Five years ago I warned that the government was preparing to treat people who questioned COVID policy as a domestic-terror problem. A 273-page DOJ report, released October 5, 2026, now shows exactly how it was done, who was targeted, and why it should matter to every reader of this newsletter.
On August 13, 2021, the Department of Homeland Security issued a terrorism bulletin that listed “grievances over public health safety measures and perceived government restrictions” among the drivers of domestic terrorism, and promised to “identify and evaluate” online activity “associated with the spread of disinformation, conspiracy theories, and false narratives.”
The next day I published a piece on GreenMedInfo saying plainly what the bulletin implied: that people who questioned, resisted, or disobeyed COVID restrictions, or who questioned the vaccines, were being moved into the category of potential domestic terrorists. I wrote that the people being described this way were mostly mothers and fathers, many with vaccine-injured children, who were questioning the medical system for the first time in their lives.
I was told that was paranoid. And that I was a “super-spreader” of dangerous misinformation.
On October 5, 2026, the Department of Justice released a report by its Weaponization Working Group, with 250 pages of internal emails attached, showing what happened in the ten weeks after that bulletin. I have reviewed all 273 pages. This is what they say, in plain language, and what it means for you.
Thirteen days from a private letter to the FBI
Here is the sequence, every step of it documented in the report’s own exhibits.
In early September 2021, Chip Slaven, the interim head of a trade association called the National School Boards Association, began corresponding with Mary Wall at the White House. Her title matters: she was Senior Policy Advisor on the White House COVID-19 Response Team. Not the education office. The COVID office.
On September 21, Wall asked Slaven for an advance copy of a letter he was drafting. On September 22, a week before the letter was public, the White House Counsel’s Office forwarded Slaven’s material to the Office of the Deputy Attorney General and asked what the Justice Department could do.
The lawyers who read it did not see crimes. One Associate Deputy Attorney General wrote that the conduct looked “state/local in character.” A colleague wrote that being a member of a political group and making offensive gestures are things people can do “all day long” without breaking federal law, and that “the constitutional right part is what appears to be missing from this picture.” Another attorney in the chain wrote three words: “This is ridiculous.”
On September 29, the letter went public. It asked the President to treat parents at school board meetings as a potential form of “domestic terrorism,” and to bring in the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, the PATRIOT Act, and hate-crime law. Its “evidence” was a list of news clippings: a man who gave a Nazi salute to mock a mask mandate in Michigan, an Alabama man who filmed himself calling school administrators, meeting disruptions in a dozen states, and one arrest in Virginia that I will come back to.
Over the next weekend the Justice Department wrote the memo anyway. A White House lawyer pressed that the matter was “fairly urgent.” The Deputy Attorney General’s chief of staff wanted a response “ASAP” and “in the next couple of hours.” The lead attorney emailed the FBI and the National Security Division asking how the Bureau decides “whether and when” school-board threats “rise to the level of Domestic Terrorism.”
The FBI’s own counterterrorism official answered that this was “potentially dangerous ground” and that “not all who oppose school board actions or legislative decisions are Domestic Terrorists.” Criminal Division attorneys called the draft “horrible,” said “they might as well rename the damn thing the Anti-MAGA Task Force,” and “stupid, stupid, stupid.” A Civil Rights Division attorney wrote that “almost all” of the cited incidents were protected by the First Amendment and that there was “nothing remotely federal” about them: “we are ramping up an awful lot of federal manpower for what is currently non-federal conduct.”
On October 4, Attorney General Merrick Garland signed the memo. It created a task force, ordered the FBI and every U.S. Attorney to convene meetings with local police within 30 days, and opened “dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting.” When a senior FBI official was asked whether he had known about it, he replied: “Not in time to stop it.”
The FBI was not given an advance copy. The school boards association was. Two days later Slaven asked whom at the FBI he should be “communicating with” to report people. On October 7, Mary Wall wrote back to him: “we have your back, and we’re exploring every avenue we can.”
Thirteen days. A private letter, routed through the White House COVID team, became federal threat-reporting infrastructure in thirteen days, over the written objection of nearly every lawyer who touched it.
Who they went after
The FBI created a threat tag, “EDUOFFICIALS,” and opened 25 assessments. Six were run by the Counterterrorism Division. Two were run by the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. By November 8, 2021, there were open files in Detroit, Portland, Atlanta, Chicago, Cincinnati, Denver, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Newark, Omaha, San Diego, San Francisco and Washington.
