By Daniel Dale, CNN
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy keeps repeating a false claim about Attorney General Merrick Garland.
In an interview on Fox last Wednesday, McCarthy said that if Republicans win control of the House in the November midterm elections, “We’re gonna investigate the attorney general. Why did he go after parents, and call them terrorists, simply because they wanted to go to a school board meeting?”
McCarthy had made the same claim about Garland in a Fox interview the Sunday prior, saying that a Republican majority would be “able to stand up to an attorney general who goes after parents and calls them terrorists if they want to go to a school board meeting.” And McCarthy delivered near-identical rhetoric in another Fox interview this Monday.
Facts First: McCarthy’s claim about the attorney general is just wrong. Garland never called parents terrorists for attending or wanting to attend school board meetings. While the National School Boards Association, a nonprofit federation of states’ own school board associations, sent President Joe Biden a letter in September arguing that “acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials” could be classified as “the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes” and suggesting that the Patriot Act could be used against perpetrators, Garland himself never endorsed the “domestic terrorism” language or the deployment of the Patriot Act on this subject. Garland testified to Congress in...
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