Over two years ago, the nation’s top law enforcement agency landed in hot water when a memo leaked detailing plans to infiltrate and illegally spy on certain Catholic parishes and classifying American Catholics devoted to the Tridentine Mass as “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics” and “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists.” The memo, drafted and approved by the FBI’s Richmond field office, caused outrage and initiated a series of congressional hearings, during which then-FBI director Christopher Wray attested, under oath, that the Richmond field office had acted alone in drafting the memo, which was never circulated or meant to be circulated to the FBI more broadly. Wray lied.

In a letter to current FBI director Kash Patel, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and the Senate Judiciary Committee requested further documents related to the FBI’s targeting of American Catholics, in addition to revealing that the agency’s anti-Catholic animus spread far beyond the Richmond office. Grassley wrote that, contrary to Wray’s testimony, the anti-Catholic memo “had been widely distributed to FBI field offices across the country.” In fact, the memo reportedly reached at least 1,000 FBI employees in multiple field offices across the country.

Grassley noted that the Richmond memo served as the basis for a much broader-reaching second intelligence product being drafted when the initial memo was leaked. “Director Wray’s testimony was inaccurate not only because it failed to reveal the scope of the memo’s production and dissemination, but also because it failed to reveal the existence of a second, draft product on the same topic intended for external distribution to the whole FBI,” the senator wrote. He said that the second draft “was clearly a separate product, since it involved a different planned distribution to the whole Bureau, and a different chain of review, through the Counterterrorism Division.”

Furthermore, other FBI field offices prepared to act on the contents of the memo and likely “placed [Catholic] groups in their areas of responsibility under suspicion based on reporting from the deeply-biased sources used in the memo.” The FBI’s field office in Buffalo, New York, for example, identified two Catholic groups labeled “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics” and possible “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists” within its jurisdiction.

Once the anti-Catholic Richmond memo was leaked to the public, Grassley found, the FBI hastily tried to gather internal information to get ahead of the impending P.R. nightmare and found at least “13 documents and 5 attachments” which used such biased terminology as “radical traditionalist Catholic.”

When Grassley and other senators grilled Wray in 2023 over the anti-Catholic memo, the then-director pledged that the FBI was currently investigating how the memo came into being and who thought it was a good idea to target American Catholics. He refused to provide further information to Congress because the investigation was still “ongoing.” But according to Grassley, the FBI had concluded its internal investigation in April of 2023, several days before Wray testified before the Senate. Months later, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee in July, Wray continued to claim that the internal review was still “ongoing.”

The FBI began hurriedly deleting documents related to the anti-Catholic memo and its production once the memo itself was leaked. In fact, according to Grassley, then-FBI deputy director Paul Abbate ordered the memo and related documents to be deleted the very day that the memo became public. “This led to the reported permanent loss of records related to the production of the memo. While the FBI last year told my staff they believed they could recover deleted files, no such files were ever produced,” Grassley wrote. The veteran senator affirmed that he will “continue to investigate [the] Richmond memo and the culture at the FBI that allowed it to be produced and approved.”

Of course, it became fairly obvious fairly quickly, back in 2023, that Wray and his cohorts were fibbing. The scope of Grassley’s subsequent findings over the past two years, however, are alarming, to say the least. This was not, as Wray swore under oath, a “single product by a single field office,” but appears to have been rather a symptom of a far more pervasive ideological animus infecting the FBI at nearly all levels. Multiple field offices — in Virginia, Wisconsin, and Oregon, at the very least — collaborated on the anti-Catholic memo. In at least one instance, an FBI agent actually went undercover and infiltrated a Catholic parish, and other agents interrogated sacristans and organists.

Yet the FBI referenced “radical traditionalist Catholics” in over a dozen other documents and was actively preparing a second document to coordinate an agency-wide effort to target American Catholics as terrorist threats. The “radical traditionalist Catholic” terminology was borrowed directly from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a far-left hatemongering group that places American Catholics in the same category as neo-Nazis, White Supremacist Skinheads, and the Ku Klux Klan. Other contributors to the anti-Catholic animus included the anti-Catholic magazines The Atlantic and Salon.

Over two years after the anti-Catholic Richmond memo became public, several startling questions remain: How often does the FBI rely on anti-Catholic sources and biased misinformation? How pervasive is anti-Catholicism in the FBI? How many times has the FBI targeted American Catholics in the past and subsequently lied about it? How close was the FBI to doing that again in 2023? Hopefully, with President Donald Trump now in office, Grassley and others may actually find some answers to these questions.