Biden DOJ was warned about a Loudoun list targeting parents and wrote a memo protecting school boards instead

In October 2021, the Biden Justice Department had a choice about whose safety to worry about. One of its own senior prosecutors pointed to Loudoun County parents. The department went with the school boards.

That choice is laid out in a 273-page report released this week by the Justice Department's Weaponization Working Group. The report, dated Oct. 5, reprints the internal emails, and one of them should make every Northern Virginia parent who went to a school board meeting in 2021 stop and read twice.

On Saturday, Oct. 2, 2021, the department was rushing to answer a Sept. 29 letter from the Alexandria-based National School Boards Association. That letter asked President Biden to treat unrest at school board meetings as potentially "the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism." Associate Deputy Attorney General Kevin Chambers circulated a draft attorney general memo and a "School Board Threats Response Strategy" to senior officials.

Corey Amundson, chief of the Criminal Division's Public Integrity Section, wrote back that night with a question the drafts never answered: "What about the reported threats against parents?"

He then described exactly what had been happening in Loudoun. "A media outlet reports that a group of current and former teachers and others in Loudoun County, Virginia, compiled a lengthy list of parents suspected of disagreeing with school system actions, including its teaching of controversial racial concepts," he wrote. The list had a stated purpose "in part to 'infiltrate,' use 'hackers' to silence parents' communications, and 'expose these people publicly.'"

Citing NBC News, Amundson noted that parents who were named "feared for their safety." Parents on both sides, he wrote, "filed reports with the sheriff's department and installed security cameras." His conclusion: "Bottom line: This is all very messy and political."

Earlier that evening, Amundson had warned that the whole effort "will be viewed by many as a partisan exercise aimed at those who do not support the Administration." He objected "in the strongest terms." His recommendation was for DOJ to focus "almost exclusively on grants" and technical help to local police, not federal enforcement.

The department did not take that advice. Two days later, on Monday, Oct. 4, Attorney General Merrick Garland signed a memo warning of "a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff." It ordered the FBI and every U.S. attorney to set up meetings with local law enforcement and open "dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting." It said nothing about threats against parents. The working group's report states it plainly: the draft memo "failed to address 'reported threats against parents.'"

What were those Loudoun parents facing? Ian Prior, a Loudoun father and former DOJ public affairs official, told a June 11, 2026 roundtable reprinted in the report that the list came from a Facebook group called the "Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County," formed in March 2021. In his words, the group wanted to "expose those parents, send mailers to those parents' neighborhoods, hack their platforms, infiltrate their groups." Prior said six school board members were in the group. That is his allegation, and the report does not test it.

Prior said that after the Garland memo, the harassment got worse, not better. The memo, he said, "gave a green light, a permission slip to these activists in the community." He described a yearlong online defamation campaign, hate mail calling him "a cancer to the community," and mailers to neighbors calling him a racist. He said a box of coal was delivered to his door and opened by his daughters on Christmas Eve, and that someone tampered with his electronic dog fence.

So the Justice Department had, in its own inbox, a warning that Virginia parents were the ones being listed, targeted and frightened. It wrote a memo aimed at protecting the officials those parents were criticizing.

Meanwhile, the FBI built a threat tag called "EDUOFFICIALS" and opened 25 assessments on school-board "threats." Citing a whistleblower, the report says one mother was investigated because she belonged to a "right-wing mom's group" and "is a gun owner." The working group says it knows of no prosecutions that came out of any of it.

The report concludes that leadership never "fully addressed" internal objections like Amundson's. It says the memo was driven by "pressure by senior leadership to support the NSBA and to bring federal pressure to bear on parents protesting school districts."

Attorney General Pam Bondi has rescinded the Garland memo. The department now says it will let parents who were the subject of FBI assessments see those files and will apologize where it finds their rights were violated.

That is overdue. But the record now shows that the Biden DOJ was told who was really at risk in Loudoun, and chose to look the other way.

Email the Loudoun County School Board:
April Chandler, april.chandler@lcps.org,
Anne Donohue, anne.donohue@lcps.org,
Deana Griffiths, deana.griffiths@lcps.org,
Ross Svenson, ross.stevenson@lcps.org,
Kari LaBell, kari.labell@lcps.org,
Jon Pepper, jonathon.pepper@lcps.org,
Lauren Shernoff, lauren.shernoff@lcps.org,
Sumera Rashid, sumera.rashid@lcps.org,
Amy Riccardi, amy.riccardi@lcps.org,

Loudoun County is a county in Northern Virginia. Its county seat is Leesburg.