Newly Released FBI Documents Reveal the National Extent of the Bureau’s Targeting of “Radical Traditionalist Catholics”

In the intelligence business, “tradecraft” is the professional use of techniques, methods, and technologies to evaluate a purported threat. When an official finding is made that a threat assessment memo lacks tradecraft standards, that is a hard knock on the substance of the memo and the agent who wrote it.
 
Thanks to the efforts of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and the forthcoming response from FBI Director Kash Patel, we now know that the infamous memo from the Richmond, Virginia, field office targeting “radical traditional Catholics” was riddled with conceptional errors and sloppy assumptions. In the FBI’s own judgment, it showed poor tradecraft. Worse, the impact of this assessment of traditional Catholics was rooted in smears from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which Sen. Grassley correctly calls “thoroughly discredited and biased.”
 
Contrary to dismissive statements from former FBI Director Christopher Wray, this memo wasn’t the product of one field office. In its preparation, the Richmond, Virginia, field office consulted with Bureau offices in Louisville, Portland, and Milwaukee to paint Catholics who adhere to “conservative family values/roles” as being as dangerous as Islamist jihadists. Sen. Grassley’s document reveal also shows that there were similar efforts in recent years in Los Angeles and Indianapolis.
 
This memo was not a mere thought experiment. It was a predicate for surveillance. Among the activities we know about that resulted from this memo were attempts to develop a priest and a choir director into FBI informants on parishioners.
 
Sen. Grassley also produced a memo from Tonya Ugoretz, FBI Assistant Director, Directorate of Intelligence, acknowledging that the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) list of hate groups – and lack of explanation for its threshold in slapping such a label on organizations and people – went unexamined by this Richmond memo. Yet that original memo from the Richmond field office found SPLC as a trustworthy source to assert that there will be a “likely increase” in threats from “radical traditional Catholics” in combination with “racially and ethnically-motivated violent extremism.”
 
Another memo produced by Sen. Grassley reveals the conclusion of the FBI’s Directorate of Intelligence: “The SPLC has a history of having to issue apologies and retract groups and individuals they have identified as being extremist or hate groups.” Now Sen. Grassley and Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) are appealing to the FBI to direct field offices not to rely on the characterizations of the SPLC.
 
This whole episode should serve as a reminder that merely opening an investigation of a religious group for its First Amendment-protected speech is a punishment in itself, at best violating practitioners’ privacy; at worst, incurring huge legal costs and anxiety.
 
Sen. Grassley deserves the gratitude of the surveillance-reform community for bringing to light the extent to which the FBI allowed America’s culture wars to become a predicate for suspicion of law-abiding Americans.

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