"When an FBI supervisor in the South informed me early in my career that 'The KKK would be dead down here if we didn’t have so many FBI sources keeping it alive,' I was shocked."
By Jeff Cortese, The Messenger Opinion: FBI Intel Report on Catholics Reveals New Weakness in Law Enforcement
In February 2023, an FBI whistleblower made public the existence of an intelligence product written by members of the FBI’s Richmond Field Office that categorized certain Catholics as potential domestic terrorists. The redacted intel product bore the title, “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities.” This had a chilling effect on all who care about the U.S. Constitution’s protections for religious liberty, including those of us, especially Catholics, who swore an oath to protect the Constitution when we entered federal law enforcement.
A House subcommittee released a report on Dec. 4 summarizing its investigation into the intel report, stating that the FBI, “Under the guise of tackling the threat of domestic terrorism … painted certain ‘radical-traditionalist Catholics’ (RTCs) as violent extremists and proposed opportunities for the FBI to infiltrate Catholic churches as a form of ‘threat mitigation.’”
After public outrage, the FBI pulled the intel report from its databases, conceding what any Catholic or culturally literate person already knew, stating in part that, “the intelligence product prepared by one field office did not meet the exacting standards of the FBI.” A subsequent internal review by the FBI’s Inspection Division and external review by Congress revealed numerous failures, deficiencies, omissions, and substandard practices behind its development and publication.
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