In a righteous pursuit for the truth, Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., excoriated Attorney General Merrick Garland for lying to Congress and abetting a cover-up of the Department of Justice’s role in tagging parents as domestic terrorists and using the FBI to track and investigate them.
Bishop demanded that Garland return before Congress for another round of questioning and testifying.
The action stems from a whistleblower memo revealing that the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division was compiling and categorizing “threat assessments related to parents, including a document directing FBI personnel to use a specific ‘threat tag’ to track potential investigations,” according to a letter from the House Judiciary GOP.
The whistleblower memo was sent a day before Garland was scheduled to testify before the House Judiciary Committee. Realizing the document was “breathtakingly problematic,” Bishop requested to see “all correspondence within the Department of Justice connected with or reacting to” the whistleblower memo.
“That document,” Bishop said, “should have been in our hands when we asked Attorney General Garland questions.”
But it wasn’t; and the alarming allegations the memo contained appeared to directly contradict Garland’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee hearing, where Garland claimed the DOJ and FBI were not using counterterrorism tools to investigate parents at school board meetings.
“This new information calls into question the accuracy and completeness of your sworn testimony,” the House Judiciary GOP letter to Garland stated.
It should’ve been AG Garland, not an FBI whistleblower, to reveal that the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division was “threat tagging” America’s parents.
I sent a letter to him calling to see all correspondence on the matter.
But Garland chose to keep it from @JudiciaryGOP instead. pic.twitter.com/Y06hsv2ei3
— Rep. Dan Bishop (@RepDanBishop) November 17, 2021
Specifically, Garland testified that he could not “imagine any circumstance in which the Patriot Act would be used in the circumstances of parents complaining about their children, nor a circumstance where they would be labeled as domestic terrorists.”
Yet the whistleblower memo, which was kept from committee members before Garland testified, showed Garland issuing a memorandum directing the FBI to address a purported “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” at school board meetings.
“As the whistleblower’s disclosure shows, the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division quickly effectuated your directive,” according to the House Judiciary letter to Garland.
“The FBl’s actions,” it added, “were an entirely foreseeable-and perhaps intended–result of” Garland’s directive.
“Not only is there a question about whether Attorney General Garland denied knowledge he must have had when he testified to this committee,” Bishop said, “but that memo was disturbing enough to an FBI agent to become a whistleblower.
“It should have been in the hands of Congress,” Bishop said of the memo. “This is a cover-up at the Department of Justice.”
