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The FBI hid the extent of what some lawmakers have called an anti-Catholic operation targeting churchgoers during the Biden administration, despite then-agency Director Christopher Wray telling Congress that the matter was limited to a single 2023 memo, according to documents released Tuesday.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who serves as the Senate Judiciary Committee chair, released documents that he said show the FBI engaged in the investigation of traditional Catholics. During his tenure, Wray characterized the matter as part of a memo prepared by the FBI’s office in Richmond, Virginia.
“I’m determined to get to the bottom of the Richmond memo, and of the FBI’s contempt for oversight in the last administration,” Grassley said in a statement. “I look forward to continuing to work with you to restore the FBI to excellence and prove once again that justice can and must be fairly and evenly administered, blind to whether we are Democrats or Republicans, believers or nonbelievers.”
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In a letter Tuesday to FBI Director Kash Patel, Grassley presented his findings while expressing frustration at the agency’s handling of the “anti-Catholic” memo under Wray and its alleged lack of transparency. Wray had told congressional lawmakers the memo was a single product by a single field office.
Despite Wray’s claims that the memo was a single product, the FBI found at least 13 additional FBI documents and five FBI attachments that used the terminology “radical traditionalist Catholic” and cited the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Grassley said.
The FBI told Fox News Digital that it received Grassley’s letter but declined to comment further.
During his testimony to lawmakers, Wray didn’t reveal the existence of a second draft product on the same topic.
“It was a product by one field office, which, of course, we have scores and scores of these products, and when we found out about it, we took action,” Wray told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about the memo in March 2023.
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The memo became known when a whistleblower brought it to light. The memo, titled “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities,” drew instant criticism from Republicans, who demanded immediate answers from the agency.
A second FBI memo drafted by the FBI Richmond Field Office for bureau-wide distribution repeated the unfounded link between traditional Catholicism and violent extremism, Grassley said, noting that it was never published due to backlash after the public disclosure of the first memo.
The new documents released by Grassley show that the Richmond memo was distributed to more than 1,000 FBI employees nationwide. One email exchange shows the FBI’s field office in Buffalo, New York, expressing concerns about hate groups identified by the SPLC, mentioned in the Richmond memo, being in its area of responsibility.
Grassley said the FBI may have relied on “deeply-biased sources” used in the memo.
“These letters focused on the preparation of the memo, its dissemination, the use of biased sources such as the radical Southern Poverty Law Center, and later, the FBI’s misleading representations to Congress, including those of former Director Wray,” Grassley wrote.
Fox News Digital has reached out to the SPLC.
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