FBI Director Kash Patel announced on Wednesday that the bureau ceased its partnership with the Anti-Defamation League, a left-wing Jewish civil rights organization.

The bureau made the move after the ADL received backlash from conservatives, including billionaire Elon Musk, over its “Glossary of Extremism and Hate,” which targeted Turning Point USA, the group founded by slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk. 

Mr. Patel put the onus on former FBI Director James B. Comey.

“James Comey wrote ‘love letters’ to the ADL and embedded FBI agents with them — a group that ran disgraceful ops spying on Americans,” Mr. Patel wrote on social media about Mr. Comey, who delivered a 2014 speech extolling the ADL at its National Leadership Summit for its work on antisemitism and extremism issues.

“That era is OVER. This FBI won’t partner with political fronts masquerading as watchdogs,” Mr. Patel added.

Mr. Comey said in his comments that the FBI made the ADL’s Law Enforcement and Society training mandatory for bureau employees and partnered with the organization to draft a “Hate Crimes Training Manual.”

He said the ADL’s work on “antisemitism to voting rights and immigration issues … from gender and LGBT equality to anti-Muslim prejudice” was laudable. “If this sounds a bit like a love letter to the ADL, it is and rightly so.”

Mr. Comey, a political opponent of the administration, was indicted last week on allegations that he lied to Congress.

Following the backlash against the organization, the ADL eliminated the entire glossary, which described TPUSA, among the more than 1,000 entries, as a “platform for extremists and far-right conspiracy theorists.”

Other groups included in the ADL’s “extremism” glossary were the Nation of Islam,  the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and the America First movement. 

Groups not included were Black Lives Matter, Antifa, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Code Pink.

“With over 1,000 entries written over many years, the ADL Glossary of Extremism has served as a source of high-level information on a wide range of topics for years,” the ADL said in a statement. “At the same time, an increasing number of entries in the Glossary were outdated.”

• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.