Jim Jordan’s Sham Investigation Backfires When Reality Refutes Him

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Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has helped lead outrage about federal law enforcement daring to even consider responding to documented threats of violence from conservatively inclined parents to officials in education amid billowing outrage on the Right about issues in schools like the imposition of restrictions around COVID-19, curriculum covering parts of life outside the established Republican norm, and more.

As explained in a new report from The Washington Post, details in a new report from a probe into that law enforcement action seem to essentially refute a guiding idea behind the outrage, which is that the scrutiny was substantively baseless and instead founded in politics. The probe, conducted under the House Judiciary Committee, which Jordan leads, highlighted an incident that led to an FBI response in which a parent said that their side was “coming” for those she was addressing. The Post identified key details that lined up with something that happened in late 2021 in Michigan where someone said: “We’re coming for you. Take it as a threat. Call the FBI. I don’t care. You’re all either going to be recalled or you’re all — we’re all coming for you. That’s what’s happening.”

In other words, the scrutiny wasn’t baseless! The speaker, in terms however unserious, literally asked for it and distinguished the application of their remarks in the electoral sphere from something else. As they themselves outlined it, what they were communicating wasn’t just about forthcoming elections for school board. Available details shared by the committee Republicans indicated the FBI conducted an interview with the mother who made those remarks.

“The committee wouldn’t confirm or deny this is the instance cited,” the Post said in comparing the incident that Republican investigators highlighted to what was independently documented elsewhere. “But its use would conform with a long-running campaign by congressional Republicans that has often skirted or gone beyond the available facts.” In other examples of gaps in the Republicans’ presentations of the facts, they’ve sought to tie statements of federal interest in the threats to school boards to comments by the National School Boards Association, but there is no evidence of any kind of specific coordination between that organization and the feds. The Republicans are trying to found government policy on whining and vibes — not evidence.

Elsewhere in the newly established GOP majority in the House, Republicans have also turned their focus to allegedly censorious suppression online of infamous reporting from the New York Post about corruption ostensibly involving the Bidens. They proposed legislation that, if enacted, would broadly restrict government personnel from getting in touch with private interests like Twitter about content on their sites.