Watching Pam Bondi’s confirmation hearing was an exasperating experience for a great many reasons, though it offered a peek into an alternate version of reality with little resemblance to our own.
To hear the prospective attorney general nominee and the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Republican members tell it, the Justice Department has been corrupted. In fact, they targeted federal enforcement as if it were incontrovertibly true that Main Justice had been “weaponized,” “politicized” and turned into a partisan tool.
None of these claims, presented to the public in matter-of-fact ways, was true. University of Michigan law professor Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. Attorney and an MSNBC legal analyst, went so far as to characterize the GOP’s Justice Department smears as “garbage,” adding that Republicans couldn’t “possibly believe” what they were saying.
There was one lie in particular, however, that stood out.
In his opening statement, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley clung to one of his party’s favorite myths. The Iowa Republican, reading from a prepared text, declared:
Let us not forget some of the other flagrant abuses of power that we’ve seen from the DOJ and the FBI over the last four years. … The FBI opened dozens of investigations into parents who voiced their concerns at school board meetings regarding curriculum choices and COVID-19 mandates.
As the proceedings continued, both the prospective nominee and other GOP senators echoed the anecdote as if it were true. “Going after parents at a school board meeting has got to stop,” Bondi testified. Around the same time, Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah claimed that the Justice Department was guilty of “branding parents as ‘domestic terrorists.’”
Republicans have spent recent years pretending that their myth about school board meetings is true. It’s not, and NBC News debunked it again during Bondi’s confirmation hearing. But no matter how many times GOP officials are presented with the truth, they continue to prefer their alternate version of reality.
In 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo ordering federal law enforcement officials to meet with local authorities around the country to ‘facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats’ against education personnel after a number of protests, attacks on social media and other actions targeting school officials over Covid policies, school curriculum, critical race theory and other issues. … Garland’s memo specified concerns about ‘illegal’ threats and harassment; it never equated parents to domestic terrorists. Ultimately, the FBI never investigated, arrested or charged a single parent in connection with school board meetings.
Similarly, the FBI has explained in writing that Director Christopher Wray and other agency officials “have stated clearly on numerous occasions before Congress and elsewhere, the FBI has never been in the business of investigating speech or policing speech at school board meetings or anywhere else, and we never will be. Our focus is and always will be on protecting people from violence and threats of violence. We are fully committed to preserving and protecting First Amendment rights including the right to free speech.” What’s more, let’s not forget that House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan launched an investigation into this myth — not surprisingly, the Ohio Republican found nothing — and a group of conservative activists even filed a lawsuit related to the myth, which was thrown out of court for being foolish. And yet, in GOP circles it remains an article of faith that the myth is true. A party that’s become dependent on rewriting recent history keeps asking Americans to believe their made-up narrative. What the party appears reluctant to consider, however, is the resulting question: If the Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland and President Joe Biden is so genuinely awful, shouldn’t Republicans be able to make a reality-based case against it?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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