This week, we got another glimpse at just how bad things were at the FBI under President Joe Biden, and let me tell you, it’s not pretty.
You may remember that in February 2023, the FBI rushed to rescind a memo it had issued on “radical traditional Catholics.” The FBI rarely comments on news, but this memo was so bad, headquarters deigned to tell lowly members of the press like me that the memo failed to meet the bureau’s “standards.”
Why? Because it relied on the Southern Poverty Law Center, a corrupt far-left smear factory that engages in routine defamation by putting conservative, Christian, and even certain gay and lesbian organizations on a “hate map” along with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. Yes, the SPLC has even branded Gays Against Groomers—a group of lesbian, bisexual, and gay people who disagree with the SPLC’s transgender agenda—on the “hate map” as an “anti-LGBTQ+ hate group.” That’s how extreme the SPLC is.
On Catholicism, in particular, the SPLC has a horrific track record. When it branded the Ruth Institute, a pro-family nonprofit in Louisiana, a “hate group,” it cited as evidence of the group’s “hate” a direct quote from the Catechism of the Catholic Church. In other words, if the SPLC were to be consistent, it would have to put the entire Catholic Church—for which the catechism is a binding statement of faith—on the “hate map.”
Yet, when 1,000 FBI employees received the notorious memo citing the SPLC as an authority on “radical traditional Catholics,” most didn’t even blink.
According to newly released documents from Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the FBI distributed the email originating from the Richmond, Virginia, field office to “more than 1,000 individuals in the FBI” on Feb. 2, 2023.
Surely, there would be a large outcry from FBI analysts who ostensibly knew that the SPLC wasn’t a trustworthy source. The Richmond office’s phone should have been ringing off the hook. This was a major scandal.
Instead, there were crickets.
“No one contacted FBI [Richmond headquarters] with concerns, suggestions, or negative feedback related to the product,” an FBI internal report reveals. “FBI [Richmond] only received positive input indicating the importance of further outreach and external dissemination of intelligence to mitigate the threat posed by [racially-motivated violent extremists].”
Oh.
This arguably conflicts with then-FBI Director Christopher Wray’s suggestion that the memo was so beyond the pale that “as soon as I found out about it, I was aghast and ordered it withdrawn and removed from FBI systems.”
A few FBI employees did seem to have a lick of common sense. One employee wrote, “Is anyone really asking for a product like this? Apparently we are at the behest of the SPLC.”
Another responded, “Our overreliance on the SPLC for hate designations is … problematic.” Yet no one raised these concerns with the Richmond office.
It seems citing the SPLC was humdrum at the FBI under Biden. In fact, that’s exactly what the FBI’s internal memo suggests.
A search for FBI documents turned up 13 documents and five attachments that included versions of the term “radical traditionalist Catholic,” many of which also cited the SPLC.
In September 2022, the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center released “Domain Awareness Tips” citing the SPLC on “radical traditional Catholics.”
Various FBI offices cited the SPLC, from the Boston office in August 2018 to the Los Angeles office in March 2018 to the Indianapolis office in August 2017.
I find the August 2018 example particularly alarming, because it came a few days after then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions told me that he had ordered “a review at the Department of Justice to make sure that we do not partner with groups that discriminate” and “we will not partner with groups that unfairly defame Americans for standing up for the Constitution or their faith.” He announced this shortly after directly addressing the SPLC.
The Tragic Irony of FBI Citing SPLC
There’s a kind of poetic tragic irony in the FBI citing the SPLC on potential terrorist threats. In 2012, a domestic terrorist confessed to having targeted the conservative Christian Family Research Council for a mass shooting because he found it on the SPLC’s “hate map.” He confessed this information to—drumroll please—the FBI. The SPLC condemned the attack but has kept the council on its “hate map” ever since.
Yet this shooting was far from the only scandal the SPLC has faced in recent years.
In 2019, the SPLC fired its co-founder amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal. In the wake of that scandal, SPLC staff unionized. Last year, the SPLC Union accused the center of “union-busting” for a rash of layoffs that included unionized staff.
The SPLC has paid millions in defamation settlements, and it currently faces a defamation lawsuit for branding a pro-enforcement immigration group in Georgia an “anti-immigrant hate group.”
SPLC and the Biden Administration
Of course, none of this prevented the Biden administration from welcoming the SPLC with open arms, as I note in my book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.”
Biden nominated an SPLC attorney to a top federal judgeship. The Biden White House welcomed SPLC leaders and staff at least 18 times. The Biden Justice Department received a briefing from the SPLC shortly after it added Moms for Liberty to the “hate map” in June 2023. The SPLC also appears to have met with Kristen Clarke, the Justice Department official who brought charges against pro-life protesters.
While conservatives know the SPLC has no credibility, many on the Left find it an effective weapon to silence their ideological opponents. Don’t like those pesky conservatives mucking up your agenda? Just cite the SPLC calling them “hate groups” and you can brush their criticisms aside.
This mentality is utterly inexcusable among federal law enforcement.
