White House, DHS Communicated on School Board Letter
- July 21, 2023
A White House official offered “to explore options” with Department of Homeland Security officials in response to a letter from the National School Boards Association about threats made against members, the Washington Examiner reports.
Partially redacted emails obtained by the group Protect the Public’s Trust show National Security Council Director for Counterterrorism Michael Massetti saying he was working “to explore options” in response to a letter from the NSBA concerning threats being made against school board members in September 2021.
Michael Chamberlain, the director of Protect the Public’s Trust, said in a statement to the Examiner that “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.”
He claimed that “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.”