A 2021 letter to then-President Joe Biden described a father as a possible domestic terrorist after he confronted a school about the brutal rape of his disabled daughter by a boy dressed as a girl in a school bathroom, the Department of Justice alleges.
Attorney General Todd Blanche on Monday announced the release of a comprehensive report on X from the DOJ which accuses the Biden administration of targeting parents around the country for speaking out against educational leaders — including a chilling case from Loudoun County School District in Virginia.
On September 29, 2021, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) sent a letter to Biden stating that some parents who voiced objections to certain policies — such as those supporting transgender ideology and critical race theory — amounted to participating in “domestic terrorism.” The NSBA requested that the federal government “arrest, prosecute, and incarcerate them,” according to the DOJ report.
One of the parents described by the NSBA as potential domestic terrorists included Scott Smith of Loudon County, Virginia, whose disabled daughter was in May 2021″attacked, anally raped, and orally sodomized, in a girls’ restroom stall at Stone Bridge High School, by a male student dressed in female attire,” the report reads.
The male student who committed the sexual assault identified as a female and was allowed to enter the girls’ restroom because of a bathroom policy adopted by officials of the Loudoun County Public Schools, the report finds. Loudoun County Public Schools Superintendent Scott Ziegler notified the Loudoun County School Board that a female student had reported being sexually assaulted by a male student in a school restroom. However, at a school board meeting in June 2021, Ziegler stated that to his knowledge “we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms.”
The superintendent also told the school board that “the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist,” causing Mr. Smith to openly challenge this claim at the meeting. There, Smith was arrested by deputies from the Loudon County’s Sheriff’s office and charged with obstruction of justice and disorderly conduct.
“His [Smith’s] prosecution only ended after he received a gubernatorial pardon” in 2023 from Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, the DOJ report notes. The fallout from the rape case is widely viewed to have contributed to Youngkin’s upset victory over Democratic former Gov. Terry McAuliffe in November 2021.
“Scott Smith is a dedicated parent who’s faced unwarranted charges in his pursuit to protect his daughter. Scott’s commitment to his child despite the immense obstacles is emblematic of the parental empowerment movement that started in Virginia,” Youngkin said in a statement to Fox News 5 in 2023. “I am pleased to grant Scott Smith this pardon and help him and his family put this injustice behind them once and for all.”
The student who brutally attacked Mr. Smith’s daughter was found guilty of sexual battery and forcible sodomy in October 2021. Despite the DOJ report identifying him as transgender, the skirt-wearing assailant identified as male and just wanted to have sex in the bathroom, his mother claimed in a November 2021 interview with the Daily Mail.
Just five days after the NSBA sent the letter to Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memorandum weaponizing the FBI to investigate parents like Smith, creating a “dedicated task force” within the Biden-era DOJ to “determine federal enforcement options for investigating and prosecuting parents” who spoke out about policies impacting their children’s health, safety, and education, the Trump administration DOJ’s report alleges.
“The initial skepticism of Department of Justice personnel proved well founded. The Garland Memorandum, though nominally focused on threats of violence, attempted to interfere with parental rights and speech,” the report states. “It was the product of political pressure from outside groups and White House officials in the Biden Administration who pushed Department of Justice leadership to inappropriately weaponize the Department of Justice and to chill the constitutional rights of parents.”
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