FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—A conservative group is demanding documents from the Justice Department that could shed light on whether former FBI Deputy Director Andy McCabe or his wife played any role in the campaign to sic federal law enforcement on parents who protested school boards in 2021. In a statement to The Daily Signal Friday, McCabe said neither he nor his wife played any role.
“The FBI exists to protect everyday Americans from critical threats—not to target them for speaking out against injustice,” Will Scolinos, counsel at America First Legal, said in a statement first provided to The Daily Signal.
“AFL and congressional investigators have established that the Biden-Harris administration in Washington, D.C., had weaponized the federal government to target parents without reason and contrary to law,” he added.
He was referring to the National School Boards Association, which sent a letter to President Joe Biden on Sept. 29, 2021, that compared concerned parents to domestic terrorists. Using that letter as a pretext, Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered the Justice Department on Oct. 4, 2021, to investigate alleged threats to school boards. The DOJ developed a “threat tag” to track parents who might pose such a threat to school boards.
“This investigation follows up on our prior work by focusing on whether the FBI was directly or—through Democrat activist and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s wife, Jill McCabe—indirectly involved in the whole-of-government assault on parental rights in Loudoun County, [Virginia],” Scolinos explained.
America First Legal filed a Freedom of Information Act request Thursday, demanding all documents related to the Garland memo, the NSBA letter, the Loudoun County School Board, and mentioning or referring to McCabe or his wife.
Who Is Andy McCabe?
McCabe, who served as deputy director of the FBI between 2016 and 2018 and acting director in 2017, reportedly discussed with then-agent Peter Strzok an “insurance policy” for the FBI to continue its investigation into alleged ties between Donald Trump and Russia if Trump were to win the presidency in 2016.
In 2019, McCabe told CNN he did not recall any such discussion.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded that McCabe, then deputy director of the FBI, had lied to then-FBI Director James Comey, to other FBI agents, and to others about leaks to a Wall Street Journal reporter. McCabe contested the findings, which featured prominently in then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ decision to fire him right before he could retire in 2018. He sued for wrongful termination and ultimately settled with the DOJ, receiving the pension he had been denied.
Horowitz concluded that McCabe orchestrated a leak to The Wall Street Journal because a previous Journal article had “questioned McCabe’s impartiality in overseeing FBI investigations involving former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.”
That article said that a political action committee run by Virginia’s Democratic then-governor, Terry McAuliffe, had donated nearly $675,000 to McCabe’s wife, Barbara J. McCabe, in her ultimately unsuccessful 2015 state Senate campaign.
Parental Rights Battles
America First Legal suggests that McCabe’s wife may have played a role in the parental rights battle that proved fundamental to the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election, in which Republican Glenn Youngkin prevailed over McAuliffe.
Parents began to protest at school board meetings in 2021, challenging COVID-19 policies such as mask mandates and opposing classroom instruction based on gender ideology and critical race theory (the ideological lens through which America is viewed as institutionally racist in favor of white people against black people). Parents in Loudoun County protested its School Board over these issues.
America First Legal’s Freedom of Information Act request described key aspects of the parental rights battle that, AFL maintains, suggest the McCabes’ involvement.
Members of a Facebook group called “The Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County” suggested targeting members of the community for speaking out at School Board meetings, and the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office opened a criminal investigation into the group in March 2021, according to a local Fox News affiliate. Six School Board members, the local Commonwealth’s Attorney, and a member of the County Board of Supervisors took part in the group.
On May 28, 2021, a 15-year-old male student forced a girl to commit sex acts at Stone Bridge High School. The same student went on to sexually assault another girl in the girls restroom at Broad Run High School on Oct. 6. The Loudoun County Juvenile Court had found the perpetrator “not innocent” of charges of forcible sodomy and forcible fellatio. The student also pleaded “no contest” to charges of abduction and sexual battery on Oct. 6.
Then-schools Superintendent Scott Ziegler said in a June 22, 2021, School Board meeting that “the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist.” After that statement, Scott Smith, the May 28 victim’s father, spoke out and was arrested and eventually convicted on charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. (Virginia’s governor, Youngkin, would go on to issue a complete pardon to Smith after he won election campaigning on parental rights.)
On the evening of May 28, an FBI agent called the Loudoun County Emergency Communications Center to inquire about the incident after the Stone Bridge principal sent a message to the community describing the incident in vague terms. The emergency center told the FBI agent that the incident involved a sexual assault under investigation by local law enforcement, and the agent said it would not require his assistance.
According to America First Legal, members of the Loudoun County School Board and their allies made numerous reports to local and federal law enforcement alleging that they had been threatened or harassed for their advocacy for COVID-19 policies, critical race theory, and transgender policies. Members of the community discussed having a contact with the FBI that was monitoring local issues in Loudoun County.
The Loudoun County School Board appointed Jill McCabe to be a formal adviser on Dec. 17, 2020. She advocated for the School Board’s transgender policies at a June 22, 2021, board meeting.
For his part, Andy McCabe served as a keynote speaker at a Loudoun County Public Schools event on cybersecurity in April 2022.
“The evidence suggests the Attorney General’s October 4 Memorandum is the byproduct of and/or a key Biden administration ‘deliverable’ in a collusive scheme, coordinated directly or indirectly with local actors in Loudoun County, Virginia (among other places), to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate parents in the free exercise or enjoyment of their rights or privileges secured by the Constitution or laws of the United States,” the America First Legal information request claims.
McCabe’s Response
“I have had nothing to do with the FBI since my termination in 2018,” McCabe told The Daily Signal.
“In 2021, my wife (a pediatrician and the medical director of the pediatric emergency department at Inova Loudoun Hospital) served on a health advisory board for the Loudoun County school system,” he noted. “Neither she nor I had anything to do with the FBI, the DOJ, Merrick Garland’s memo, ‘school safety’, a ‘left-wing school board group’ or Loudoun County school parents.”
“Any suggestion to the contrary is absolutely false,” he added.
