What Loudoun parents paid: Ian Prior's account of a yearlong campaign against his family

Ian Prior did what engaged parents are supposed to do. He read up on what his daughters' schools were doing, wrote about it, and showed up at school board meetings to speak. In Loudoun County in 2021, he says, that made him a target.

Prior, a former deputy director of public affairs at the Justice Department during President Trump's first term and now senior counsel at America First Legal, described what followed at a June 11, 2026 DOJ roundtable. The transcript is reprinted in the department's new 273-page "2026 Report to Expose the Weaponization of Government Against Parents in Schools," released this week and dated Oct. 5. The report's own conclusion quotes his account as evidence of how the 2021 Garland memo chilled parents' speech.

Prior said his family moved to Loudoun while he worked at DOJ, trading a longer commute for "better schools." In 2018, he said, "Loudoun County public schools were great schools. Well, it did not take long for that to change."

By summer 2020, he said, he learned the district was using curriculum from the Southern Poverty Law Center, and he concluded it was "essentially engaging in race-based admissions" to a new magnet school. He wrote about it in The Federalist and spoke at a board meeting about the First Amendment.

Then, in March 2021, according to Prior, a Facebook group called the "Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County" set out "to find all the parents that opposed school closure and mask policies" and the district's equity and critical race theory policies. The goal, he said, was to "expose those parents, send mailers to those parents' neighborhoods, hack their platforms, infiltrate their groups." He said six school board members were part of the group, along with then-Commonwealth's Attorney Buta Biberaj. Those are his allegations. He said the board, rather than apologize, "turned it back around on us."

Prior responded by founding Fight for Schools, which sought to remove six board members under Virginia's removal law. "Over the course of that summer, we gathered 25,000 signatures," he said. He became the go-to critic of the school system in the press and, he said, "enemy number one of the Loudoun County School Board in 2021." He said there was literally a list, and that former Attorney General Jason Miyares, who ranked fifth on it, called him a little upset to be behind him.

Then came the National School Boards Association's Sept. 29, 2021 letter and Attorney General Merrick Garland's Oct. 4 memo. Prior, who knows how DOJ works from the inside, said a memo in five days "doesn't happen." In his telling, the memo did more than direct the FBI. "It also gave a green light, a permission slip to these activists in the community that worked with the school boards, that worked with the Commonwealth Attorney Buta Biberaj to target people, to intimidate people, to harass people," he said. "Because we're the bad ones. According to the federal government, we're the bad ones."

What followed, he said, was "a yearlong online defamation campaign." He described hate mail sent to his home "saying that I was a cancer to the community." He said a box of coal was delivered to his door and opened by his daughters on Christmas Eve, and that mail was sent to his neighbors calling him "a racist and white supremacist" and telling them to shun him. "This is where my daughters play," he said.

The most concerning incident, Prior said, involved his electronic dog fence. Someone switched its wires so it no longer worked. That "put not only my dogs at risk, but also my kids at risk," he said.

Prior said the campaign continued until Biberaj lost, and that it has stopped since President Trump took office again. But the damage to civic life lingers. "This is why parents are afraid to go out and speak," he said. "It doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter where you've worked, it doesn't matter who you know or how good you are at your job, they will target you." He said he has talked to "so many people that want to take action, but they are afraid to do it."

Former Gov. Glenn Youngkin, seated on the same panel, drew the obvious lesson. When people hear stories like Prior's, he said, "they decide it's better off to keep your head down," and good candidates stop running for school board.

The Justice Department's own files show the department was told about threats to Loudoun parents in real time. On Oct. 2, 2021, the head of its Public Integrity Section flagged reports of a Loudoun list compiled to "expose these people publicly." The memo that went out two days later did not mention parents' safety at all.

Under new leadership, DOJ says it will review files on parents scrutinized under the Garland memo and apologize where rights were violated. For Prior's family, the cost is already paid. "Weaponization of government in and of itself is the problem," he said. "But the other problem is what it does within the community."

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.