parenthood's role in the abortion industry. And what Obamacare means to the pro-life movement. Discover the many ways your membership with the ACLJ is empowering the right to life. Request your free copy of Mission Life today online at ACLJ.org slash gift. At the American Center for Law and Justice, we're engaged in critical issues at home and abroad. Whether it's defending religious freedom, protecting those who are persecuted for their faith, uncovering corruption in the Washington bureaucracy, and fighting to protect life in the courts and in Congress, the ACLJ would not be able to do any of this without your support.

For that we are grateful. Now there's an opportunity for you to help in a unique way. For a limited time, you can participate in the ACLJ's Matching Challenge. For every dollar you donate, it will be matched. A $10 gift becomes $20.

A $50 gift becomes $100. This is a critical time for the ACLJ. The work we do simply would not occur without your generous support. Take part in our Matching Challenge today. You can make a difference in the work we do, protecting the constitutional and religious freedoms that are most important to you and your family. Give a gift today online at ACLJ.org. If you watch our broadcasts on Facebook, Periscope, YouTube, Rumble, I want you to share it with your friends and family now. They all have a way to share the video with the people that are your friends on these various social media outlets because I want to make sure this information is getting out to people.

Because there is more. The Department of Justice, we just got an excerpt from the Inspector General's report on, quote, Department of Justice top management and performance challenges in 2021. You know what it is? Maintaining independence from political influence by adhering to and strengthening policies designed to ensure objectivity and impartiality. It goes on to say, one important strategy that can build trust in the Department of Justice is to ensure adherence to policies, remember that includes the FBI, and procedures designed to protect DOJ from accusations of political influence or partial application of the law. As we found in a prior report examining various actions taken during the election, decisions to deviate from the FBI, the DOJ's established procedures and norms negatively impact the perception of the Department.

Check this one out. In March of 2020, Pew surveyed 1,000 adults and asked them their overall opinion of 10 federal agencies how favorable it was. Of the 10 agencies including in the survey, DOJ ranked ninth. Only worse, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And we know why that is. There's a crisis on our border that isn't being addressed.

This is how bad. This is the real issue here. The American people, and we've been fighting this, we've been fighting the IRS.

The IRS was setting people up the exact same way. Can we find a federal nexus? Can we get a federal investigation to go after these Tea Party groups?

Can we get the motivation behind the criminal activity? Can we get the APC involved? Can we get the DOJ involved?

We could just file one group, one case, we could stop this. The entire country ranks them as nine out of 10 of the worst government agencies. That says a lot for our nation's top law enforcement officials.

It's terrible. To Merrick Garland, to the Biden administration, to the FBI and Christopher Wray, you have taken an organization which I think most people thought was without political. It's about human trafficking and crimes and drug trafficking and counter-terrorism instead of targeting American citizens for free speech. And this, to me, is the reason why this bureaucracy, we have to watch so carefully these spending bills, Dan, because they just pump money back into these agencies who are being told by their Inspector General, you're partisan, you're out of control, and it's why the American people don't have faith in you. Well, those bills doubled the size of the IRS. They also send money to the Department of Justice to prosecute those that the IRS turns up.

Look, there will be prosecution money in this as well. And Jordan, as you were going through that, you talked about how they're saying it negatively impacts the American people's perception of the agency. Absolutely true, but Jordan, it also negatively impacts the reality of their effectiveness. In order to have the resources to allocate in this direction, you have to take them away from the very things that the FBI statement itself said that they're supposed to be doing, drug trafficking and human trafficking. Jordan, we fund these agencies so that they can prosecute the crimes that fall in their jurisdiction, and if they're going to get outside of their lane and try to do something that someone else is already responsible for, it by definition means that the dollars the American people send to that agency to prosecute drug trafficking and human trafficking, Jordan, it's not being used for that purpose, so there's more lanes for those criminals to run in. I mean, our annual drug overdose deaths, it's hit record levels.

