Biden administration memo directed federal law enforcement agencies to target conservatives, including pro-life advocates, school parents

WASHINGTON, DC- Conservatives have long suspected the FBI’s targeting of pro-life advocates, parents at school board meetings, and active-duty service members was being directed from the upper reaches of the Biden administration. Now, Just the News is reporting that declassified documents show Biden officials ordered federal law enforcement agencies to investigate active-duty servicemen, gun owners, and others deemed to be spreading so-called “disinformation.” 

The documents say that Americans engaged in “concerning non-criminal behavior” were being targeted as a means to fight so-called “domestic terrorism” and to fight “xenophobic” disinformation.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard recently released a fully unredacted version of the Biden administration’s “Strategic Implementation Plan for Countering Domestic Terrorism,” which disclosed the extent of the administration’s mandate. 

Written in 2021, the memo shows the “intelligence framework that led the FBI to monitor and probe conservative Catholics and parents who protested against some school board policies,” Just the News wrote. It also encouraged the Department of Homeland Security to censor or debank Americans the administration considered to be potential enemies of the US. 

The National Security Council issued directives to the Department of Justice and the FBI, which said they should “drive…executive and legislative action” to ban “assault weapons” and high-capacity magazines, control so-called “ghost guns,” and probe active duty servicemembers for terrorist recruitment and to “mitigate xenophobia and bias.” 

Typically, the FBI has a high bar for the opening of criminal or national security investigations, otherwise known as a “predicate.” Such a predicate requires “an articulable factual basis” that “reasonably indicates” a crime or national security threat has or is about to occur. It strongly resembles the concept of “probable cause” used by police officers to make an arrest or obtain an arrest warrant. In the case of the FBI, the predicate concept is memorialized in the Attorney General’s Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations. 

According to legal experts and lawmakers contacted by Just the News, the Biden-era memo substantially lowered that standard to “concerning” behavior instead of criminality, noting that it possibly jeopardized the civil liberties of those targeted. It also served to weaponize police powers against Americans who held different views from the Biden administration on issues like the Second Amendment and COVID-19. 

House Judiciary Committee member Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), who played a key role in highlighting FBI abuses in the Russia collusion probe that took up much of President Trump’s first term, said the memo was nothing less than a “broad brush to start spying on Americans.” 

“It doesn’t have to be criminal, for sure. But it doesn’t have to be heterodox,” Biggs told Just the News. “It just has to be something that some agent, or some local agent, says, ‘Oh, we got a beef about this. We’re going to check it out.’” 

“It’s spying on Americans, violating the Fourth Amendment,” Biggs continued. 

Biggs wants FBI Director Kash Patel to ensure the Biden administration’s guidance is no longer in play and that current FBI agents no longer follow that protocol. “If there’s no predicate, but you’re investigating, then people need to be let go and fired,” he said. 

Dr. John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and a former Justice Department official, told the John Solomon Reports podcast that looking at “non-criminal behavior” by federal law enforcement was concerning. 

“Well, back in June 2021, the Biden administration put out its plan for dealing with domestic terrorists. The one that they put out at that time talked about how they were going after criminal activity. And of course, everybody, anybody who’s espousing violence or trying to or committing violence, one wants the government to get a handle on that,” Lott said. 

“What Tulsi Gabbard declassified was the rest of the document that was there, and what was shocking to me is that the types of tools and responses that they have been making fore people who are engaged in some type of violence actually applied to non-violent individuals, non-criminal activity that was there,” Lott continued. 

Federal law enforcement agencies were advised to examine “domestic terrorism iconography, symbology, and phraseology” as part of their “counterterrorism toolbox.” Such images included symbols from the American Revolution, such as the Gadsden flag and the so-called “Betsy Ross” flag representing the original thirteen colonies. The memo also identified pro-2A messages as indicators of possible domestic terrorism. 

And liberals call President Trump a fascist and a Nazi. 

Lott said targeting common conservative symbols and images while ignoring liberal symbols and images could be considered bias. 

“[When] you go and you look at something like the symbolism that they’re looking for, right, the 2A, somebody writing something like the right to keep and bear arms, the Betsy Ross flag, the Gadsden flag. Everything that you can find there seems to be something that would be associated with conservatives,” Lott continued. “I don’t see anything in there that’s associated with people on the left. There’s nothing about, like, a Black Lives Matter, or something like that, that somebody might say might be, you know, an equivalent thing there that they should be concerned about.” 

It was clear from the memo that it aligned with the priorities of the Democratic Party, including gun control, targeting law enforcement as being systemically racist, and pushing reliance on the federal government. 

The memo said federal law enforcement should “mitigate xenophobia and bias, including by advancing inclusion in the nation’s COVID-19 response,” putting the White House Domestic Policy Council as the lead. It also pushed the 2021 COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, which created a grant system for states to create “hate crime reporting hotlines.” It is unknown what COVID-19 had to do with “hate crimes.” 

The memo attempted to tie the spread of so-called “disinformation” to domestic terrorism. The memo directed agencies to increase information sharing to improve the government’s “understanding of how foreign state and non-state information operations, particularly disinformation, relate to the domestic terrorism threat.” 

The memo said federal agencies should “collaborate on addressing terrorist content online with partner governments similarly committed to freedom of expression.” 

Biden ordered the State Department, FBI, Justice Department, and CIA to “increase the priority of obtaining from foreign partners foreign intelligence and information related to U.S.-based violent extremism, overseas violent extremism and actors, and potential connections among them.” 

The State Department came under scrutiny from conservatives concerned with the activities of the Global Engagement Center, which was shuttered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, which funded NGOs that targeted, tagged, and labeled conservative content producers and media sites as “foreign agents.” Those targeted included The Federalist, now-FBI Assistant Director Dan Bongino, and other high-profile conservative voices. 

Bias within the FBI is nothing new, including the 2017 shooting at a baseball practice for congressional Republicans, where Republican Steve Scalise (R-LA) was seriously wounded. For years, the agency misled the American public, claiming the shooter, James Hodgkinson, was motivated by an attempt to commit “suicide by cop.” Hodgkinson, however, was a rabid Bernie Sanders supporter, and evidence pointed to the shooting as having left-wing political motivation. In 2021, the FBI reversed its stance, however, it never explained why. 

Initially, the memo was developed in the wake of the January 6 US Capitol siege, and gave the FBI an impetus to target conservatives for suspected domestic terrorism during the Biden regime. 

A number of FBI whistleblowers have said that strategies designed to target real extremists were turned against pro-life protesters, parents speaking out at school board meetings, and expressing traditional Catholic viewpoints. 

Garrett O’Boyle, one such whistleblower, testified that the FBI issued guidance after Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court to investigate pro-life groups for threats against the high court, which was absurd because threats against the justices were coming from the political left, not the right. In fact, a far-left pro-abortion advocate drove cross-country as part of a failed assassination plot against conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh. 

O’Boyle was directed to talk to a pro-life informant “about the threats to the Supreme Court,’ which left him baffled. 

“I was like, why would this person know about those threats? He’s pro-life. Like, he’s not the one going and threatening the Supreme Court Justices,” O’Boyle said. Such is the extent to which the Biden-controlled FBI was obsessed with targeting conservatives. 

In targeting Catholics via the so-called “Catholic Memo,” the FBI spoke of developing a source network in conservative and traditional Catholicism, fearing they served as a “nexus” for the development of extremist ideology. Another whistleblower provided evidence to Congress showing that FBI counterterrorism personnel were involved in investigating parents protesting school board policies.