It turns out that the contemptuous FBI threat assessment letter warning that something should be done to “mitigate” that scourge of radical Shiite Catholics and recommending sending spies into Catholic Churches wasn’t the work product of only that out-of-control Cincinnati office. Sorry, I’m just having Lois Lerner flashbacks. Make that the Richmond, Va., office. Now we discover that the FBI offices in Los Angeles and Portland, Ore., were in on it too.
FBI Director Christopher Wray’s nose is growing again.
The Chairman of the House of the House Judiciary Committee, Congressman Jim Jordan, (R. Ohio), dispatched a howler — a lawyer letter — to Wray on Wednesday asking him why he lied at a hearing a month ago about the extent of the FBI’s probe into what they called “radical traditional Catholics.” Jordan was nicer than that, but, considering that Wray adamantly stated, “[T]he Richmond product … was a single product, by a single field office,” and it wasn’t, you can understand why Jordan wanted a bit more information.
He’s asked for an un-redacted version of the letter and to have a chat with the people who wrote and signed off on it, including the Richmond office counsel. He offered Wray a chance to come clean with the Judiciary Committee and change his bogus testimony on the issue. See Wray’s testimony from a month ago in the video below.
The “Richmond product,” an “aghast” Wray euphemistically called it, was a January 2023 letter first exposed by FBI whistleblower Kyle Seraphin in February. The letter is entitled, and you’ll want to sit down for this one, “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities,” and it assesses the “Racial or ethnically motivated violent extremists in radical traditional Catholic ideology.”
Sourcing for this pile of poo, or as Seraphin called it, “shoddy” work product, was vapor, unless you count the Southern Poverty Law Center’s political “hate watch” list, The Atlantic, and Salon Magazine as reliable intel sources, which of course they’re not. This is the same old FBI-deep-state-media feedback loop trick we saw in the framing of Donald Trump as a Russian secret agent.
The FBI spies in desperate search of a scintilla of a vestige of a predicate upon which to criminally charge some Catholic dude who prays outside of abortion clinics or protests a satanic-based drag queen outfit being feted by the Los Angeles Dodgers. The last time we checked, these things were protected under the First Amendment. However, the FBI sees the need to “mitigate” the harms of free thought before the 2024 election.
Jordan complained to Wray that it should have been obvious that this threat assessment was all about politics. The letter highlighted the border, LGBT issues, affirmative action, and abortion. “It’s politics, that’s the motivation,” he said, holding up the blacked-out letter. “A bunch of Catholics on the U.S. Supreme Court on affirmative action. Politics was the total motivation here, and that’s what’s scary,” he lectured. He could have added that it was unconstitutional too, not that the FBI would understand that. Anti-free speech is what animates the January 6 case against Donald Trump. But I digress.
Now we discover from Jordan that the L.A. and Portland FBI offices were involved too and that Wray intentionally kept that information from Jordan and his committee even after explicitly testifying, “[T]he Richmond product… a single product, by a single field office, which, as soon as I found out about it I was aghast and ordered it withdrawn from the FBI system.”
In Jordan’s howler to Wray he notes that the lesser redacted letter handed over on July 23 showed that the FBI had a church spy inform on a “[Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremist (RMVE)]” Catholic man (who has since died) who moved from a Portland Catholic Church and then “gravitated to [Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX)],” which the FBI deems an extremist group.
Jordan also asked Wray about the FBI spying on an L.A. Catholic man by using “an FBI undercover employee with “direct access” reporting on a subject who “attended the SSPX-affiliated [redacted] Church in [redacted] California, for over a year prior to his relocation.” Jordan says the document stated that the “FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office initiated an investigation on the ‘RMVE subject.’” The less redacted document shows that the “FBI Richmond “[c]oordinated with” FBI Portland in preparing the assessment.
In his letter, Jordan states, “This revelation raises the question of why you redacted this information in previous versions of the document you produced to the Committee…” Why indeed.
Jordan asked Wray in the July 2023 hearing, “What percentage of those [60 million] Catholics are radical traditional Catholics according to the Richmond field office of the FBI?”
Wray dissembled, “That product is not something I would defend or excuse… That product did not — to the best I can tell — [result] in any investigative action.” Wrong. His own letter showed that the spying on American churches has already begun.
They were all in on it. The FBI was all in on spying on Catholics who adhered to pre-Vatican II beliefs, such as the love of Latin masses.
Whistleblower Seraphin says that the assessment was clearly the work of a woke, anti-religious person. “The weaponization of the FBI against conservative Americans can be seen in the way documents like this are published and distributed,” he states. “Poorly sourced and highly speculative intelligence products lead to opening badly articulated predicate investigations into Americans in violation of their God-given, First Amendment-protected civil liberties.”
And where does it end? “Such investigations can easily lead to the same analysis of Radical Traditional Baptists, Radical Traditional Lutherans, and Radical Traditional Evangelicals,” he writes. “The FBI is forbidden from opening cases or publishing products based solely on First Amendment-protected activities,” he says. To get around that, the FBI must criminalize religious beliefs just as they’ve criminalized political ones.
It’s nothing short of the destruction of American life.
Politics, religion, press freedom. The Biden Administration and their minions in the big tech space and intelligence communities are going after the First Amendment with a vengeance.
The social media companies, at the behest of Democrats, have been preventing you from seeing our brand of opinion journalism for years now. They’re trying to starve us into compliance — or non-existence. PJ Media has been censored, disappeared, thrashed, and throttled by social media companies at the behest of political Leftists. It’s wrong and un-American. That’s where you come in. Are you sick of this yet?
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