The FBI issued a controversial memo, then pulled it back when the public found out about it. Now, the House Judiciary Committee is digging into how “traditional Catholics” became classified as “possible violent extremists.” On Thursday, they wrote a nastygram demanding answers from Christopher Wray.
FBI focused on Catholics
On Thursday, February 16, Ohio’s Jim Jordan teamed up with Mike Lee of Louisiana to write a letter to FBI director Christopher Wray.
They’re asking nicely for now but if they don’t get the paperwork, they have ways of shaking it loose. Unpleasant ones for Wray. The controversial memo crawled out of the bureau’s Richmond field office.
It seems that the FBI determined that authorities need to be on the alert for communities of “radical traditionalist Catholics.” Those are ones who “prefer the traditional Latin mass.” It recommended infiltrating such congregations to “mitigate” the threat while they “explore investigating such communities.”
BREAKING: Gov Glenn Youngkin demands "full transparency and accountability" from the FBI in the wake of the internal memo citing the disgraced SPLC targeting traditional Catholic ideologyhttps://t.co/een3ASelLg
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) February 16, 2023
As soon as a whistleblower made the memo’s existence known, they yanked it back. After they were caught, they decided the memo did not meet the agency’s “exacting standards.” It was fine until everyone found out what they were doing.
They didn’t rethink their strategy on their own. According to the lawmakers’ letter, “in the wake of the backlash against the FBI’s anti-Catholic document, the FBI withdrew the document and blamed the local level field office for its creation and dissemination.”
The committee isn’t letting the Federal Bureau of Instigation off the hook that easy. “However, there remain many questions about the genesis, review, and approval of this document, as well as the FBI’s commitment to upholding First Amendment protected activity.”
Only left-wing sources
Conservative views don’t matter to the FBI, those are the ones they’re working real hard to stamp out. Traditional family values are now considered “hate crimes.”
The FBI prefers to follow the guidance of the Southern Poverty Law Center. That was one of the sources relied on in the memo as “justification for targeting traditionalist Catholic groups for surveillance.”
As the Judiciary Committee pointed out, it’s totally routine for the SPLC to malign “mainstream conservative and religious organizations as ‘hate‘ groups, simply because the SPLC disagrees with their views.” Using them as a basis to treat Americans as criminals won’t fly.
BREAKING: Last August the Atlantic labeled the rosary an Extremist Symbol
The FBI cited this article as evidence in their targeting report on conservative Catholics pic.twitter.com/LQ8cF6Y2HD
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) February 10, 2023
“The fact that the FBI would blindly accept and regurgitate the SPLC’s spin is highly concerning and undercuts the FBI’s assertion that it is unbiased and politically neutral.”
Jordan and his committee are demanding that the FBI “turn over all documents related to the memo, as well as any intelligence efforts targeting so-called ‘radical traditionalist Catholics.‘” The also want “a list of the employees involved with drafting and approving the memo.” They have a sneaky suspicion that Wray signed off on it. Maybe even with approval from Merrick Garland.
Meanwhile, the attorney general for Virginia is hopping mad, as well. Jason Miyares also wrote to Wray, informing him that “a number of other Republican attorneys general were ‘horrified‘ by the revelation of the memo and demanded Wray reveal whether or not the agency had been actively surveilling houses of worship.“
