The threat of terrorism in America has not gone away. In many ways we are as vulnerable as we were before September 11, 2001. We have learned a lot, but we have also misplaced a lot of our priorities.
On Sunday, Legal Insurrection posted an article about some of the people the Federal Bureau of Investigation chose to investigate during the Biden administration.
The article reports:
The FBI’s Richmond office did not just write a memo tying “radical-traditionalist Catholics” to violent extremism. Agents also built a presentation that put the Traditional Latin Mass, “conservative family values/roles,” and a “rejection of modernity” on a slide describing the “Core Ideology and Beliefs” of traditionalist Catholics, treating ordinary religious practice as a marker of potential radicalization.
Another slide went further, listing “hardline positions on abortion, LGBT matters, interreligious dialogue” among the characteristics of what the FBI called “Radical-Traditionalist Catholicism.” The presentation was included in a massive Justice Department report released by the Trump administration on the FBI’s now-infamous 2023 Richmond Catholic memo. The report was produced by a Trump administration working group reviewing Biden-era conduct, a fact critics will note, but the underlying documents, including the FBI’s own slides and internal emails, speak for themselves.
Eric Schmitz, Director of Coalitions for Speaker Johnson, who said he attends the Traditional Latin Mass himself, posted several of the slides and called them “UNREAL.”
…The 210-page report from DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group found the Richmond Field Office began with one legitimate criminal investigation: a man who had moved from New York to Virginia, posted violent and racially motivated content online, and eventually began attending a chapel run by the Society of St. Pius X. He was ultimately imprisoned on vandalism and weapons charges. From there, agents expanded their investigation to an SSPX-affiliated priest and then to a second priest connected to the SSPX Resistance, a breakaway group the FBI alleged had neo-Nazi sympathies.
That predicate became the basis for a much broader theory connecting traditionalist Catholicism with racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists. The problem was finding evidence for it. Investigators eventually found only two additional cases, one involving a dead person, and nothing establishing a broader link between Catholics or non-mainstream Catholic groups and domestic extremism.
The article notes:
And the consequences inside the Biden-era FBI were minimal. An internal review found employees lacked “professional judgment” and failed to follow FBI standards, but the personnel involved were largely admonished and ordered to undergo additional training. Several later received positive performance reviews ranging from “Consistent” to “Exemplary,” while Richmond leadership defended them.
The Trump administration says that has now changed. DOJ said the FBI personnel responsible for creating the memo have been terminated.
Terminated is not enough! If the FBI violated the civil rights of Americans, there need to be orange jump suits!