We topped 100,000 for the first time in, I guess, the fiscal year or the reporting over a 12-month period. Most of those, a lot of those related to Fentanyl. You know where that's coming from?

Overseas. You know where that, again, jurisdiction would be because they're trafficked across state lines? DOJ focus, how to keep that out of the American's hands so that people are not dying in record numbers, but no, their focus is all politics. What their inspector general is saying is stay out of politics, especially local politics. That's what the school board is. It is about local decisions, local elected officials, not even state officials, the most local you could get.

County municipalities, townships, villages. That's what we're talking about, but it's interesting that, and what Jim Jordan said is it calls into question the accuracy and completeness of Merrick Garland's sworn testimony, which we know that's being nice for saying untruths were testified to. Now, he may not have been aware of it. I'm not accusing him of that. He may not have been aware of his own department, but that has to know the record needs to be corrected. But it's so interesting to me when we talk about this tag, a tag is merely a statistical tool, you said this before, to track information for review and reporting. The FBI has used tags to track, as you said, drug trafficking and human trafficking in local school boards.

I mean, that's where none of this makes sense. Let's grab a phone call here. Yeah, let's go to Bill in Wyoming on Line 1. Hey, Bill, welcome to Sekulow. You're on the air.

Yeah, thank you for taking my call. This has got me really upset because it seems to me that what they're doing with the FBI is not worrying about the base and security, but they're going after parents instead of taking care of the real criminals that are running through the whole country here. No, I think you are right.

I was going to ask Harry this. I mean, we both have taught criminal law over the years. What are the elements of a federal crime? What are the elements of a federal crime at an unruly school board meeting or even something threatening? Generally, those kind of issues, and we're not saying anybody should threaten, we think that's wrong, but it's handled by local law enforcement. This is where the federal government right now does not understand their jurisdictional limitations on anything across the board. This seems to be the trend.

We'll talk more about that next week. I mean, this is kind of the view that, you know, we're the federal government, we get to do everything. There are things the states can do that the federal government cannot do. I think that's precisely correct, but what we have in Washington is basically a globalist move to concentrate power in Washington, and basically every other American is now a subject rather than a citizen of these bureaucrats. And so while, as Jordan correctly points out, over 100,000 people have died from drug overdoses over the last year and a half or so, the question becomes how many school board members have died because of the activities of unruly parents? That's number one. Number two, and how many of these parents are moving back and forth across interstate lines in order to attack school board members?

I think, again, the answer to that is zero. Nonetheless, we have an attorney general after initiating the targeting of parents pursuant to the National School Board Association letter saying, I can't imagine that the FBI would target parents. Why isn't the FBI, for instance, targeting drug trafficking? Why isn't the FBI targeting human trafficking?

Here's the problem. Will Haynes brought this up, our executive producer. What tags did the IRS use? I remember the tags. It was Tea Party, it was Patriot, it was Liberty, it was 9-11, and there was a whole series of them.

So, you know, here I guess the tag is parents, unruly, school board meeting. But my question going, listen, we want to hear your, this affects everybody in the country. We want to hear your comments on this at 1-800-684-3110 in the second half hour of this broadcast. 800-684-3110, we want to hear from you.

800-684-3110. Fan, really quickly here, is there going to be congressional action here or is this because of the way Congress is set up right now just going to be a pass? Well, I hope there will be, but we're not going to give them the benefit of the doubt, Jay. We're reviewing options right now to find these answers for ourselves.

I think it needs to be dual-track, but look, if Congress doesn't do the job, we will. Critical time for the ACLJ. We have a matching challenge this month of November. You can double the impact of your donation today.

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At the American Center for Law and Justice, we're engaged in critical issues at home and abroad. For a limited time, you can participate in the ACLJ's matching challenge. For every dollar you donate, it will be matched. A $10 gift becomes $20. A $50 gift becomes $100. You can make a difference in the work we do, protecting the constitutional and religious freedoms that are most important to you and your family.

