An Arizona school board president has found himself in hot water after accusations of collecting data for a secret online dossier that listed parents who opposed mask mandates and critical race theory.
According to media reports, Scottsdale Unified School District Governing Board President Jann-Michael Greenburg accidentally displayed a link in an email message, granting access to a Google Drive for a parent he had accused of posting "anti-Semitic" comments against billionaire George Soros.
The drive allegedly contained files titled "SUSD Wackos" and "Anti Mask Lunatics", and was full of personal information, documents, and photos of about 47 people, including children, AZ Free News reported.
It featured hundreds of photos, documents, videos, screenshots of Facebook conversations, and even a report by a private eye on some parents' financial and criminal records.
The Daily Caller said that the woman who initially discovered the drive, Kim Stafford shared its contents with other parents, which led to an uproar among them. One of the mothers, Amanda Wray even said that the trove included pictures of her 8 and 10-year-old daughters - as well as data on her AirBNB property, mortgage documents, and other stuff.
The school district promised to conduct an investigation into the document but also suggested that Greenburg's father may be responsible for the weird dossier since he shares a computer with his son.
In the meantime, the school board president himself has claimed that he was not in any way linked to the document.
"I categorically deny having anything to do with any of this. If you are going to claim in a story right now, that I had anything to do with this, I would argue that crosses the line", Jann-Michael told the Daily Independent.
When asked if his dad, Mark Greenburg, was the creator of the dossier, he said "I am not my father's keeper".
One of the videos found on the drive reportedly shows Mark Greenburg confirming he hired a private investigator to snoop for some people.
The scandal erupted as widespread discussions are being held across the country after some American schools adopted critical race theory (CRT) in their curricula, causing mass protests among parents.
The theory states that US laws and legal institutions are "inherently racist" and function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and non-whites - predominantly, African Americans. Its opponents note that the theory promotes racial discrimination itself and consider it to be "anti-American propaganda".
In September 2020, then-President Donald Trump even prohibited the federal government and its contractors from instructing their employees to follow CRT's tenets, however, Joe Biden later rescinded the order.