The Justice Department issued a report on Monday that showed career officials in the agency sharply disagreed with a Biden-era memo about alleged threats to school officials, worrying that it seemed like a politically charged entry into the fight over Covid restrictions that was “stupid, stupid, stupid.”
The internal documents were an unusually substantive exhibit in the Trump administration’s long and often hyperbolic campaign to suggest that the Biden administration weaponized the Justice Department against conservatives.
The report on Monday concluded that the 2021 memo was “the product of political pressure from outside groups and White House officials in the Biden administration” who sought to “inappropriately weaponize the Department of Justice and to chill the constitutional rights of parents.”
But the report also shows that many of the loudest voices inside the F.B.I. and Justice Department arguing against the memo by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland were later forced out by the Trump administration — meaning that the administration purged some of the very people who had defended conservatives and parents from what they viewed as unjustified investigations.
The Garland memo, issued as schools around the country started a third academic year of Covid-related restrictions, aimed to create a nationwide task force to investigate purported threats to school officials. It was prompted by a letter from the National School Boards Association that raised concerns about the security of school administrators and called some threats potentially “the equivalent of a form of domestic terrorism or hate crimes.” The letter prompted immediate blowback from conservatives and parents, and the organization eventually apologized.
The new report shows that veteran Justice Department lawyers and F.B.I. agents saw the Garland memo as a misguided overreach that erroneously conflated free speech activity — parents complaining about decisions made by school administrators — with terrorist threats.
Inside the department, a number of senior career officials, including George Toscas, a national security official, and Corey Amundson, a public corruption prosecutor, argued against the effort.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Mr. Amundson wrote to a colleague, Kevin Driscoll. Mr. Driscoll agreed. “It’s like they’re affirmatively trying to make this thing not work and look political,” Mr. Driscoll wrote, frustrated that Biden administration officials wanted to combine the school issue with a separate effort to investigate threats to election officials. “If they do this, they might as well rename the damn thing the Anti-MAGA Task Force.”
Mr. Toscas and Mr. Amundson were among a small group of senior, respected officials at the department who were removed from their positions on the first day of the second Trump term, as administration officials sought to assert immediate control over decision-making. Mr. Amundson and Mr. Toscas eventually resigned from the department entirely.
About a month later, when senior Trump administration officials demanded that the Justice Department drop corruption charges against the mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, Mr. Driscoll resigned.
At the F.B.I., a number of senior officials also objected to the Garland memo, including Steven Jensen, a senior counterterrorism official.
A few days before the memo was issued, Mr. Jensen warned colleagues in an email that it was “potentially dangerous ground, to blanket label generalized activity” as domestic terrorism. “Not all who oppose school board actions or legislative decisions are domestic terrorists. Not all who threaten politicians are” domestic terrorism subjects, he added.
Mr. Jensen was fired by the Trump administration in 2025 after disagreements over how to treat F.B.I. agents who had worked on cases arising out of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. He has sued over his termination.