Give a gift today online at ACLJ.org. We're talking about freedom. We're talking about freedom.

We will fight for the right to live in freedom. Keeping you informed and engaged, now more than ever, this is Sekulow. And now your host, Jordan Sekulow.

Let me reset this a bit for you. Remember we had Attorney General Garland, he testified on October 21st about this memo. This was a memo put out by him on October 4th. It's about engaging the FBI and U.S. Attorneys to look at what was going on in the school boards, specifically looking at the parents and their response to the school board.

I want to say this right off the bat. If a parent showed up at a school board meeting or any local individual and waited their turn to talk and made violent threats, or if they did that in some other manner, those threats should be, or if they took any action, they should be handled by local law enforcement. It's a local school board. This is not a federal issue.

It's not federalized. But you see that if they can federalize this, you've federalized another power grab we kept talking about this week by the Biden administration. If they can tell you that we're going to be the ones handling this. Well, Merrick Garland then went and testified before Congress on October 21st that he just couldn't imagine that things like the Patriot Act, a counter-terror division at the FBI would be utilized to go after parents, even angry ones, at school boards. Well, a whistleblower has put out a memo. This is from the Criminal Investigative Division and Counterterrorism Division of the FBI.

The day before, this memo was out the day before, Garland testified before the House Judiciary Committee. In it, they create the tag, the bolo tag. It's EDU officials, education officials. The purpose of the threat tag is to help scope this threat on a national level, provide an opportunity for comprehensive analysis of the threat picture. They want to see any way for the federal government to get involved, so they ask, is there a federal nexus? Are there federal crimes being committed? Can we investigate those and charge them?

What's the motivation? Is there a conspiracy? That's what they were looking for there. No evidence of any of this, by the way. These are one-pagers. But this is signed by the head of their Counterterrorism Division, the head of the FBI's Criminal Division. And it doesn't just say violence and threats of violence.

It also uses words that sound bad but are very general. Intimidation and harassment. Now, there may be someone on the school board who doesn't like me because I show up to every meeting and I get a little upset about my kids. That doesn't mean I've committed any crime. It doesn't mean I had to threaten their livelihood or threaten any physical action to get them. I can be angry.

You can get to your school board and be angry. I don't always suggest that's the best tone to take, but you certainly can be. And, again, as long as you're following the rules. So what is – they start creating these new terms that don't have a lot of legal meaning in this section. The harassing speech to a public official at an open school board meeting.

I mean, they are elected and they should – because they're elected and compensated for their job, they have to hear from people when they're upset. Of course. The words here that jump out to me, Harry, are distributing spike and harassment and intimidation. By the way, both of which are not federal crimes.

Neither of which are federal crimes. I think that's precisely correct. So essentially the FBI is asking this question. How dare parents have an opinion?

Exactly. And particularly how dare they have an opinion which differs from the opinion of experts. And so essentially what the FBI is now doing, it is attempting to criminalize an opinion. That arguably violates the First Amendment of the Constitution. We are entitled to have differing opinions. But that is not the prevailing view in Washington.

That is the prevailing view of the Biden administration. You know, folks, we come back. We're going to take more of your phone calls. We want to hear from you.

We're going to Julie First. 1-800-684-3110 to have your voice heard. Here's a place where you can have your voice heard.

1-800-684-3110. What do you think about the FBI using its Counterterrorism Division to try and scare you away? Because that's ultimately what this is. Scare you away from actually getting civically engaged. Which is what the government should be encouraging at the federal and local level.

That is what they are trying to do. Be right back. Let's take your calls. 1-800-684-3110.

And what about the effect this will have on your kids and grandkids' education if you don't speak out because you're scared? The ACLJ would not be able to do any of this without your support. For that, we are grateful. Now there's an opportunity for you to help in a unique way. For a limited time, you can participate in the ACLJ's Matching Challenge. For every dollar you donate, it will be matched. A $10 gift becomes $20.

A $50 gift becomes $100. This is a critical time for the ACLJ. The work we do simply would not occur without your generous support.

