Kash’s Corner: ‘Domestic Terrorism’ at School Board Meetings?

“There’s been too much politicization of what is and is not domestic terrorism.”
In this episode of Kash’s Corner, we discuss the National School Boards Association calling on the Biden administration to protect its members from “angry mobs,” whose actions have been likened to “domestic terrorism.”

And we also take a look at the case of Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller who has been charged with six violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) for publicly criticizing military leaders in a series of viral videos for their handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal.

Jan Jekielek: Hello everybody and welcome back to Kash’s Corner. So Kash, a couple of things I wanted to cover today. One of them is the Department of Justice responding to the National School Boards Association letter basically saying it believes there’s a threat from potential parent. The Department of Justice actually responded to this letter from the National School Boards Association saying it’s going to convene with different levels of law enforcement and discuss the issue and presumably protect the teachers and the Teachers Association. What are your thoughts on all this? This seems kind of a strange set of developments.

Kash Patel: I guess what the Attorney General is saying is that parents will take to physical violence at some of these meetings, but I don’t understand the basis for that because I haven’t seen any information to support it. If we’re going to use a national police force locally, I want to know what the intelligence or information is from the FBI who’s supposed to report to the Attorney General.

Does the FBI have information to support this allegation? Are they saying people have been threatened or they have credible reporting to say people will be threatened at parent, teacher meetings or school meetings and municipalities, which are a local matter, which are a state and county matter, not a national law enforcement matter? And if there is, then maybe there’s a basis to do that. A lot of times we do joint work that is federal and state come together to do certain law enforcement engagements when appropriate. It happens a lot.

But I’m wary of the Attorney General entering a political fray by saying, “Well, because I received a letter from the National School Boards Association, I’m going to respond publicly.” He could have taken another approach and directed the FBI to engage local law enforcement quietly and gone to them in person and said, “Do you have any merit? Do you have any information to support this accusation? And if you do, do you need funding?” So a lot of questions, probably not a lot of answers at this time, but that’s kind of where I’m at on that.
Mr. Jekielek: I was just interviewing someone who’s been active around the Loudoun County Public School Board. And this is one of the groups, [that] has been very active and agitated and I asked her, “Do you feel there’s any threat of violence or anything like that.” I haven’t seen anything like that.

Yes we’re very organized. Yes, we’re very active. It feels to the people that have been active in these situations that I’ve been speaking to as if this is kind of a stretch to attract sort of federal scrutiny.

Mr. Patel: Well, I think there’s a lot of credence to that without having access to the underlying information that I haven’t seen an uprising or a case where it merited federal national attention, God forbid, even if there was an incident at a local school board meeting, it’s a local school board meeting for local authorities and sheriffs …

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