The Justice Department has not released who those people were. But a House Judiciary Committee investigation, which the DOJ report relies on, described three of them, and the descriptions tell you everything about how the machine actually worked:
A mother was reported to the FBI’s tip line because she told a school board “we are coming for you.” The tip said she was a threat because she belonged to a “right wing mom’s group” and “is a gun owner.” When an agent interviewed her, she explained she meant replacing the board at the next election.
A father was reported because he “fit the profile of an insurrectionist”: he “rails against the government,” “believes all conspiracy theories,” and “has a lot of guns.” When the agent interviewed the person who reported him, that person admitted having “no specific information or observations of any crimes or threats.” They had called because they learned the Justice Department had set up a website to report “concerning behavior directed toward school boards.”
Republican state officials were reported by a state Democratic Party official for criticizing vaccine mandates online.
Read those again. Nobody was reported for doing anything. They were reported for what they believed, what group they belonged to, and what they owned. The complaints came through a federal tip portal that the Attorney General had just advertised. The FBI itself later admitted it “has not observed an uptick of threats directed at school officials since it began tracking the data.” Not one of the 25 cases produced a federal charge.
And the Virginia arrest the letter used as its centerpiece? That was Scott Smith, a plumber whose daughter had been sexually assaulted in a school bathroom a month earlier. He went to a board meeting to hear the superintendent deny that any assault had occurred. A local activist threatened to destroy his business on social media if he did not stop talking about it. He lost his temper and swore at her. Deputies tackled him, and the photograph of his bloodied face became the trade association’s exhibit for “domestic terrorism.” He testified at the Justice Department in June that after the memo came out, his local board meetings went from “three to four hundred people to just a handful.”
That is what a chilling effect looks like. It is not a metaphor. It is an empty room.
The document that connects it to you
Most coverage of this report has stopped at the school-board story. The most important document in the appendix is not about school boards at all.
On October 28, 2021, three weeks after the Garland memo, the DHS Counterterrorism Mission Center circulated a threat assessment titled “Threats to Public Schools Likely Elevated Due to Opposition of Mask and Vaccine Mandates, Perception of Critical Race Theory.” Its core judgment:
“Violent individuals who oppose mask mandates, vaccine requirements, and CRT as a topic of classroom learning, will increasingly pose a threat to school personnel over the next six months due to the expected approval of a COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 5-11.”
This is the August 13 bulletin I wrote about, applied. The “grievances over public health safety measures” had become mask and vaccine opponents by name, with the children’s vaccine rollout as the trigger date.
Look at what the assessment was built on. Its own source summary says it rested on “DHS reporting, reliable NGO reporting, reliable Western news reporting, and a letter from a school board association.” The “reliable NGO” is identified in the footnotes: SITE Intelligence Group, a private company that monitors online chatter. The “letter from a school board association” is the same letter the lawyers called ridiculous. The analysts gave the whole thing “medium confidence” and admitted their confidence “would increase if we had additional information about the incidents that have occurred.”
Now look at the remedy, which the assessment rated “high confidence.” It was not arrests. It was “programs to counter misinformation”: DHS’s CP3 office, CISA, and the Department of Education, described as “at the forefront in creating programs and resources to counter misinformation and increase the public’s understanding of digital literacy,” plus “multidisciplinary teams” of law enforcement and school psychologists to attend “contentious school board meetings” on “topics perceived as controversial or polarizing.”
In one document, the government fused two things that should never touch: the counterterrorism threat file and the counter-misinformation program. The people in the threat file were defined by their opinions about masks and vaccines. The remedy for the threat was to correct their opinions. An FBI official who read it refused to let the Bureau be listed as a coordinator, calling it “a politically charged paper.”
I know this machine from the inside
In March 2021 a private group in London called the Center for Countering Digital Hate published a report naming twelve people it called the “Disinformation Dozen.” I was one of them. The report claimed we were responsible for 65 percent of anti-vaccine content online.
On July 15, 2021, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki stood at the podium and repeated it almost word for word: “There’s about 12 people who are producing 65 percent of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms. All of them remain active on Facebook, despite some even being banned on other platforms.” In the same briefing she said the White House was “flagging problematic posts for Facebook” and had proposed that platforms create “a robust enforcement strategy that bridges their properties,” which is a bureaucratic way of saying that someone banned on one platform should be banned on all of them (White House transcript). Facebook’s own internal analysis, later released by the House Judiciary Committee, put our actual share of vaccine content at a fraction of one percent (The Defender).