Take part in our Matching Challenge today. You can make a difference in the work we do, protecting the constitutional and religious freedoms that are most important to you and your family. Give a gift today online at ACLJ.org. Only when a society can agree that the most vulnerable and voiceless deserve to be protected is there any hope for that culture to survive. And that's exactly what you are saying when you stand with the American Center for Law and Justice to defend the right to life. We've created a free, powerful publication offering a panoramic view of the ACLJ's battle for the unborn.

It's called Mission Life. It will show you how you are personally impacting the pro-life battle through your support. And the publication includes a look at all major ACLJ pro-life cases, how we're fighting for the rights of pro-life activists, the ramifications of Roe v. Wade 40 years later, the play on parenthood's role in the abortion industry, and what Obamacare means to the pro-life movement. Discover the many ways your membership with the ACLJ is empowering the right to life.

Request your free copy of Mission Life today online at ACLJ.org slash gift. Think about this, how bad is the chilling effect on parents' engagement in their kids' education? I want to hear from you because maybe you're someone who over all this pandemic and CRT and all these different issues and you're trying to just figure out what are my kids being taught and you might have gotten a preview of it and been freaked out when you saw the virtual learning. Remember they were trying to ban you from watching that? They said, parents, please leave the room while we're virtually teaching because they didn't want you to know what they were teaching.

Well, they woke a giant. Made them uncomfortable. I think this is way before, I think I was a little kid, used to go to school board meetings all the time.

We used to tell people this is where the problems start. Hey, look, I was loud at school board meetings. Yeah, you were probably intimidated. I'll tell you a school board I did intimidate. The school board in Metropolis, Illinois, I wish we had that on video, they arrested Misty Newberry in 1992 for participating at CU at the poll.

Put her in a police car, took her to the jail. I went to the school board meeting, it was very aggressive. I was not thinking, I was within my constitutional rights, I was representing Paris, I was an aggressive advocate. I did not think for a moment that this was going to raise the level to the FBI where they would say, this lawyer is intimidating us. I wasn't threatening, I'm threatening him with a lawsuit. Is that threatening?

Well, that's the question, Harry. Probably under their definition, I would never feel that it is. Is that threatening legal action?

Is that, you know, the new standard? I would imagine that is the new standard at the FBI, that someone feels intimidated, therefore it's a crime. But I mean, think about this for a moment. There are a lot of times parents go to school board meetings and they're really upset, so they're going to be, you know, maybe aggressive. I mean, that happened, if you polled the school board and it could be over tax assessments or closing orders, whatever it might be. This idea that we're going to federalize this is exactly what they tried to do to the pro-life movement. They tagged the pro-life movement like they're now trying to tag parents at school board meetings. And then the head of the Department of Justice, the Attorney General of the United States, goes in front of Congress and says, no, we would never do that. And then his own department has a memo out saying, yeah, we're doing it right now, actually.

The day before he testified to that. So let me go to the phones, Julie in California, online too, and if you want to talk to us, it's 1-800-684-3110, because I want to know people. You understand, this is all about, they want to go back to the status quo of most people not showing up, of most parents not caring to spend the time to go to the school board meetings, which are long, and wait their turn to speak.

But I think, again, a dragon was woken when all of these school boards were making all these wild decisions during the pandemic, and then there was more interest also in the curriculum as well. Hey, Julie, welcome to Sekulow. You're on the air. Hi, Jordan. Hi, Jay. Hi, team. I have a comment and a question.

My comment is, thank God for the ACLJ because you guys are constitutional lawyers and you will know what can be done to stop this on a constitutional level. So definitely all good during your matching challenge. Thank you.

You're welcome. My question is, what exact powers does the FBI have once they want to take a person, for instance, and say, we need to look at this person, does that give them the ability to get their phone records, see their social media contacts? Julie, they could seek warrants, they could seek subpoenas to go into your house if they have probable cause, and they now define it.

