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FBI Director Christopher Wray said Tuesday it is a distortion for critics to claim that numerous FBI field offices beyond Richmond, Virginia, were involved in investigating whether traditional Catholics posed a terrorist threat.
“I think that this notion that other field offices were involved is a garble,” Mr. Wray told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “The only involvement of the two other field offices was the Richmond authors of the product included two sentences or something that they’re about referencing each of these other offices’ cases.”
Mr. Wray said the Richmond field office sent those two sentences about the other offices’ cases to [the field offices], not the whole product, and asked both field offices, “Hey, did we describe your case right?”
“That’s all the other offices had. So it was a single field office’s product, and I stand by that,” Mr. Wray told senators. He also said he could not recall whether he had read the unredacted version of the anti-Catholic memo produced by the Richmond field office before he previously testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee.
During that hearing, Mr. Wray was critical of the memo and claimed that it was only the Richmond office that was involved in the Catholic Church investigation.
House investigators said Monday that the FBI‘s probe into whether traditional Catholics posed a terrorist threat included interviews with a priest and a church choir director, and involved an undercover agent who infiltrated the church.
The House Judiciary Committee‘s weaponization of government panel uncovered the interviews and the role of at least one undercover agent, as part of a congressional probe into the FBI‘s alleged targeting of traditional Catholics.
Subpoenas issued in the investigation, House lawmakers said, revealed that the FBI “singled out Americans who are pro-life, pro-family, and support the biological basis for sex and gender distinction as potential terrorists.”
According to the House Judiciary subcommittee on the weaponization of government, the FBI‘s interviews with a priest and choir director were used to inform on a parishioner under investigation who self-described as a “radical traditionalist Catholic.”
FBI employees in the bureau’s Richmond office where the probe originated could not define the meaning of radical traditionalist Catholic, but “this single investigation became the basis for an FBI-wide memorandum warning about the dangers of ‘radical’ Catholics,” House lawmakers said Monday.
The FBI probe was not limited to Richmond. House investigators said it relied on “reporting from other field offices,” including Los Angeles, Milwaukee and Portland, Oregon.
In a statement to The Washington Times on Monday, the FBI said: “We have stated repeatedly that the intelligence product prepared by one FBI field office did not meet the exacting standards of the FBI and was quickly removed from FBI systems. An internal review conducted by the FBI found no malicious intent to target Catholics or members of any other religious faith, and did not identify any investigative steps taken as a result of the product.”
“The FBI is committed to upholding the constitutional rights of all Americans and we do not conduct investigations based solely on First Amendment-protected activity, including religious practices,” the statement said. “The FBI investigates violence, threats of violence, and violations of federal law. We have provided hundreds of pages of documents and briefings to the committee to address our findings and the numerous actions we are taking to address identified shortcomings.”
• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.
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