One of the authors of the memo also reportedly told an FBI internal review that one of the sources is ‘known to have a political bias.’
The FBI agents who drafted a memo proposing targeting “radical-traditionalist Catholic” ideology admitted to relying on politically biased sources of information when drafting the memo, according to a new House report.
For months, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government have been investigating a memo drafted within the FBI’s Richmond Field Office that proposed new efforts to monitor radical-traditionalist Catholic (RTC) ideologues as an avenue to racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism. In a new report on Monday, the House committee asserted there “was no legitimate basis for the memorandum” and detailed several alleged mistakes made in the process of drafting the memo.
The new House report criticizes the RTC memo’s authors at length for relying on “politically biased” open sources, applying the label to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Salon magazine, and The Atlantic. One SPLC report cited in the controversial RTC memo said so-called radical traditionalist Catholics “may make up the largest single group of serious antisemites in America.”
The Atlantic and Salon are both news magazines rated by various media analysts to be left-leaning.
The SPLC is a legal advocacy and civil rights organization that researchers alleged hate groups. Right-leaning organizations and groups critical of the political left have criticized some of the SPLC’s hate group designations as dubious and politically slanted.
According to the House report, an FBI internal review of the RTC memo determined its authors lacked “sufficient evidence or articulable support” to initiate investigative activity on Catholic parishes and “failed to consider the potential bias and credibility of open-source information cited in support of the [document’s] assessment.”
One of the authors of the RTC memo also reportedly told an FBI internal review that the SPLC is “known to have a political bias.” Despite that admitted bias, the RTC memo’s authors did not make any caveats about the reliability of their sources and instead submitted their work with a “high confidence” rating.
By Ryan Morgan
