Kerry Picket | June 4, 2025
(The Washington Times) — The Biden-era FBI concealed the extent of its anti-Catholic operation, which then-FBI Director Christopher A. Wray told Congress was limited to a single 2023 memo, newly revealed bureau documents show.
The FBI files were obtained by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley and shared first with The Washington Times.
The files show that the agency was engaging in a bureau-wide investigation of “Radical Traditionalist Catholics,” but Mr. Wray and other top FBI officials characterized it as a one-off memo.
The FBI declined to comment.
Mr. Grassley presented his findings to FBI Director Kash Patel in a letter Monday. The Iowa Republican expressed his concerns about the FBI’s handling and dissemination of an anti-Catholic memo under Mr. Wray and the agency’s lack of transparency and responsiveness to congressional inquiries about the matter.
The investigation first came to light on Feb. 8, 2023, when former FBI agent turned whistleblower Kyle Seraphin published a memo created by the bureau’s office in Richmond, Virginia. The memo was an alert that “Radical Traditionalist Catholics” adhere to an “anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ and white supremacist ideology” and said these Catholics are prone to “extremist ideological beliefs and violent rhetoric.”
However, the memo’s reach was much broader than what FBI officials disclosed.
The new documents show that the Richmond memo dated Jan. 23, 2023, also known as the Richmond Domain perspective, was distributed on Feb. 2 to more than 1,000 FBI employees nationwide.
None of the FBI recipients appeared to respond to the Richmond office with concerns. The Richmond office received only positive feedback about mitigating the threat posed by “Radical Traditionalist Catholics,” Mr. Grassley said.
The FBI field office in Buffalo, New York, told other FBI officials in an email that two Catholic groups “included in the Richmond Domain perspective” and identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “hate groups” were in its area of responsibility.
Mr. Grassley told Mr. Patel that the email “raises serious concerns that FBI field offices may have relied on the Richmond memo, and placed groups in their areas of responsibility under suspicion based on reporting from the deeply biased sources used in the memo.”
The newly revealed documents show that the Richmond field office worked with the FBI office in Louisville, Kentucky, to gather information about Catholic traditionalist groups from the Louisville area.
FBI analysts in Richmond also consulted with the Portland, Oregon, and Milwaukee field offices as they prepared the memo.
Mr. Grassley criticized the FBI for preparing the memo for distribution based on a “biased” and “radical” source such as the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“These letters focused on the preparation of the memo, its dissemination, the use of biased sources such as the radical Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and later, the FBI’s misleading representations to Congress, including those of former Director Wray,” the senator wrote.
The FBI found at least 13 additional FBI documents and five FBI attachments that used the terminology “radical traditionalist Catholic” and cited the SPLC.
In testimony on March 8, 2023, before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Mr. Wray said he was “aghast” when he first learned about the memo and that the bureau “took steps immediately to withdraw it and remove it from FBI systems.”
“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,” Mr. Wray told the committee.
When lawmakers questioned the scope of the memo’s production and dissemination, Mr. Wray did not reveal the existence of a second draft product on the same topic intended for external distribution to the entire FBI.
According to the new documents, that draft product was intended for distribution as a Strategic Perspective Executive Analytic Report (SPEAR).
“It was clearly a separate product, since it involved a different planned distribution to the whole Bureau, and a different chain of review, through the Counterterrorism Division,” Mr. Grassley said. “It also contained different content from the internal Domain Perspective, notably deleting references to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“Nevertheless, this draft external memo repeated the unfounded link between traditional Catholicism and violent extremism that was present in the internal Domain Perspective.”
The FBI’s SPEAR report concluded that the racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism of “Radical Traditionalist Catholics” was “likely to increase.”
This additional report, Mr. Grassley said, shows “once again that Director Wray’s previous testimony to Congress that the Richmond analysts produced a ‘single product’ was false.”
The new documents show that the FBI leadership ordered the deletion of this second draft memo and emails of a list of users accessing the Richmond memo.
Mr. Grassley said the deletion was ordered by then-Deputy Director Paul Abbate, who wanted “a permanent removal of the memorandum, as well as any edits or references, from all FBI systems.” Mr. Abbate told the special agent in charge in Richmond to “pull it down” the same day the memo was made public.
“This led to the reported permanent loss of records related to the production of the memo. While the FBI last year told my staff they believed they could recover deleted files, no such files were ever produced,” Mr. Grassley said.
On Feb. 10, 2023, two days after the memo’s public release, the FBI’s operational technology division notified the Richmond field office that an FBI official, whose identity is redacted, similarly ordered them to “pull down” an Excel document showing the list of “users who have accessed the Domain Perspective Intel product across our relevant case files.”
Mr. Grassley asked Mr. Patel to:
- Remove the redaction over the name of the FBI official who ordered the operational technology division to pull down the list of users who accessed the Domain Perspective Intel product.
- Search for additional documentation and all instructions on how to delete files related to the incident.
- Give the reasons for those deletions.
- Find out whether those deletions were intended to deny information to Congress or internal investigators.
- Find out whether any of the deleted files have been or can be recovered.
