U.S. senators are grilling the director of the FBI over reportedly deleting documents related to the creation of the now-infamous anti-Catholic Richmond memo, and potentially lying under oath to Congress. In a letter to Christopher Wray dated Wednesday, a coalition of conservative senators wrote, “We recently also learned that the FBI permanently deleted critical records related to the memo, and one of the authors of the Richmond memo prepared a second, external report in coordination with headquarters that was intended to be circulated outside the Richmond office to the full FBI.” The letter continued, “This information further calls into question your sworn testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on July 12, 2023, and the integrity of the FBI’s internal review. The FBI must immediately provide a coherent and complete response to the Senate.”
In order to repair its critically-damaged reputation, the letter says that the FBI needs transparency.
In early 2023, a leaked memo from the FBI’s Richmond field office revealed that the agency had detailed plans to infiltrate and spy on Catholic parishes where the Tridentine Mass is celebrated. The memo was based, at least in part, on insight from the anti-Catholic magazines The Atlantic and Salon, as well as the radical left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which classifies “radical traditionalist Catholics” as a “hate group” on par with the Ku Klux Klan, Neo Nazis, and White Supremacist Skinheads. The memo explicitly warned that Catholics devoted to what the late Pope Benedict XVI designated the Extraordinary Form of the Mass were to be considered “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists.” (READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy: Strangers in a Strange Land: The Catholic Church and Immigration)
Since then, Congress has been working diligently to hold the FBI accountable for these egregious and targeted religious liberty violations, but Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland have made the process more akin to pulling teeth than collecting testimony. Wray, for example, had initially told Congress that the memo was the product of the Richmond field office and the Richmond field office alone, but Congress later found evidence that the Richmond office had collaborated with other field offices to craft its document and that the document was available to the entire FBI via the agency’s database. Furthermore, in a congressional report, it was revealed that the FBI “relied on at least one undercover agent to develop its assessment” and “interviewed a priest and choir director affiliated with a Catholic church in Richmond, Virginia for the memorandum,” contradicting both Wray’s and Garland’s insistence that Richmond had acted alone and did not implement its infiltration agenda.
The FBI somehow managed to dodge providing documentary evidence to Congress by claiming that it was conducting its own internal review — which many conservative and Catholic legislators noted is distinctly different from a criminal investigation. In Wednesday’s letter, that “internal investigation” is labeled “an excuse not to provide records or respond to [Congress] members’ questions.” The letter notes that Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) “asked for copies of the correspondence between the intelligence analysts who drafted the Richmond memo and anyone of higher rank related to the report, an unredacted copy of the Domain Perspective memo, and a copy of all reports issued within FBI or DOJ within the past five years alleging a link between any primarily-religious or conservative association or entity and violent extremism.”
The letter continues, “Now we know that information related to the Richmond memo wasn’t provided to Congress because the FBI deleted the records as soon as the incident became public.” The signatory senators called on the FBI to “provide an immediate explanation for its order to delete records related to this incident, which not only obstructs congressional oversight, but also means the FBI’s internal review itself did not have access to documents that may have provided critical information on the incident. The FBI must also explain why it withheld this information from the Senate, despite repeated requests for records” and Wray in particular to “provide a full explanation of your testimony that the Richmond memo was ‘a single product by a single field office.’”
Additionally, Wednesday’s letter reveals that one of the analysts who crafted the Richmond memo was collaborating with the FBI’s counterterrorism unit to expand the memo and make it more widely available. “There are other significant problems with the FBI’s response to the Richmond memo as well,” the letter continues. One of those problems was the review process for the memo, which meant that top FBI lawyers and Special Agents in Charge read, approved, signed off on, and promoted the document. “That a product this defective was reviewed by seven FBI employees and senior agents is evidence of a cultural problem at FBI that points well beyond a single report,” the senators wrote, further demanding that the FBI scour its databases for similar “intelligence” products targeting American religious communities in order to expose and redress a culture of anti-Christianity burgeoning under the Biden administration. (READ MORE: Understanding Pope Francis’s Comments on Hell)
The letter also offers a scathing critique of the FBI’s internal review process, noting that it abjectly failed to address the FBI’s reliance on SPLC bias as data and did not review the personnel files of the individuals involved in the memo’s genesis. “Without consulting the employees’ personnel files, it’s unclear how FBI determined that an admonishment was the appropriate discipline,” the letter explained. “FBI also admitted that it deferred to the Richmond Field Office’s Human Resources office to review the personnel file of the Special Agent in Charge, the very supervisor they report to. This is a clear conflict, which FBI needs to remedy by tasking those outside the Richmond Field Office with this review.”
The senators conclude that the FBI is facing a crisis of credibility, actively undermining its own authority and its reputation as the benchmark for law enforcement. In order to repair its critically-damaged reputation, the letter says that the FBI needs transparency and must submit itself to congressional oversight — an end which the agency has been thwarting and frustrating since even before Biden took office. (READ MORE: Archdiocese Challenges Child Abuse Victims Act)
The letter was signed by senators Chuck Grassley, Lindsey Graham, James Lankford (R-Olka.), James Risch (R-Idaho), John Hoeven (R-N.D.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), Todd Young (R-Ind.), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), Mike Braun (R-Ind.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Roger Marshall (R-Kans.), and Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.).
