A Department of Justice unit dedicated to “preventing and responding to” “hate crimes” tracked the conservative education policy group Moms for Liberty in the same manner it tracked the Ku Klux Klan, according to internal emails obtained by The Daily Wire.
Moms For Liberty was tracked by the DOJ’s Community Relations Service (CRS) alongside symbols such as the noose, the Confederate flag, and the swastika. The only other groups whose movements were similarly tracked, the emails show, were the Ku Klux Klan, a second KKK-style group, and the Oath Keepers.
The DOJ concealed the records from the public by ignoring a Freedom of Information Act request, but released them pursuant to a lawsuit filed by America First Legal on behalf of The Daily Wire. They show the Community Relations Service, which says its role is “preventing and responding to community tensions and hate crimes, bias, bullying, and discrimination,” tracked targets like Moms for Liberty through Google and LexisNexis alerts.
The DOJ did not return a request for comment on why it was tracking Moms for Liberty. It appears to have used its tracking of Moms for Liberty to identify school boards considering enacting conservative-leaning education policy. It then pressured school boards to defer to the DOJ to resolve the differences of opinion between duly-elected conservative officials and leftist activists, instead of enacting platforms they won elections on.
The Daily Wire obtained emails from DOJ-CRS “Conciliation Specialist” Hannah Levine. The emails suggest that she did little other than track supposed “hate” by setting up Google Alerts and LexisNexis alerts for keywords. For example, she scoured the news for articles that said “washington, dc n-word” and “washington, dc confederate flag.”
On July 20, 2023, a Google Alert set for”‘moms for liberty’ virginia” turned up an article that said that the “Virginia Department of Education releases new policies for transgender students.” Days later, Levine wrote to school board members in Roanoke County, Virginia, to “offer our services in conflict resolution.”
“CRS is aware of ongoing community tensions in Roanoke County following the release of the new model policies for transgender students. I’d like to connect to see if we might be able to offer support and services as you work to manage conflict within the community related to this,” she wrote in an email that was first reported by The Daily Wire last August.
Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin had drafted a “model” policy that would prevent schools from gender-transitioning children without their parents’ consent, which school boards had the option to adopt. In deep-red Roanoke County, Youngkin won twice as many votes as his Democratic opponent, with similar results down-ballot.
In a democracy, that meant that the locality had chosen to implement conservative policy. In the United States, schools are locally controlled. Yet CRS seemed to ask local school board members to defer to CRS because of “tensions” between the elected leaders who had an overwhelming mandate, and a tiny band of leftist agitators.
The Daily Wire compiled a list of alerts the DOJ unit had set to monitor, based on the emails produced. The words tracked by the DOJ official, often paired with jurisdictions such as “washington, dc” or “virginia,” were:
- antisemit*
- bias
- bigot*
- bullying
- confederate flag
- Daleneo Martin [a black teen who was shot by police after he took off in a stolen car as police tried to apprehend him, trapping the police officer in the car as he crashed it into a house, whose family alleged that his civil rights were violated]
- deface
- disability
- discriminat*
- full haus [which the Southern Poverty Law Center claims is a white supremacist group in West Virginia]
- hate speech
- hate symbol
- homophobi*
- Irvo Otieno [a mentally ill Kenyan who was asphyxiated by sheriff’s deputies and hospital guards attempting to restrain the “combative” man in a psychiatric facility, and whose family hired civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump to extract a payout]
- islamophob*
- klan
- noose
- n-word
- moms for liberty
- oath keepers
- protest
- racis*
- “red truck bakery” [a bakery that claimed it was harassed by conservatives after it gave free coffee to Black Lives Matter activists, but not those who believed “all lives matter]
- sexism
- shooting police-involved
- slur
- swastika
- tension*
- vigil
- white supremac*
There is no evidence that Moms for Liberty or elected officials in Roanoke were committing hate crimes.
Instead, DOJ seemed to be operating on the premise that either the Republican governor’s proposed policy was itself “hate,” or that lawless leftist activists created “tensions,” which opened the door to federal intervention designed to diffuse the tensions by appeasing them. Two leftist protesters were detained by police for allegedly disrupting a school board meeting on the topic by screaming.
The emails show that CRS at times pressured locals, using emails from doj.gov accounts, to accept their “services,” pestering them when they ignored them or said they had no interest. CRS presented itself as a neutral arbitrator on issues like Youngkin’s transgender policy even as CRS provided ideological “trainings” such as “Transgender Training for Law Enforcement.”
Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice called the findings “a new low for the Department of Justice.” telling The Daily Wire
“We reject the notion that advocating for parental rights and the well-being of children is an act of hate and we call on the Department of Justice to clarify its position on this matter,” Justice told The Daily Wire. “The actions of the federal government should never infringe upon the rights of parents to engage in the democratic process.”
Ironically, the top item in the Moms for Liberty Google alert that flagged Youngkin’s policy was an article about the “sick strategy of smearing moms as Nazis.”
Another Moms for Liberty Google alert said “America First Legal Launches Investigation Into Government Collusion with the Extremist SPLC to Target Parents’ Rights Advocate Groups,” pointing to an article that said that the SPLC labels mainstream, center-right groups like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education as “extremists,” while the DOJ treats SPLC as a source of credible information.
During the Obama administration, the CRS’s budget was $12.5 million, but it grew to $15.5 million by 2019. In 2020, Donald Trump unsuccessfully proposed eliminating CRS after the Heritage Foundation said it was only stoking racial conflict. It has grown since, with the Biden administration requesting $29 million for fiscal 2025, which would double its Obama-era size.