Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) on Friday evening demanded Attorney General Merrick Garland’s resignation over intimidating parents with the FBI due to faulty information from National School Board Association (NSBA).
“Merrick Garland mobilized the FBI to intimidate parents without legal basis and, we now know, premised on misinformation he didn’t bother to verify,” Hawley tweeted. “It was a dangerous abuse of authority that has badly compromised the Justice Dept’s integrity and Garland’s. He should resign.”
Merrick Garland mobilized the FBI to intimidate parents without legal basis and, we now know, premised on misinformation he didn’t bother to verify. It was a dangerous abuse of authority that has badly compromised the Justice Dept’s integrity and Garland’s. He should resign. https://t.co/MXKN5j0L5g
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) October 23, 2021
The National School Board Association apologized Friday for calling parents concerned about Critical Race Theory (CRT) “domestic terrorists” who should be targeted by the FBI.
“On behalf of NSBA, we regret and apologize for the letter,” the NSBA wrote to its members. “To be clear, the safety of school board members, other public school officials and educators… However, there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter.”
“We should have had a better process in place to allow for consultation on a communication on this significance,” the group added.
On Thursday, Garland was questioned before the House Judiciary Committee as to the source for intimidating parents with the FBI. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) asked if Garland had believed there were parents acting as terrorists because the NSBA had told him so.
“So, you read the letter, that’s your source?” Jordan asked. “Are there some studies on that or some investigation someone did that said there’s been a disturbing uptick, or did you just take the words of the National School Boards Association?”
“When the National School Board Association, which represents thousands of school boards and school board members says that there are these kinds of threats,” Garland said, “When we read in the newspapers reports of threats of violence, when that is in the context of threats of,” Garland admitted before Jordan’s time expired.
Garland was also questioned before the committee about his conflict of interest with his son-in-law’s alleged tied of selling Critical Race Theory curriculums. The conflict of interest is predicated on the son-in-law promoting tenets of “CRT through his educational data firm, while Garland was cracking down on parents objecting to CRT at recent school board meetings.”
Garland told the committee he would in fact not seek an ethics review from the Department of Justice over his son-in-law’s likely ties to the promotion of CRT.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø
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