The activities were revealed in a House Judiciary Committee letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland.

According to the Washington Examiner, the specifics of the investigations were disclosed to the committee by whistleblowers.

Garland directed the FBI and Department of Justice to form a joint task force in October of last year after the National School Boards Association asked the Biden administration to investigate parents protesting at school board meetings as domestic terrorists.

Despite the NSBA later backtracking, Garland defended his task force which apparently continued to carry out investigations.

“The information we have received shows how, as a direct result of your directive, federal law enforcement is using counterterrorism resources to investigate protected First Amendment activity,” ranking members Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Mike Johnson (R-LA) wrote in the letter.

The letter cites three examples of incidents the FBI singled out for investigation.

In one, the FBI interviewed a mother who told the school board, “We’re coming for you”. The FBI opened its investigation after noting the parent was a member of the activist organization Moms for Liberty and legally owned a firearm.

In another case, the FBI interviewed someone who filed a tip against a father for “fitting the profile of an insurrectionist” and legally owned guns. During the interview, the people who filed the tip admitted “they had not ‘specifically’ observed ‘any crime threats’.

In the last example cited by Jordan and Johnson, an FBI field office opened an investigation into elected Republican officials after a Democratic party official filed a tip claiming they “incited violence” by simply “expressing displeasure with school districts’ vaccine mandates.”