Rep. Jordan: Multiple FBI Offices Contributed To Anti-Catholic Memo
The federal intelligence community has faced mounting accusations in recent years that top officials are targeting law-abiding Americans instead of focusing their attention on legitimate threats to U.S. safety.
One notable example involved a controversial letter the National School Boards Association sent to the FBI urging the agency to treat parents who expressed concerns about the direction of public education as “domestic terrorists.”
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), who was the ranking Republican on the panel at the time, launched an investigation into the Biden administration’s response to that letter last year.
More recently, he has seized on an apparently coordinated effort by multiple FBI offices across the nation to target Catholics as possible threats to the homeland. Although FBI Director Christopher Wray testified that it was “a single product by a single field office,” Jordan and Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government Chairman Mike Johnson (R-LA) assert that at least two other offices — in Portland, Oregon, and Los Angeles, California — collaborated with the Richmond, Virginia, office in drafting the memo.
The two lawmakers sent a letter to Wray seeking an explanation for why he “redacted this information in previous versions of the document” provided to Congress.
They went on to assert that “the newly produced version of the document explicitly states that FBI Richmond ‘coordinated with’ FBI Portland in preparing the assessment,” adding: “Thus, it appears that both FBI Portland and FBI Los Angeles field officers were involved in or contributed to the creation of the FBI’s assessment of traditional Catholics as potential domestic terrorists.”
The letter includes a request for “a transcribed interview with the Chief Division Counsel who approved the Richmond document” and offers Wray an opportunity to “amend” his previous testimony.
In response to the latest allegations, the FBI defended Wray’s assessment as “accurate and consistent,” noting that the evidence cited in the letter “does not change the fact the product was produced by a single office.”
Earlier this year, Jordan indicated that the bureau’s own internal documentation signaled that agents used Catholic parishes to spy on Americans of faith.
“The FBI purported to categorize Catholic Americans based on theological distinctions and relied on the Southern Poverty Law Center to suggest that certain kinds of Catholic Americans may be domestic terrorists,” he said at the time.
