TRAVELARIUM / stock.adobe.com
The FBI’s anti-Catholic Richmond memo was distributed to more than 1,000 employees in FBI field offices across the country before it was ever leaked to the public by a whistleblower, according to documents obtained and revealed by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-IA, this week.
What is more, Grassley found that the FBI had “produced at least 13 additional documents and five attachments that used anti-Catholic terminology and relied on information from the radical far-left Southern Poverty Law Center,” according to a June 3 press release from the senator’s office.
Grassley also found that the FBI Richmond field office drafted an additional anti-Catholic memo that was going to be distributed throughout the entire Bureau “but was never published due to backlash following the Richmond Memo’s public disclosure,” the release states.
Grassley, who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent a letter June 2 to FBI Director Kash Patel recounting that he had sent multiple letters to former FBI Director Christopher Wray inquiring about the “preparation of the [Richmond] memo, its dissemination, the use of biased sources such as the radical Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and later, the FBI’s misleading representations to Congress, including those of former Director Wray.”
The FBI did not adequately respond to these inquiries during Wray’s tenure, Grassley wrote.
Grassley’s letter to Patel also details that the FBI offices in Louisville, Portland, and Milwaukee were all consulted ahead of the Richmond memo’s preparation.
“The FBI’s recent production shows the FBI analysts in Richmond also consulted with the Louisville, Portland, and Milwaukee field offices as they prepared the Richmond memo,” Grassley wrote. “This included gathering information about Catholic traditionalist groups from the Louisville Field Office. That information appears to have informed a slide presentation at least one of the Richmond analysts produced referencing [Radical Traditionalist Catholics] RTCs’ supposed ‘core concepts,’ including ‘[c]onservative family values/roles’ and finding ‘radical-traditional Catholicism’s’ beliefs were, ‘[c]omparable to Islamist ideology.’”
In a June 3 statement, CatholicVote Cofounder Joshua Mercer emphasized that Grassley’s findings should cause shockwaves through the nation.
“In 2023, CatholicVote sued the Biden administration’s FBI to obtain copies of the documents that led to the infamous ‘Richmond memo’ authorizing agents to spy on Catholic churches,” Mercer said. “Thousands of heavily redacted pages and a lawsuit later, we learned that the FBI effort had involved at least four field offices – including Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and Richmond.”
“We now know that the FBI under President Biden launched a nationally coordinated effort to monitor traditional Catholics as ‘potential domestic terrorists’ because his administration perceived them as political enemies,” Mercer continued. “Our own government authorized the use of undercover agents to infiltrate our Catholic churches, parish schools, and even diocesan offices around the country.”
“This week, thanks to Senator Chuck Grassley, we learned the ‘Richmond memo’ was much worse than that,” Mercer said. “It was just one of 13 FBI documents and 5 attachments targeting ‘radical traditional Catholics’ and citing the Southern Poverty Law Center — an anti-Catholic hate group. Not only that, the memo was sent to over 1,000 FBI employees in at least three additional cities.”
“This frontal assault on the First Amendment should horrify every American – and it must never be allowed to happen again,” Mercer said. “CatholicVote calls on FBI Director Kash Patel to make public the measures his agency is taking to make sure these directives are immediately rescinded, their authors fired, and any ongoing surveillance of Catholics brought to a halt.”
As CatholicVote reported in 2023, Wray testified under oath before the Senate Intelligence Committee that he was “aghast” upon learning of the memo, which he described as “a single product by a single field office” that was immediately “withdrawn and removed from FBI systems.”
In his June 3 letter to Patel, Grassley wrote that “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.”
This internal draft, intended to be a Strategic Perspective Executive Analytic Report (SPEAR), repeated claims that traditionalist Catholics posed a threat of violent extremism, according to Grassley. Though never finalized, the report was circulated until FBI leadership ordered its deletion after national backlash resulting from the Richmond memo being leaked to the public.
“It 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,” Grassley wrote. “It also contained different content from the internal Domain Perspective, notably deleting references to the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
During his January confirmation hearing, Patel pledged to hold accountable those responsible for the persecution of Catholics and the destruction of records related to the misconduct.
Grassley urged Patel to identify the officials responsible for the deletion of the Richmond memo and requested a search for additional documentation and an update on whether any of the deleted files can be recovered.