FBI interviewed Catholic priest and choir director while probing churches: Report

The FBI spoke with two church leaders while it was compiling a controversial internal memo that took aim at certain “traditionalist” Catholics, according to a report published Monday by the House Judiciary Committee.

The report detailed the FBI’s behind-the-scenes efforts, including the two interviews with a priest and a choir director from a church affiliated with the Society of Saint Pius X, that took place ahead of the FBI field office in Richmond, Virginia, internally releasing the memo in January.

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The FBI retracted the memo as soon as a whistleblower made it public in February, and the bureau has since repeatedly condemned it for not meeting FBI standards.

The memo, a redacted copy of which the committee published in August, drew a correlation between “radical-traditionalist Catholics” and violent extremism and sought to assess the “threat” presented by those types of Catholics.

Citing an unnamed analyst, the FBI determined that particular group of Catholics made up a “small minority of overall Roman Catholic adherents” and that there existed an “increasingly observed interest” of violent extremism within the group.

The bureau also detailed opportunities for “threat mitigation,” including engaging with Catholic leaders to persuade them to work within their churches as “tripwires,” or sources, for the FBI.

The memo laid out three examples of legitimately radical people to bolster its case, and the FBI interviewed the priest and the choir director about one of them. Lawmakers learned about the interviews through a whistleblower, according to the committee’s report.

The Washington Examiner verified the interviews did indeed occur, but it is unclear what information the FBI was seeking from the pair of church leaders. The memo only shows that the interviews were related to an arrested person with a history of incendiary online posts. The person, who was found in possession of Molotov cocktails, smoke bombs, a smoke grenade, and firearm parts, had attended their church.

The FBI memo drew outrage earlier this year from religious freedom advocates, who found it discriminatory against Catholics and a violation of the First Amendment because of how it attempted to showcase that certain Catholics had a pattern of dangerous behavior.

“Under the guise of domestic terrorism, the Richmond memorandum cast swaths of Catholic Americans as ‘radical-traditionalist Catholics’ and those practicing it as ripe opportunities for FBI ‘threat mitigation,'” the committee said in its report on Monday, emphasizing religious liberty concerns.

The committee detailed how it had thoroughly investigated the origins of the memo, including by subpoenaing hundreds of pages of documents and by interviewing the head of the FBI’s Richmond office.

Its investigation found that the memo had been made available in an “FBI-wide system” and that no one in the FBI appeared to take issue with it before it became public, despite the memo undergoing a peer-review process, a lawyer reviewing it, and supervisors approving it.

FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress in July that it was “a single product by a single field office, which as soon as I found out about it, I was aghast and ordered it withdrawn and removed from FBI systems.”

The FBI also conducted an internal review of how the memo could have been created. The committee acknowledged this and said it had received a briefing from the FBI on the matter but said lawmakers were dissatisfied.

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The committee called for the FBI to “take decisive action to rebuild public trust” and called for the FBI’s Richmond office specifically to issue an apology. The committee also demanded the removal of employees involved with the memo’s creation.

The Washington Examiner reached out to the FBI for comment.