Set the two episodes side by side.
A private organization writes a document naming a category of people as dangerous. A White House policy office adopts the document’s language within days. The government never charges anyone with anything, because there is nothing to charge; instead it attaches a label, “domestic terrorism” or “disinformation,” that no statute defines and no court reviews. An enforcement arm acts on the label: an FBI threat tag and a tip portal in one case, platform bans and algorithmic suppression in the other. The private organization later backs away or does not: the school boards association apologized within 23 days and said there was “no justification” for its language; the Center for Countering Digital Hate never has.
Same year. Same White House. Same COVID response apparatus. The difference between the twelve of us and the twenty-five parents is only which door the machine used.
What this means for you
If you read this newsletter, you probably questioned a mandate, declined a shot, shared a study, or spoke at a meeting sometime in the last five years. Here is what the government’s own documents establish about what that meant.
Your beliefs and memberships were treated as evidence of dangerousness. The tips that triggered FBI files cited gun ownership, membership in a mothers’ group, “conspiracy theories,” and criticism of government. Not acts. Not threats. Profiles.
Anyone could put you in the system. The Attorney General advertised a portal. A neighbor, a school board member, or a party official could enter your name with, in the government’s own words, “no specific information or observations of any crimes or threats,” and an agent would open a file and knock on your door.
“Threat” and “misinformation” were one file. The DHS assessment proves that counterterrorism analysts and counter-misinformation programs were working the same list of people for the same reasons. The censorship you experienced online and the intimidation parents experienced at meetings were not separate stories. They were the same operation with two outputs.
It worked. Rooms emptied. People stopped posting. A master plumber spent two years and his savings fighting a disorderly conduct charge. The government did not need a single conviction. The memo was the punishment.
The machine is not partisan and it is not gone. Tip portals, threat tags, private “NGO reporting” contracts, and counter-misinformation offices are infrastructure. They outlive the administration that built them. The only reason we can read these emails is that one administration chose to release documents about the previous one. The next one can choose otherwise.
What the government now admits, and what it owes
The Justice Department has rescinded the memo and committed to five remedies: the 25 people assessed under it will be offered a chance to read their own files; a disclaimer will be added noting the memo “raised serious constitutional concerns”; every file will be reviewed for constitutional violations; where violations are found, the Department “will issue a formal apology”; and money will go to training school staff on parents’ First Amendment rights.
Good. Now apply the same standard to everyone else the same machine processed.
Twelve of us were named from the White House podium as the source of a national health emergency, on the basis of a private group’s statistic the platforms themselves did not believe. Millions more had posts removed, accounts throttled, and names flagged through channels the White House described openly. None of us has been offered a file, a disclaimer, a review, or an apology.
The ask is simple and it is already the government’s own policy:
Extend the file review and apology process to anyone whose name was transmitted between the White House, a private “monitoring” organization, and a platform or agency during the COVID response. The Department has shown it can do this for 25 people. It can do it for twelve more, and then for the rest.
Release the communications. The same transparency rationale that justified publishing privileged DOJ emails about the Garland memo justifies publishing the White House’s communications with CCDH, SITE Intelligence Group, and the platforms.
Make it illegal to rebuild. The Senate Commerce Committee has already advanced S. 4749, the JAWBONE Act, which would bar federal officials from coercing platforms to suppress lawful speech. Call your senators and ask them to pass it. Then ask your representative for a House companion. The coalition I helped found, Restore the First, has scripts and a lookup tool.
Join Stand For Health freedom and take action with their advocacy tools. And share the platform widely with those you know who are.
Pre-order my upcoming investigative book, Shadow Empire: The Epstein Files, to educate yourself on how the systems of power that operate with impunity expose themselves in the 3.5 million document release from Jan. of this year. I recently reported on Epstein’s plan to create a “Mother’s Army” to target their children for vaccination directly. The truth must get out.
In August 2021 I wrote that if we stood together in “full transparency, open dialogue, and non-violent civil disobedience,” we would be vindicated. The vindication is here, in the government’s own hand. What we do with it is up to us.
What the documents actually say
Every quotation below is from the DOJ report or its appendices, available at justice.gov, unless otherwise noted.
