WASHINGTON — Attorney General Garland testified to Congress that the FBI was not conducting operations against American parents as “domestic terrorists.” It turns out he was either lying or greatly misinformed.

On Tuesday Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee released whistleblower documents showing that on October 20 the Counterterrorism Division and Criminal Investigative Divisions of the FBI had created a threat tag, EDUOFFICIALS.

It instructed that that the tag be applied to “investigations and assessments” of threats directed at “school board administrators, board members, teachers and staff.” The purpose of the tagging is to “help scope this threat on a national level” and identify “trends, strategies and best practices” to combat the alleged threats to school personnel.

This issue first broke on October 4, when the Justice Department announced that Attorney General Garland had directed the FBI to form a broad-based task force to establish mechanisms to prosecute crimes based on an alleged “increase in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence against school board members, teachers and workers in our nation’s public schools.”

The task force included the Justice Department’s National Security Division, which was formed in 2006 under the USA PATRIOT Act reauthorization to consolidate the department’s primary national security operations. The division serves as an interface between law enforcement agencies and the Intelligence Community and was intended to focus on the threat of domestic and international terrorism operating in the United States.

General Garland’s memo was a response to a September 29 letter from the National School Boards Association asking that the Biden administration classify as “domestic terrorism” protests against school curricula and programs and that it prosecute concerned parents under the PATRIOT Act and federal hate crimes legislation.

Leaked internal emails disclosed that the NSBA worked closely with the White House to formulate the letter, and the Justice Department’s quick response also suggested this was a coordinated effort. The NSBA came under intense fire for tagging parents as terrorists and disavowed the letter. Yet two dozen state education boards have either withdrawn their membership from the organization, withheld, dues or otherwise disassociated themselves.

Though the NSBA retracted their letter, Mr. Garland did not retract his memo. In testimony before Congress on October 21, the attorney general defended his approach, saying that “the First Amendment right of parents to complain as vociferously as they wish about the education of their children, about the curriculum taught in the schools” is “not what the memorandum is about at all, nor does it use the words ‘domestic terrorism’ or ‘PATRIOT Act.’”

The AG angrily rejected the idea that “the PATRIOT Act would be used in the circumstances of parents complaining about their children” or that this “would be labeled as domestic terrorism.” The new whistleblower memo — from the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division no less — dashes Garland’s denials.

The top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan of Ohio, promptly fired off a letter to Mr. Garland saying the new information “calls into question the accuracy and completeness of your sworn testimony.” Jordan says the new memo provides “specific evidence that federal law enforcement operationalized counterterrorism tools at the behest of a let-wing special interest group against concerned parents.”

If Garland was aware of this effort, which was being sent throughout the Bureau the day before he testified, Mr. Jordan reckons that Mr. Garland “willfully misled” the Judiciary Committee “about the nature and extent of the Department’s use of federal counterterrorism tools to target concerned parents at school board meetings.” Mr. Jordan invited the Attorney General to amend his October 21 testimony to deal with the discrepancy.

It is unclear how many FBI agents have been dispatched to monitor parents, what tools they have used to conduct their surveillance, what if any writs have been issued to authorize wiretaps or other more sophisticated means of collecting information, and how many American citizens have been branded with the EDUOFFICIALS threat tag.

Questions also remain about Mr. Garland’s potential conflict of interest regarding his son-in-law Xan Tanner, a co-founder of Panorama Education, a consultancy that has netted multi-million dollar contracts supporting “equity” training in schools. This is the very type of thing against which parents are protesting.

The Justice Department has taken a black eye over recent disclosures about its use of the discredited Steele Dossier to conduct domestic spying operations on the 2016 Donald Trump campaign. Polling in recent years has shown a growing partisan divide over respect for the once vaunted FBI. The new whistleblower documents are another blow to the credibility of the Justice Department and the FBI and will strengthen the argument for tough reforms of these politicized organizations.