They could do surveillance without you even knowing it. I mean, this is where I wonder where, I mean, I know that the... Yeah, the fly list, that's another one. The fan with the situation in Congress right now, the question is, and we're going to take our action because you can't rely on Congress here because you don't have the votes, let's be honest. Now, Merrick Garland may come back and correct this record. He might. He might have to. Well, he should, Jay. And look, he's going to have to come back in front of Congress at some point. I don't know if the Democrats will call him back urgently on this matter, but the next time he's up, even if it's several months down the road, this should be brought up. But we're not going to wait on that, Jay. We're not going to take benefit of the doubt on his word.

We're going to demand. We want to know who was involved, not just the attorney general, who else was involved and why they decided to do this. And Jay, the other thing I would just say, I mean, on this breathtaking power grab, remember, even if even if the FBI doesn't use all of the tools that you just mentioned, the whole point of the IRS targeting the be on the lookout list was to chill the speech of those tea party groups. I really think the whole point of this, Jay, is to chill parental speech. And if that means that school boards are less accountable to parental scrutiny, I think their mission will have been accomplished. And that would be a horrific thing. The chilling of the parental speech is something we've got to stop as well.

All right. We're going to continue to take your phone calls. 1-800-684-3110 is the number you call.

That's 1-800-684-3110. Heather's called in from New Mexico on Line 1. Hey, Heather, welcome to Sekulow. You're on the air.

Good morning. Thank you guys for taking my call. Of course, you guys do an amazing job. I'll get right to it. I understand from what your aspect of that you're going to go and get more information. But, you know, I happen to be a homeschool parent. So most people would say, why are you worried about this? Well, I would be one of those dissident parents that would probably be targeted if my kids were in school.

And so I'm still very passionate about it for all of my friends that have kids there. And so my question is, what can be done other than just finding out who or what? You know, the reality is that we've got to do something, not just, no offense to you guys.

You guys need to find the information. But the rest of the world as parents need to do something. Here's what parents can do.

Let me just be really clear. And, Heather, I think you're the kind of person that can probably help your community do this. Get rid of everybody. If you have a school board, they have elections.

You have a vote. Organize at the community level and vote out everybody. And put in your friends.

Find parents of the students there or former parents that have maybe the time to do it and take over the school board. Then you set the curriculum. Then you set the tone for the meetings.

Then you set what the kids are taught. You have all of the power here. It is at the most local level.

So when people ask, what can you do now? We can fight back through it if we have to legally, always. But what you can do is say, and we've seen this happen actually already this year multiple times. So people are doing it, is vote them out. And that is not as big as taking on a statewide election or a Presidential election. You put some good grassroots organizing in, you can beat basically anybody on that school board. Because most of those people, they're the only person that runs.

And occasionally you might get one seat. But why not target, might just say, everybody needs to go. We're going to put in a full slate of new people that we trust as parents because they're going to fight for us the right way. They're going to fight back against the curriculum we don't want. They're going to fight for the curriculum we do want. That's where it starts. And we'll make sure that you're not going to be treated like a terrorist while you do that.

Because let me tell you that. What if you got up in this meeting and say, I'm going to make sure you lose your election and we're going to do everything we can to make sure you don't sit on this school board. Are you being intimidating and harassing now? Well not under the FBI.

Are you being tagged is really what the question is. The whole idea that the Department of Justice Counterterrorism Task Force or Counterterrorism Unit, not just a task force, the Counterterrorism Unit is now engaging in on this at the highest level. Is this the seventh floor again?

Of course it's the seventh floor. It shows you a complete lack of understanding of our constitutional balance, Harry. You know, you can have a really good idea on the federal level. We're going to do such and such. But if you don't have the constitutional authority to do it because that authority has been reserved to the states, well it could be a really good idea but a really bad execution if you try to do it when you don't have the authority and power to do it.