“This is ridiculous.” — ODAG attorney, before the NSBA letter was public (Report p. 10; App. G p. 11)
“The constitutional right part is what appears to be missing from this picture.” — Myesha Braden, ODAG (Report p. 10)
“Not all who oppose school board actions or legislative decisions are Domestic Terrorists.” — Steven Jensen, FBI Counterterrorism (Report p. 12)
“They might as well rename the damn thing the Anti-MAGA Task Force.” — Criminal Division attorney (Report p. 13)
“Almost all” of the incidents were protected speech; “nothing remotely federal”; “ramping up an awful lot of federal manpower for what is currently non-federal conduct.” — Civil Rights Division attorney, Oct. 3, 2021 (Report pp. 15–16)
“Not in time to stop it.” — FBI Deputy Assistant Director Jay Greenberg, Oct. 4, 2021 (Report p. 16)
“We have your back, and we’re exploring every avenue we can.” — Mary Wall to Chip Slaven, Oct. 7, 2021 (NSBA independent review, via Fox News)
“Violent individuals who oppose mask mandates, vaccine requirements, and CRT … will increasingly pose a threat to school personnel over the next six months due to the expected approval of a COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 5-11.” — DHS assessment, Oct. 28, 2021 (App. G pp. 94–99)
Sources: “DHS reporting, reliable NGO reporting, reliable Western news reporting, and a letter from a school board association.” Footnotes 3, 5 and 7: SITE Intelligence Group. — DHS assessment Source Summary
“CP3, CISA, and DOE have been at the forefront in creating programs and resources to counter misinformation.” — DHS assessment
“The FBI does not consider parents making their voices heard at school board meetings - or anywhere else - to be domestic terrorists.” — FBI internal email, Nov. 16, 2021 (App. G p. 101), never quoted in the report’s narrative
25 Guardian assessments; 17 Criminal, 6 Counterterrorism, 2 Weapons of Mass Destruction; one full investigation; no federal charges; “has not observed an uptick of threats.” — House Judiciary interim report, pp. 2, 7
“Right wing mom’s group,” “is a gun owner,” “fit the profile of an insurrectionist,” “no specific information or observations of any crimes or threats.” — House Judiciary interim report, p. 7
“There’s about 12 people who are producing 65 percent of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms.” — Jen Psaki, July 15, 2021 (White House transcript)
“Grievances over public health safety measures and perceived government restrictions.” — DHS NTAS Bulletin, Aug. 13, 2021 (GreenMedInfo, Aug. 14, 2021)
Sources
U.S. Department of Justice, Weaponization Working Group, “The 2026 Report to Expose the Weaponization of Government Against Parents in Schools,” Oct. 5, 2026, with Appendices A–G. Press release: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/weaponization-working-group-releases-report-garland-memo-chilled-parental-rights-and-warned
House Judiciary Committee and Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, “A ‘Manufactured’ Issue and ‘Misapplied’ Priorities,” Mar. 21, 2023: https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/115531/documents/HHRG-118-JU10-20230323-SD001.pdf
NSBA independent review exhibits (Mary Wall emails and title): https://nsba-cloud-drupal-files-nsba-dev.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/NSBA+Report-5-19-22+exhibits+only.pdf
White House press briefings, July 15–16, 2021: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2021/07/16/press-briefing-by-press-secretary-jen-psaki-july-16-2021/
Governor of Virginia, Absolute Pardon of Scott Thomas Smith, Sept. 2023: https://www.governor.virginia.gov/media/governorvirginiagov/governor-of-virginia/pdf/Scott-Thomas-Smith—Pardon.pdf
Sayer Ji, “The ‘Vaccine Hesitant’ & ‘Conspiracy Theorists’ a Domestic Terrorism Threat,” GreenMedInfo, Aug. 14, 2021: https://greenmedinfo.com/content/vaccine-hesitant-conspiracy-theorists-domestic-terrorism-threat-new-homeland-secu3
Restore the First, JAWBONE Act (S. 4749) action page: https://restorethe1st.com/
The DHS are the real terrorists.
Incredible! I am glad we haven't forgotten, that many of us are still speaking up but every time I see reruns of specific parts of the whole covid mess I get angrier! They destroyed our world, many are dead & injured due to covid poison shots & so many people seem to be permanently brain damaged by the propaganda.