The FBI’s Richmond Memo, which suggested a link between traditional Catholicism and violent extremism, was distributed to more than 1,000 FBI employees nationwide during the Biden administration, according to new documents obtained by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
According to Grassley, the documents show that the FBI produced at least 13 additional documents and five attachments that used the terminology “radical traditionalist Catholic.” These reports also relied on information from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left advocacy group.
The Iowa senator also noted that the FBI Richmond field office drafted an additional memo that it intended to distribute to the entire Bureau, but it was never published due to the controversy surrounding the Richmond Memo.
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Remarking on Grassley’s findings, CatholicVote co-founder Joshua Mercer called for the authors of the memo to be held accountable, asserting that the senator’s investigation shows the document was “much worse” than initially thought.
“This frontal assault on the First Amendment should horrify every American — and it must never be allowed to happen again,” Mercer said in a statement provided to The Christian Post. “CatholicVote calls on FBI Director Kash Patel to make public the measures his agency is taking to make sure these directives are immediately rescinded, their authors fired, and any ongoing surveillance of Catholics brought to a halt.”
The FBI did not immediately respond to The Christian Post’s request for comment.
In the January 2023 field office memo, the FBI warned about the connections between “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists and radical-traditionalist Catholic ideology.”
As Grassley recounted in a Monday letter to FBI Director Kash Patel, he had sent multiple letters in March, August and October of 2023 and January 2024 to then-FBI Director Christopher Wray seeking answers about the Richmond 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 (SPLC), and later, the FBI’s misleading representations to Congress, including those of former Director Wray,” Grassley wrote.
“The FBI under Director Wray consistently failed to provide full responses to these requests,” he asserted.
Grassley also accused Wray of evading questions about the memo when the former FBI director testified before the House Judiciary Committee in July 2023, “where he repeatedly evaded questions by claiming the internal review hadn’t been completed even though by then it most assuredly was.”
Regarding the scope of the memo, Wray had claimed it was “a single product by a single field office” that was immediately “withdrawn and removed from FBI systems.” Grassley wrote in his letter to Patel that FBI offices in Louisville, Kentucky, Portland, Oregon, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, assisted with the Richmond memo’s preparation.
When questioned by Grassley in December 2023 about his initial testimony, Wray maintained that a single office produced the Richmond memo.
The former FBI director claimed that other FBI field offices’ contributions to the memo included two sentences or “‘something thereabouts referencing each of these other offices’ cases, and they sent those sentences about the other offices’ cases to them, not the whole product, and asked them, ‘Hey, did we describe your case right?’”
According to the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Wray’s testimony is further proof that the FBI must provide Congress with all records related to the agency’s response to the memo and the timing of Wray’s review of it.
As Grassley wrote in the letter to Patel, “Wray’s testimony was inaccurate not only because it failed to reveal the scope of the memo’s production and dissemination, but also because it failed to reveal the existence of a second draft product on the same topic intended for external distribution to the whole FBI.”
The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee urged Patel to continue producing records related to the Richmond Memo’s origins.
During Patel’s January confirmation hearing, when asked by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., about the Richmond memo, he vowed to hold the responsible parties accountable.
Samantha Kamman is a reporter for The Christian Post. She can be reached at: samantha.kamman@christianpost.com. Follow her on Twitter: @Samantha_Kamman
