Justice Department leadership accepted left-wing briefing calling Moms for Liberty ‘extremist’

EXCLUSIVE — Staff at the U.S. Department of Justice accepted a “Year in Hate and Extremism” briefing from the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center, during which the parental rights group Moms for Liberty was characterized as a “reactionary anti-student inclusion” and “anti-government extremist” group.

The SPLC offered a briefing to the DOJ on its annual extremism report last summer, shortly after designating Moms for Liberty an “extremist” organization — a designation it boasted to DOJ officials as the first of its kind.

Emails obtained by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project through a public records request show DOJ officials interested in the briefing that claimed pro-parent groups like Moms for Liberty are “working to burnish connections to far-right politicians and normalize assaults on inclusive education.”

The Justice Department confirmed to the Washington Examiner on Wednesday that it accepted the briefing from the SPLC, although it did not specify when.

“The DOJ calling parents domestic terrorists, the SPLC, trying to label us as a hate group, having the SPLC, an outside organization, giving briefings to the Department of Justice about moms and dads that are concerned about the fact that the majority of our kids in schools are not learning how to read is shocking and should be shocking to the American public,” Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice told the Washington Examiner in an interview. “The weaponization of the American government against the people themselves is no joke, and we should be paying attention.”

The SPLC is known for designating mainstream conservative organizations as “hate” groups or “extremists,” comparing groups such as the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council to neo-Nazis and white supremacist organizations.

DOJ officials were approached by Michael Lieberman, SPLC senior policy counsel on hate and extremism, in early June of last year to “arrange a special briefing for select [Civil Rights Division] staff” and provide a first look at the group’s upcoming public designation of Moms for Liberty as an extremist organization, which placed the parents’ rights group on the same level as the Ku Klux Klan.

After DOJ officials in the agency’s Civil Rights Division shopped the briefing around within their division and to the separate DOJ office of the Criminal Division, Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Robert Moossy told his colleague that “the briefing makes sense,” according to a June 7 email exchange.

“This is even more proof that the highest levels of the United States government have put a target on the back of Moms for Liberty and other parents who have committed no crime,” Oversight Project Executive Director Mike Howell told the Washington Examiner. “This perverted weaponization of government serves no legitimate end besides satiating the bloodthirsty radical left.”

Lieberman, the SPLC counsel, provided the DOJ with a preview of the briefing, which stated that “schools have become a primary target for locally driven extremist mobilization” and defined “anti-government extremist” as “organizations or a collection of individuals that — based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities — believe the federal government is tyrannical and traffics in conspiracy theories.”

“A consistent tactic of these groups has been to attack public education and to attempt to ban books from classrooms and libraries based on what they deem inappropriate — because the content addresses race, LGBTQ issues and gender,” the SPLC briefing preview continued.

Most books subjected to the kind of “bans” that left-wing organizations are frustrated by have explicit depictions of sexual acts and pornography, which some school districts have nonetheless determined is appropriate content for children. Groups such as the SPLC have argued that blocking public schools from distributing such graphic content to children is an affront to LGBT rights.

Among other policy recommendations, the SPLC said in its preview of the briefing it offered DOJ officials that the government must “fiercely oppose efforts to impose educational gag orders on teaching painful truths about our nation’s racialized history.”

“It’s really shocking for, I think, the American people, American moms and dads, who are concerned about what’s happening in our public schools, the indoctrination that we’re seeing, to be considered extreme … for addressing it and bringing it to light,” Justice said. “The Southern Poverty Law Center is a hate machine in and of itself, and has labeled a number of different organizations, including Moms for Liberty, with this anti-government tag.”

“I think it’s really interesting that we’re actually working within the government process, you know, we endorse in school board races in the past two years, we’ve helped over 365 people get elected to school board[s],” she continued. “I think we actually embody the very best about what it means to be an involved American in our governmental processes.”

Confirmation that the DOJ accepted the briefing comes as other agencies in the Biden administration, including the Department of Education, have been keeping tabs on Moms for Liberty as well.

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The Oversight Project filed a lawsuit against the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, and the Federal Bureau of Investigations on behalf of Moms for Liberty last fall to produce records related to the Biden administration’s coordination with the SPLC in its attacks on the parents’ rights group.

The SPLC did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.