Senior FBI Alums Sound Alarm on Garland’s ‘Politically Loaded’ School-Board Threat Memo

High-ranking FBI alumni are sounding the alarm on a memo from Attorney General Merrick Garland highlighting a purportedly “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” against schools and school officials, from parents. According to these former officials, the memo represents an unwelcome politicization of the bureau’s mission, and may portend further consequences down the line.

Garland’s memo, issued in October, instructed “the Federal Bureau of Investigation, working with each United States Attorney, to convene meetings with federal, state, local, Tribal, and territorial leaders in each federal judicial district,” in order “to facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats.”

The attorney general’s directions were inspired in large part by a letter from the National School Boards Association (NSBA) citing a number of incidents and arguing that some of them verged on domestic terrorism.

Both the incidents themselves and the label have come under significant scrutiny. Sixteen of the 24 examples listed by the NSBA constituted tense verbal altercations, which did not include physical threats. And the remaining examples, if criminal, fall squarely under local and state jurisdiction. One of the instances pointed to by the NSBA was the arrest of Scott Smith, the father of a sexual-assault victim in Loudoun County, Va. None of these, critics say, fall under the category of “domestic terrorism,” or even fit within the Bureau’s purview.