A few years back, during Joe Biden’s tenure in the White House when Catholics and other Christians seemed often to be in the bull’s-eye of his pro-abortion, pro-transgender, pro-leftist ideologies, the FBI’s Richmond office came up with a memo.
It identified “radical traditionalist Catholics” as potential domestic violent extremists. Terrorists, in fact.
The disastrous claims triggered a congressional investigation, a review by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General and widespread comments about the religious profiling active under Biden’s regiome.
It was “withdrawn,” officials confirmed, for not meeting bureau “standards.”
But now the full truth of the matter is being revealed. It seems that the FBI’s claims were based on sourcing from the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center, which agents at the time apparently were treating as a government agency.
The SPLC now, in fact, is under indictment for a number of counts for allegedly boasting to supporters about working to exterminate extremists, and then using donors’ funding to hand out cash to those very extremists.
At the time, the SPLC had claimed “radical traditionalist Catholics” are part of the people in America who “may make up the largest single group of serious anti-Semites in America.”
Now a report posted by the American Center for Law and Justice confirms at the time the scandal developed, a lawyer with the FBI’s Office of General Counsel, warned, “It seems that some of our folks may be equating a third-party organization with another government organization, and perhaps we need to remind the workforce about non-governmental organizations.”
The ACLJ explained, “That statement in and of itself is a remarkably dangerous implication of the Deep State.”
The ACLJ said it found the comment in a cache of internal FBI emails it obtained through a Freedom of Information Act litigation.
“The records reveal that the FBI’s own intelligence leadership quickly identified the fatal flaw in the now-infamous Richmond memorandum: The Bureau relied on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) subjective ‘hate group’ labels without first determining how the SPLC made those designations or whether its standards even aligned with the FBI’s own definitions,” the ACLJ said.
In fact, the SPLC routinely labels as a “hate group” any organization that does not comply with its own political, social and ideological agendas, including promoting transgenderism and abortion.
That leaves pro-family organizations like the Family Research Council, which was targeted in an attempted mass killing by a follower of SPLC ideologies, labeled as “hate.”
The ACLJ warned about how deeply dedicated the FBI was to the leftist ideology of the SPLC.
“The FBI proposed using Catholic communities themselves as potential avenues for intelligence collection.”
The cache confirmed Tonya Ugoretz, then the Assistant Director of the FBI’s Directorate of Intelligence, emailed a long list of others.
“With respect to sourcing (in particular, SPLC): SPLC has been a source for statistics and data not otherwise available to law enforcement. However, this product cites more subjective information from SPLC (a list of hate groups) without examining SPLC’s threshold for determining a hate group or explanation of how that threshold aligns with the FBI’s definition,” she warned.
Explained the ACLJ, “The FBI appears to have imported the conclusions of a private advocacy organization without first performing the basic analytic work necessary to determine whether those conclusions satisfied federal law enforcement standards.”
Said the ACLJ, “Private organizations are free to publish reports, promote political positions, and label other groups as they see fit. But their conclusions are not judicial findings. They are not official intelligence assessments. And they cannot substitute for independently verified evidence of criminal conduct.”
The report said, “Federal law enforcement must investigate criminal conduct – not disfavored theology, traditional religious practice, or constitutionally protected political beliefs. The FBI cannot outsource its judgment to a private far-Left ideological organization and then use that organization’s subjective labels to justify intelligence collection involving churches and religious communities.”