I think that is correct. And I would say that the FBI is part of a deep state effort to target common folk, to target the middle class, to target individuals in our society who are not necessarily experts, who are not necessarily coming from elite schools with elite education or elite sources of money. And so if you look, for instance, at social media platforms, if you look at mainstream media, there is this overarching tendency to look down on individuals, for instance, who live in flyover country or flyover counties in America. And to argue that parents really do not know what is in the best interest of their own children which probably cost Terry McAuliffe the election in Virginia. And so there is now an emerging effort, for instance, that goes well beyond what the FBI is doing here in terms of targeting parents as potentially domestic terrorists. There is an emerging effort to license parents to raise their own kids. In other words, there is an effort to withdraw state support for parents who wish to raise their own kids.

And this has already happened in a number of jurisdictions outside of the United States but there is an emerging trend to push this forward in the United States. You know, when you've got questions like this, Harry, is there a federal nexus? Are there potential federal violations to be investigated and charged? What's the motivation behind the criminal activity?

They are in search of a crime against parents. That's what this is. This is exactly what they did in the IRS case and we're just not going to allow it.

It wasn't about should they get taxes obsessed. No, they were looking at can we shut them down? Can we put them in jail? We could scare them to stop talking. And then we prosecute one of them and then they'll all go away.

No parents will show up immediately as before. We're not going to let that happen, of course. And we're going to continue to fight back. We saw this memo. We said this is what we're going to cover today on radio. We're going to get right on this because we have lived this before. Support our work at the ACLJ. We have this Matching Challenge Month of November. It's not just to prepare for the future.

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Give a gift today online at ACLJ.org. Alright, 1-800-684-3110. If you want to talk to us on the air, we've got people holding on. Let me go right to the phones. Robin in Texas online too.

Hey Robin, welcome to Sekulow, you're on the air. Thank you. So I made the mistake eight years ago of thinking that the schools had the best interest of my child. And unfortunately, it wasn't the case. I fought tooth and nail to get my son the support that he needed. You know, it started in third grade. They kept telling me to go to the doctors, to go to the doctors. I went to the doctors, the doctors would push me back to the school.

So it's from four to seven. It took me three years of fighting, fighting for him to get the services that he needed. And after I got him identified, I became a target to where they were harassing me and I was being retaliated against. You know, we had to move different schools, different times. But I think that, you know, I think that they tried to censor me more and more each year. But I finally got that up and I wrote the Department of Education. I filed an OCR complaint.

And I have attended meeting after meeting. Yes, we did get him into special education. However, the gaps and efforts have not been closed. Here he is a senior and he's far behind of what we would expect for this level. We talk about the tests, the state tests that they require them to pass in order to graduate.

It's nonsense. They put all this anxiety and all this pressure on students for what? So that they end up graduating anyways. You're totally right.

My son has never mastered, you know, the state tests. Robin, here's where I want to step in. I feel your passion is your child needed special education needs. We did a lot of that during COVID. I was going to say, we looked at, I think, what did we handle?

1,600, 1,800 requests during COVID? But I feel your frustration because you're being pushed around. The school board says to go back to the doctor.

The kid needs medication. You know, but go back to the school and they need special education. And ultimately now they're a senior and you realize they're not ready for the next step because you had to fight for years and they were being nasty to you.

So Robin, likely you would be someone that they would want to consider maybe is harassing, maybe is intimidating. You have passion. I understand that passion.

I have children too. I would care a lot too if the school wasn't doing what, by the way, they are receiving resources to do. So it shouldn't have been any question whatsoever. But Robin, I think this is what underscores my bigger message. At ACLJ, we'd fight back if anybody felt like they were actually implementing this federal nexus to look to charge a parent for just exercising their First Amendment right. But at the bottom line, if parents organize the community level, it's usually non-partisan, you can take these school boards over pretty quickly, very quickly. And you can determine the curriculum.

