WASHINGTON – Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) today released Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) records revealing the Biden FBI’s anti-Catholic Richmond Memo was widely distributed to over 1,000 FBI employees across the country before it was publicly disclosed by a whistleblower in 2023.
Per the Grassley-obtained records, the Biden FBI's targeting of Catholics based on biased sources was more widespread than previously known. In fact, Grassley found the FBI produced at least 13 additional documents and five attachments that used anti-Catholic terminology and relied on information from the radical far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). One FBI agent admitted over email, “[O]ur overreliance on the SPLC for hate designation [of traditional Catholics] is ... problematic.”
A second FBI memo, released by Grassley, was drafted by the FBI Richmond field office for Bureau-wide distribution. The draft memo repeated the unfounded link between traditional Catholicism and violent extremism, but was never published due to backlash following the Richmond Memo’s public disclosure. The existence of this second memo contradicts former-FBI Director Christopher Wray’s testimony that the Richmond field office only produced “a single product.”
Grassley is urging FBI Director Kash Patel to continue producing records related to the Richmond Memo’s origins, as well as former-FBI Director Christopher Wray’s misleading and obstructive response to Grassley’s oversight of the memo.
“I’m determined to get to the bottom of the Richmond memo, and of the FBI’s contempt for oversight in the last administration,” Grassley wrote. “I look forward to continuing to work with you to restore the FBI to excellence and prove once again that justice can and must be fairly and evenly administered, blind to whether we are Democrats or Republicans, believers or nonbelievers.”
Find Grassley’s letter and the released FBI documents HERE.
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