ANALYSIS:
July 2023 was a soul-searching month for the FBI’s field office in Richmond, Virginia. The office’s analysts didn’t like the way the Washington headquarters treated them and would eventually need therapeutic counseling, a new Justice Department report says.
Earlier that year, the field office produced a confidential intelligence product now known as the “Richmond Catholic Memo.” It linked the area’s nontraditional, 49-year-old Our Lady of Fatima Chapel with a global network of anti-Vatican priests, the Society of St. PiusX (SSPX).
The memo suggested the alliance presented an extremist threat here at home. The field office even assigned operators to surveil two priests.
All of this was done in secret until Kyle Seraphin, an ex-agent and whistleblower, posted the memo that February.
Catholic leaders found the allegations offensive. So did FBI headquarters, then under the supervision of FBI Director Christopher Wray.
The memo read more like a description of Antifa than traditional Latin-loving Catholics.
Second-term President Trump ordered the creation of a Justice Department “Weaponization Working Group” to investigate alleged abuse of power during the Biden years. The Richmond memo fit the bill. The department on Aug. 28 released over 200 pages of narrative and exhibits.
The report said the FBI Inspection Division concluded in 2023 that the memo’s creators lacked “professional judgment and failed to adhere to FBI standards.” All involved should be “admonished.”
How did the field office take the criticism? Not well. Agents staged a mini-revolt, the DOJ report tells us.
“The Richmond Field Office did not agree with the criticisms of the internal review. On July 7, 2023, the Special Agent in Charge held a staff meeting at the Richmond Field Office to preview the Inspection Division’s findings. Notes from that meeting reveal that many in the office, including the Special Agent in Charge, disagreed with the Inspection Division’s report.”
According to the notes, the assistant special agent in charge said, “There are no inconsistent performers in this room.” And his boss, the agent in charge, “apologized” to his staff for Washington’s rebuke.
The report also said, “When Intelligence Analyst 2 said in an e-mail that she was ’terribly sorry for all that everyone has had to endure as a result of this product,’ the Special Agent in Charge told her she
need not apologize, saying that the event ’will make for a great chapter in your memoirs some day!’”
The revolt was not done. Three weeks later, at an all-employee meeting, the report said, “Leadership at the Richmond Field Office expressed … ’that people involved didn’t deserve this.’” Supervisors offered “Employee Assistance Counselors.”
Here is how the FBI field office wrote the first paragraph of the Richmond Catholic Memo, as circulated internally on Jan. 23, 2023.
“FBI Richmond assesses the increasingly observed interest of racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) in radical-traditionalist Catholic (RTC) ideology almost certainly presents opportunities for threat mitigation through the exploration of new avenues for tripwire and source development. FBI Richmond makes this assessment with high confidence based on FBI investigations, local law enforcement agency reporting and liaison reporting, with varying degrees of corroboration and access.”
Here’s why the Richmond office should never have written the report.
It largely revolved around one bad actor, a right-wing criminal who made plans to blow up targets and has been sent to prison twice. He considered himself a radical Catholic. He made a brief attempted connection to the Lady of Fatima Chapel, taking a catechism course. But as the priest explained to the FBI, he was never allowed to join or go to confession.
The Richmond field office only identified two other supposed radicals, one in Portland, Oregon, who had died, and the second in Milwaukee.
That was about it.
Another problem. Richmond showed its liberal bias. FBI analysts relied on the disgraced Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for how to define dangerous Catholics. The field office ignored the fact that the SPLC is staffed by conservative haters who like to attach the “hate” label to people with whom it disagrees.
It was the SPLC years ago that coined a new label, “Radical Traditionalist Catholics (RTC),” which the Richmond field office readily adopted in the lead memo paragraph.
The two news media cited in the Richmond Memo — what the FBI calls “Open Source” — were the ultraliberal The Atlantic and Salon.
And then there is the memo’s language.
A slide presentation on how to recognize “Radical Traditionalist Catholics” (RTC) lists “conservative family values/roles,” the “rejection of modernity” and “tendency toward isolationism.”
The Trump Justice report says, “The Memo did not provide concrete examples of the differences between ’radical-traditionalist Catholics’ and traditionalist Catholics, indicating that the key metric was simply how traditionalist a particular Catholic group was.”
The field office also mapped out a network of other Catholic institutions in the Richmond area for whom parishioners could serve as informants.
The Richmond Catholic Memo listed names, addresses and phone numbers and said the FBI should engage each institution’s leadership to “sensitize [the] congregations to the warning signs of radicalization and enlist their assistance to serve as suspicious activity tripwires.”
But Mr. Seraphin’s publication of the memo ended Richmond’s grand plan.
Washington headquarters ordered the memo deleted from the FBI database.
And today.
“The FBI personnel involved in the creation of the Richmond Catholic Memo have been terminated from their positions,” said the Weaponization Working Group.
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