If you make sure that parents who have students with special needs are taken care of, you can make sure that the resources are spent correctly and they're spent best for your community. And it's not just a bunch of school board members who are also receiving political donations from, surprise, surprise, the teachers unions. Because that is who is actually to blame for all this starting was the far left is what I would call the teachers union now and their actors. Yeah, they appear at partisan political events, Harry. I mean, they were out for Terry, that of it was out for Terry McAuliffe the day before the election in Virginia.

Absolutely. So local school boards, public schools and national teachers unions have all managed to become massively dysfunctional in our society. They continue to fail children. They can continue to fail parents. And accordingly, parents are rightly upset and they are beginning to fight back. But they need to continue to fight back by throwing out of office existing school boards and making necessary changes in curriculum, making necessary changes with respect to child safety in schools, restrooms and elsewhere. All of these things need to be done and they can be done on a nonpartisan basis by parents who are fully and completely engaged.

I would urge parents, however, once they become engaged, to not leave the arena, to stay engaged for decades because at the end of the day, your children are at risk and they are at risk. Why? Because many school boards and national teachers unions have been co-opted by political interests that do not care one bit about children. Hey, Thanh, I want to ask you about this. In the subcommittees on this kind of situation, I mean, is there any way in the House that these can be brought up? I mean, what can procedurally be done when you're the Republican or the minority party here?

Sure. If the majority party, Jay, refuses to call the Attorney General back until he comes the next time, the minority party could do something very much like you did with the Ways and Means Committee about a month ago, I think, where they held a hearing, a roundtable. The majority may not attend, Jay, but they could still invite the Attorney General to come.

Now, I don't know if he would come or not, but I think they should absolutely do that. And just quickly, as we look into this, Jay, I mean, Jordan is 100% right that parents have the control here. However, in the intervening midterm elections here, if the executive branch continues to go out of bounds like this, I think we also have to look at whether or not we need to ask the legislative branch to dock them funds for this.

If they're not going to use their funds according to the authority that they have, Jay, they shouldn't get those funds from the legislative branch. We'll go right to the phones. Dan in Tennessee will be the final call today. Dan, welcome to Secular Year on the Air. Thank you very much for taking my call.

I'd like to shine a different light on this real quick, and I'll be quick. I love what the parents are doing. My kids are grown. When ours was in school, we definitely were in the school board meetings and whatnot. But can we hold these school boards to a certain level to where if they don't do what these parents are asking them to do, instead of fighting the government and fighting FBI, can't we do something to fight and get these kids moved to a school that will do what they're supposed to do?

Okay, so you can do two things. You can support school choice initiatives. One of the reasons that victory we had earlier in the week where we represented 78 members of Congress, Senator Tim Scott was the leader on our brief. He was the leader on our brief because that revenue provision and that first stimulus fund would prevent states and localities from providing tax incentives for school choice programs. I think school choice is an ultimate solution to this whole problem because then these public schools would have to compete, and when they have to compete, they would not be able to be so radical and outside of what the community wanted.

And by the way, that was some brief. You go to San Francisco, you might get a pretty radical school board, and you might get a pretty radical. That's what they elected. Also, if the school board reflects your community, that's fine. I think what's wrong in the country is that most of them don't. Most are people being funded by teacher's unions, and they run these campaigns very small. So you really want to do something about it?

Get involved at the school board elections. And that's why that brief we filed was so significant in that case, and with so many members of Congress and then Tim Scott too, so it was great. But folks, this is a time to support the work of the American Center for Law and Justice.

We're in the midway, a little bit more than midway through the month of November. Your support makes a huge difference. Any amount you donate to the ACLJ, we get a matching grant for. Let me encourage you to go to ACLJ.org, ACLJ.org.

We'll talk to you tomorrow. At the American Center for Law and Justice, we're engaged in critical issues at home and abroad. For a limited time, you can participate in the ACLJ's matching challenge. For every dollar you donate, it will be matched. A $10 gift becomes $20. A $50 gift becomes $100. You can make a difference in the work we do, protecting the constitutional and religious freedoms that are most important to you and your family. Give a gift today online at ACLJ.org.