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WASHINGTON — Top Justice Department lawyers balked at the Biden administration’s attempts to prosecute parents who protested at school board meetings as potential domestic terrorists, ripping senior officials’ push for the criminal probes as “ridiculous” and highly “political,” according to emails released Monday.
Attorneys in deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco’s office expressed concern about the demand for federal criminal investigations at the behest of the National School Boards Association, and mocked the partisan goals it would accomplish, messages published by the DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group show.
“This is ridiculous,” wrote one official in Monaco’s office on Sept. 25, 2021.
Other attorneys called the effort, “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
“It’s like they’ve [sic] affirmatively trying to make this thing not work and look political,” said one official in the DOJ’s criminal division Oct. 2, 2021.
“If they do this they might as well rename the damn thing the Anti-MAGA Task Force.”
The White House-directed effort followed a letter from NSBA boss Chip Slaven, who had declared that US public schools were “under an immediate threat” from parents — and that some were committing “acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
