The FBI produced over a dozen documents using anti-Catholic terminology and distributed the infamous Richmond memo to 1,000 agents, records show.
The Biden-era FBI’s efforts targeting traditionalist Catholics were far more extensive than previously known and involved personnel from multiple field offices, according to newly revealed documents that contradict former FBI director Christopher Wray’s congressional testimony.
The FBI’s focus on traditionalist Catholics was revealed in February 2023, when a former agent published a leaked memo produced by the bureau’s Richmond, Va. field office warning against the emerging threat posed by “radical traditionalist Catholic ideology.”
The Richmond memo was largely based on the findings of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has a record of maligning conservative groups as “extremist.” The memo was distributed to more than 1,000 FBI employees but was later retracted after a public backlash.
When then-FBI director Christopher Wray was called before Congress to answer for the memo, he insisted that it was the product of a single field office and did not lead to any actual investigative operations.
But new FBI records obtained by Senator Chuck Grassley suggest the bureau’s targeting of traditionalist Catholics was more widespread than Wray indicated.
In addition to the memo, the FBI produced over a dozen documents and five attachments using anti-Catholic terminology, Grassley found. A second anti-Catholic memo was drafted and never published because of the backlash to the initial Richmond memo.
“These documents reveal the same day the Richmond memo was made public, the FBI searched to determine how many FBI products used similar terminology. It determined at least ‘13 documents and 5 attachments’ used the terminology ‘radical traditionalist Catholic.’ The production also shows these reports also relied, in part, on the thoroughly-discredited and biased SPLC as a source,” Grassley said.
A congressional investigation previously revealed the involvement of other FBI offices in the Richmond memo and agents’ use of left-wing organizations as sources, but the existence of other anti-Catholic documents and the scale of the memo’s distribution were not previously known.
Before the Richmond memo was produced, analysts consulted with colleagues in the Louisville, Milwaukee, and Portland field offices, the records indicate. The FBI analysts discussed the memo’s contents over email and by phone, exchanging information about traditionalist Catholics.
Information from the Louisville field office influenced a presentation put together by a Richmond analyst that focused on traditional Catholic values and found “radical traditional” Catholicism’s beliefs to be “[c]omparable to Islamist ideology.”
Some agents in the Milwaukee and Phoenix offices pushed back against the use of the SPLC as the source for labeling traditionalist Catholics as extremists, the records show.
“O]ur overreliance on the SPLC for hate designation [of traditional Catholics] is … problematic,” An FBI agent from the Milwaukee field office said.
It is unclear if the criticism of the SPLC made it back to the Richmond field office. However, the criticism shows the extent to which the Richmond memo was distributed and widely discussed before it was finalized.
Another email exchange shows FBI agents in the Buffalo, New York field office discussing the Richmond memo. The agents noted that two of the nine “hate groups” listed in the memo were in the Buffalo area. It is unclear what organizations the “hate groups” were referring to.
Like the Richmond memo, the second, unpublished FBI memo also falsely linked traditionalist Catholicism to violent extremism. It would have been a Strategic Perspective Executive Analytic Report, a different kind of document from the Richmond memo that required coordination with the FBI’s counterterrorism division.
Grassley revealed the records in a letter to the FBI as he continues to conduct oversight on the production of the Richmond memo.
“I’m determined to get to the bottom of the Richmond memo, and of the FBI’s contempt for oversight in the last administration,” Grassley said.
“I look forward to continuing to work with you to restore the FBI to excellence and prove once again that justice can and must be fairly and evenly administered, blind to whether we are Democrats or Republicans, believers or nonbelievers.”
Grassley also scrutinized Wray’s congressional testimony about the scope of the memo and involvement of other field offices. Wray previously downplayed the memo, telling Grassley that it was “a single field office’s product” and dismissing the involvement of other field offices in its development.
“The only involvement of the two other field offices was the Richmond authors of the product included two sentences or something thereabouts referencing each of these other offices’ cases, and they sent those sentences about the other offices’ cases to them, not the whole product, and asked them, ‘hey, did we describe your case right?’ That’s all the other offices had. So it was a single field office’s product, and I stand by that,” Wray said.
Wray’s testimony appears to be misleading because it does not reveal the extent of the Richmond memo’s distribution and the input of other field offices in crafting it. Wray also did not reveal the additional anti-Catholic documents the FBI produced.
When reached, the FBI acknowledged receiving Grassley’s letter but declined to comment further.
Grassley accused the FBI under Wray of obstructing his investigation into the Richmond memo’s origins and questioned the FBI’s deletion of records related to the Richmond memo after it become public.
When the Richmond memo became public, then-FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate ordered the removal of the document and references to it from FBI systems, leading to the loss of files on its production. Grassley is demanding more information about the records deletions and whether they were intended to obstruct congressional investigators.
Grassley is asking FBI director Kash Patel to continue disclosing records related to the Richmond memo and to release records tied to Wray’s congressional testimony. At his confirmation hearing, Patel promised to cooperate with congressional oversight and investigate anti-Catholic bias inside the FBI.