EXCLUSIVE — A senior official in the Biden White House asked the Department of Homeland Security to share any department programs that could contribute to the administration's response to a letter from the National School Boards Association about threats against school board members, according to internal emails.
The emails, which show communications between National Security Council Director for Counterterrorism Michael Massetti and DHS officials, were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the government watchdog group Protect the Public's Trust. The documents are the latest indication of the lengths the Biden administration went to in order to respond to the NSBA's September 2021 letter.
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In an email dated October 1, 2021, Massetti said he was working "to explore options" to respond to the NSBA's letter and address the concerns raised by the school board group.
"While we recognize that this is in large part a state/local law enforcement issue, I wanted to check and see if you were aware of any on-going DHS programming or outreach vectors that could be used to help with this issue," Massetti said in the email.
A significant amount of the email exchanges between DHS officials are redacted, but Massetti later re-upped his request on October 4, 2021, the same day that Attorney General Merrick Garland issued his infamous memo. On October 6, Lucian Sikorskyj, acting deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism and threat prevention, told the NSC official to contact him directly for further requests, while John Picarelli, the director of the Center for Prevention, Programs, and Partnerships, provided Massetti with "three relevant responses" pertaining to his request. However, the relevant responses are entirely redacted.
The NSBA's letter touched on a firestorm of controversy when it was released, as it compared parents protesting at school board meetings to domestic terrorists and urged the Department of Justice to investigate threats against school board members using federal anti-terrorism statutes.
While the NSBA ultimately retracted and apologized for the letter, Garland issued a memo establishing a DOJ-FBI task force charged with investigating school board members. FBI whistleblowers later revealed that the agency had investigated numerous parents who addressed their school boards as potential threats.
In a statement to the Washington Examiner, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said that the agency only provided publicly available resources to the National Security Council.
“Upon receiving this outreach from NSC, DHS personnel provided publicly available resources related to addressing threats of violence, as requested," the spokesperson said.
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Michael Chamberlain, the director of Protect the Public's Trust, told the Washington Examiner in a statement that the latest production of documents was further evidence that the Biden administration had mobilized counterterrorism officials to respond to the letter.
"Officials at the highest levels of the administration have denied for years that they ever referred to or considered the protests of parents at school board meetings to be domestic terrorism," Chamberlain said. "Now we have confirmation that the letter from the National School Boards Association spurred the administration to put its top counterterrorism officials at the National Security Council and Department of Homeland Security on the case. If the gaslighting and obfuscation weren’t bad enough, the use of counterterrorism tools in this context certainly raises the specter of the government trampling on the First Amendment rights of parents who were just trying to get the best for their kids."