Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, under [last week’s Senate hearing’s] questioning from [Senator Josh, (R, MO)] Hawley, said the memo is only about violence and threats of violence, and it’s the role of the FBI address those threats.

And

Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said in a separate hearing that the Justice Department does not see parents as a threat and that the attorney general’s memo is only focused on threats and intimidation.

The FBI’s claimed responsibility in this context is to

help protect you, your children, your communities, and your businesses from the most dangerous threats facing our nation—from international and domestic terrorists….

To help. Help whom? State and local police forces, acting within a State’s police powers, their authority to enforce law, are fully capable of handling “threats and intimidation;” they might need help only against domestic terrorism.

To help. Emphasis on “help.” The FBI’s claimed responsibility also is to help State and local law enforcement agencies deal with violence, not to do for the State and locals, or dictate to them, or to usurp their responsibilities.

But, if we can take Clarke’s and Monaco’s claims at face value, the only ones talking about domestic terrorism or domestic terrorists are the worthies of the National School Boards Association. Specifically, neither DoJ nor the FBI are talking about domestic terrorism, either in the Garland Memo or in those Senate hearing testimonies. Thus, there is no reason, by Garland’s own memo or those testimonies, for the FBI’s presence in these matters: with no domestic terrorism involved, there’s nothing for which the FBI need assist State and local law enforcement.

AG Merrick Garland’s memo is reprehensible, and dangerous to liberty, not because it focuses on threats of violence (which is bad enough FBI interference)—stipulate, arguendo, that that insistence is accurate—but because it exists.

Garland’s memo is reprehensible and dangerous to liberty because it is a naked attempt to usurp those States’ police powers and law enforcement capacities and arrogate them to the Federal government’s national police.