Today, America First Legal (AFL) launched an investigation to determine the role of former FBI Deputy Director and Loudoun County resident Andy McCabe and his wife Jill McCabe, advisor to the Loudoun County School Board, in Attorney General Merrick Garland’s October 4th, 2021 memo that mobilized federal counter-terrorism resources against concerned parents speaking up during school board meetings.
In 2020, parents in Loudoun County began speaking out against a variety of issues involving their public schools, including school closures, Critical Race Theory (CRT), transgender bathroom and locker room policies, and the politicization of the Loudoun County School Board as it related to those issues.
In March 2021, the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office opened a criminal investigation into a private Facebook group called “The Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County” after members suggested targeting parents for speaking out at school board meetings against school closures and CRT in Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS). Among the group members were six school board members, the Commonwealth Attorney, and a member of the Board of Supervisors. Later, the FBI launched a parallel probe into the matter.
On May 28, 2021, LCPS announced that there was an incident in the main office of Stone Bridge High School but that there was no safety threat. That “safety incident” was in reference to an upset father, not the underlying sexual assault of his daughter.
Later that evening, an FBI agent called the Loudoun County Emergency Communications Center and asked about “the incident at Stone Bridge HS today.” When the operator informed the FBI agent that it was a sexual assault investigation being handled by local law enforcement, the FBI agent lost interest.
Since the beginning of 2021, members of the Loudoun County School Board and allied community members made reports to local and federal law enforcement, alleging that they had been threatened and harassed for their advocacy in support of school closures, CRT, and the district’s transgender policies. Community members have also publicly discussed having contact with the FBI which was monitoring local issues in Loudoun County.
Notably, on December 17, 2020, Jill McCabe was appointed as a formal advisor to the Loudoun County School Board.
On June 22, 2021, the Loudoun County School Board held a meeting to discuss the adoption of “transgender” bathroom and locker room policies. Jill McCabe was the second speaker and spoke in favor of the policies. The school board ended public comment after members of the audience applauded a speaker who was critical of the board’s policies. Following the closing of the meeting, Scott Smith, whose daughter had been sexually assaulted in the school restroom, was arrested during a confrontation with a member of “The Anti-Racist Parents” of Loudoun County.
Ms. McCabe was also a candidate for Virginia Senate in 2015 and received over $700k in campaign donations from entities controlled by then-Gov. and 2021 gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe. Shortly after the issuance of the Attorney General’s October 4, 2021 memo, Andy McCabe served as a keynote speaker at a Loudoun County Public Schools event on cybersecurity.
On September 29, 2021, the partisan “National School Boards Association” made public a “letter” demanding federal action under the PATRIOT ACT to stop parents from objecting to mask mandates and CRT. The group demanded Federal action because parents were engaged in First Amendment activities, including “posting watchlists against school boards and spreading misinformation that boards are adopting critical race theory curriculum and working to maintain online learning by haphazardly attributing it to COVID-19.”
On October 4, 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued his infamous memo to the FBI and all United States Attorneys, promising the Department would “protect all people in the United States from violence, threats of violence, and other forms of intimidation and harassment.” The press release announcing the memo also encouraged people to report to the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center.
Almost immediately, on October 7, 2021, AFL requested the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General investigate “whether the Attorney General’s memo was formulated and issued based on improper considerations.” AFL highlighted serious irregularities, including evidence demonstrating that the memo stated justification was a fabricated pretext by the Biden White House to chill parents’ speech and political action. Among other things, AFL pointed out that “the normal clearance process and standard order both within the department (including legal sufficiency review by the Office of Legal Counsel, the Civil Rights Division, the Criminal Division, the Office of Legal Policy, and other components), and between the department and the White House Counsel’s Office and the Office of Management and Budget, [had been] bypassed or corrupted.”
On May 21, 2023, the House Weaponization Committee released a report revealing that the FBI had opened 25 assessments with the threat tag “EDUOFFICIALS” and assigned seventeen of those investigations to the Criminal Investigative Division, six to the Counterterrorism Division and two to the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. Of those 25 investigations, the FBI determined that only one warranted a full investigation.
The Committee also revealed that the Attorney General’s memo was an attempt to silence parents critical of Democratic education policies (policies like school closures, Critical Race Theory, transgender bathroom, and locker room policies) ahead of the 2021 Virginia Gubernatorial election between Glenn Youngkin and Terry McAuliffe.
On December 21, 2023, AFL released additional records confirming that the Garland memo was the means by which leftist political officials weaponized the government against parents.
There was no place in Virginia where parents were more critical of far-left school policies than Loudoun County. AFL demands complete transparency in the FBI’s involvement and collusion in the unconstitutional attack on American parents defending their children from leftist ideology.
Statement from Will Scolinos, America First Legal Counsel:
“The FBI exists to protect everyday Americans from critical threats—not to target them for speaking out against injustice. AFL and Congressional investigators have established that the Biden-Harris Administration in Washington, DC, had weaponized the federal government to target parents without reason and contrary to law. This investigation follows up on our prior work by focusing on whether the FBI was directly or, through former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s wife Jill McCabe, indirectly involved in the whole-of-government assault on parental rights in Loudoun County,” said Will Scolinos.
Read the FOIA request here.
