The Justice Department published a report on Monday that accused the Biden White House of seeking to weaponize the federal government against parents with conservative views in 2021 despite internal pushback from federal officials.
In 2021, the Biden administration issued a memorandum to the FBI and every US attorney’s office nationwide to “convene meetings with federal, state, local, Tribal, and territorial leaders” to discuss “strategies for addressing threats against” school officials.
The story was very widely covered by outlets from the right. The only outlet from the left or center AllSides found to cover the story was The New York Times (Lean Left bias), which offered a different angle than outlets on the right.
The Biden Administration’s 2021 Memorandum
On September 29, 2021, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) urged President Joe Biden to take action to “protect” school officials from parents who had become unhappy with things like COVID-19 mandates and the teaching of critical race theory.
Notably, the NSBA’s letter said, “As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
The NSBA requested that federal authorities deploy enforcement against violent or disruptive parents and specifically suggested invoking the Patriot Act – a post-9/11 counterterrorism statute that expanded the government’s surveillance powers – against concerned parents.
A few days later, on October 4, Attorney General Merrick Garland sent out the aforementioned memorandum.
The Trump Administration's 2026 Inquiry
Now, the Trump administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) has published a report titled, “The 2026 Report to Expose the Weaponization of Government Against Parents in Schools.” The report was filed pursuant to President Trump’s January 2025 executive order, “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government.”
Announcing the report’s publication on Monday, Attorney General Todd Blanche said the DOJ released it to detail the Biden administration’s “weaponization of the department against parents” who exercised free speech rights. He accused the Biden DOJ of “attempting to get the [department’s] National Security Division involved” and “ignoring repeated warnings from employees that leadership’s actions could be unconstitutional.”
He added, “We’ve released hundreds of exhibits and emails that make official and verify what many Americans had guessed: the Garland DOJ worked hand in hand with WH officials and the National School Boards Association to chill free speech and parental rights while they threatened to prosecute parents and label them domestic terrorists.”
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How The Media Covered It
On the right, the report was a big story. As of October 8, AllSides found coverage from 16 different outlets: American Greatness (Right), The Blaze (Right), The Daily Caller (Right), The Daily Signal (Right), The Daily Wire (Right), The Epoch Times (Lean Right), The Federalist (Right), The Gateway Pundit (Right), Fox News (Right), The National News Desk (Right), National Review (Lean Right), The New York Post (Right), RedState (Right), Washington Examiner (Lean Right), The Washington Stand (Right), and ZeroHedge (Lean Right).
Outlets from the right generally played up the dissent from federal officials on the Biden administration’s memorandum in headlines. Most outlets included quotes from officials that were revealed by the report. Some included:
- Deputy Assistant Attorney General Kevin Driscoll said, “I don’t think it’s possible to state how strongly I object to this.”
- FBI counterterrorism official Steven Jensen called the report “potentially dangerous” and said, “Not all who oppose school board actions or legislative decisions are domestic terrorists.”
- Corey Amundson, chief of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section of the Criminal Division, said the directive was “stupid, stupid, stupid.”
The only outlet from the center or left that AllSides found coverage from was The New York Times. The Times ran the headline, “Justice Dept. Officials Objected to Biden-Era Covid Memo, Report Shows.”
The Times seemed to agree with outlets from the right that the report was notable enough to cover, prominently describing the Trump administration’s report as an “unusually substantive exhibit in the Trump administration’s long and often hyperbolic campaign to suggest that the Biden administration weaponized the Justice Department against conservatives.”
While the headline wasn’t much different from those from the right, The Times criticized the Trump administration for eventually firing some of the “loudest voices” against Garland’s memo, pointing out that “the administration purged some of the very people who had defended conservatives and parents from what they viewed as unjustified investigations.”
The Times highlighted some of the same quotes from dissenting officials that appeared in coverage from the right, but also briefly chronicled events that led to their firings.
Just as the Biden administration’s 2021 memorandum appeared to be politically motivated, one could argue the same for the Trump administration’s 2026 follow-up report. Nonetheless, the drastically lopsided coverage is yet another example of why readers should take extra steps to make sure they are consuming news from outlets of different biases on a regular basis. By only reading a few outlets from one side of the spectrum, readers can become siloed into filter bubbles and not even hear about some news that others may learn about at length – placing them farther from each other in the increasingly polarized American political discourse.
Andy Gorel is the Managing Editor of AllSides. He has a Center bias.
This piece was edited and reviewed by Project Manager Evan Wagner (Lean Left) and News Analyst and Social Media Editor Malayna J. Bizier (Right).
