Report: FBI 'abused its counterterrorism tools' to target Catholic Americans; would continue doing so but for whistleblower

Congressional lawmakers released an interim report Monday titled, "The FBI's Breach of Religious Freedom: The Weaponization of Law Enforcement Against Catholic Americans," providing a glimpse into the lengths the FBI has gone to cast those with conservative religious beliefs as threats apparently requiring state surveillance and "mitigation."

The new report from the House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government indicates the FBI:

• "abused its counterterrorism tools to target Catholic Americans as potential domestic terrorists";
• "relied on at least one undercover agent to develop its assessment";
• "proposed developing sources among the Catholic clergy and church leadership"; and
• would likely still be "violating the religious liberties of millions of Catholic Americans" were it not for former FBI special agent Kyle Seraphin's disclosure.

The subcommittee began looking seriously into the FBI's apparent suspicion of conservative Catholics after Seraphin blew the whistle in February over the existence of an internal memo released by the FBI field office in Richmond that warned violent extremists are attracted to "Radical traditionalist Catholic ideology."

Finding the FBI uncooperative after the initial revelations about the memo, Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) issued a subpoena to Director Christopher Wray in April demanding documents pertaining to the internal January 2023 memo.

The new report indicated on the basis of documents obtained via the subpoena that there was "no legitimate basis for the memorandum to insert federal law enforcement into Catholic houses of worship."

The pretext for the anti-Catholic initiative appears to have been the self-identification of a single parishioner under investigation as a "radical-traditionalist Catholic." Agents reportedly interviewed the parishioner's priest and the choir director related to his church while developing the memo.

While FBI employees reportedly could not define the RTC descriptor, the phantom danger nevertheless became the meat of the FBI-wide memo concerning the alleged dangers of "radical" Catholics.

Extra to building a blanket condemnation on a lone case and an ill-defined descriptor, the two FBI employees who penned the internal memo reportedly admitted their sources cited in the document were politically biased. The sources included the Southern Poverty Law Center, Salon, and the Atlantic.

Salon recently evidenced its skew by advancing the claim that "MAGA and Christian nationalism" constitute greater threats than Hamas "could ever be." The SPLC has claimed that RTCs "may make up the largest single group of serious antisemites in America."

The FBI later admitted that the memo "failed to consider the potential bias and credibility of open-source information cited in support of the [document's] assessment" and that the alleged link between racially motivated violent extremists and RTC lacked "sufficient evidence or articulable support."

It appears the slapdash stigmatization of this particular group of conservative Christians was driven by more than mere bigotry. After all, the memo claimed that increasing extremist interest ahead of the 2024 general election in pro-life, pro-family, and reality-affirming Catholic views — views ostensibly antithetical to those held by incumbent federal powers — created an opportunity for the FBI to execute new "mitigation efforts," such as the development of informants in churches.

According to the report, FBI Richmond, the office that originated the memo, has not apologized or canned any of the employees involved in creating the document.

The report concluded, "This ill-conceived and ill-administered memorandum is a stark warning of the need for scrupulous review of FBI documents with the potential to circumvent Americans' civil liberties and the right to free exercise of religion."

"Remember when Joe Biden stood in front of Independence Hall and talked about how one half of the country is fascist?" Chairman Jordan told Fox News Monday. "It's this whole mindset. If you're pro-life, if you're a traditional Catholic, somehow you're radical, somehow you're an extremist."

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