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On Thursday, the Justice Department’s “Weaponization Working Group” issued a report supposedly explaining how, in 2023, an FBI field office unfairly targeted conservative Catholics, concluding “that the Biden FBI engaged in improper and unjustified law enforcement and intelligence activity.”
It was released in response to Executive Order 14147 (“Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government”), issued by Donald Trump on the first day of his second term in office.
The entire report is utterly ridiculous, and that becomes evident once you understand the actual story. But the Trump administration knows damn well no one’s going to pay attention to the details, so they’re loudly proclaiming that the Biden administration was somehow anti-Catholic, assuming no one’s going to dig into the details and hoping that their right-wing allies in the media will just amplify the headline they want to see.
That’s why it’s important to dig into those details.
I’ve written about this story before. But it’s worth describing again because this may be the most egregious example I’ve ever seen of how Christian Nationalism isn’t merely unconstitutional and unethical but quite literally putting our lives in danger.
The background information that I found most helpful in understanding this situation comes from a report written by former Department of Justice Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz, who investigated the matter in 2024… and found no evidence of religious discrimination.
What the investigation was all about
Beginning in 2019, the FBI began tracking a(n unnamed) man who advocated civil war and the assassination of politicians… and then purchased semi-automatic weapons and ammo. He was then arrested for other reasons, but in jail, his online threats grew even worse. He would make phone calls to family members during which he talked about the need to “build guns, explosives, and other forms of weaponry and store them in [his] room without fear of the law finding out about it.” He also said he needed to “make total war against the Satanic occultist government and the Zionist devil worshiping bankers who control it.”
He completed his sentence in June of 2021, and once he was released, there was reason to believe this guy wanted to put his violent rhetoric into action—specifically against “pro-choice, Jewish, and LGBTQ individuals.”
Because of his status as a convicted felon and due to his plea agreement, however, he couldn’t actually purchase any weapons to carry out his planned attacks. But he did have social media accounts in which he posted Nazi symbols and talked about killing police officers, “ganging up on and beating” racial/religious minorities, carrying out a mass shooting at a “school for special needs children,” etc.
Then he took a step that could help him close the weapons gap.
In early 2022, the guy began attending a church that’s not formally affiliated with the Catholic Church but pushed “traditional Catholic theology and liturgy.” He also described himself on social media as “‘Fascist and Catholic’ and a ‘[radical-traditional (rad-trad)] Catholic clerical fascist.’” Even worse, it appeared that he was recruiting members in that church to carry out an attack.
He even made comments to members of the church saying he was going to commit violence and suggested he was building a pressure cooker bomb. (The church members were not on board with any of this.)
At that point, the FBI office in Richmond, Virginia sent an undercover agent to the church to interact with the man and find out how serious these threats were. The answer? Very. It led the office to declare the man to be their “highest priority domestic terrorism subject.”
The man kept taking steps indicating he was going to kill people. He even purchased equipment that would let him lock the doors of commercial buildings, preventing hostages from exiting. He then bought a truck and posted a video on social media saying that was his final step before the attack.
On November 12, 2022, investigators obtained a search warrant for his home and found all kinds of disturbing stuff inside: ammo, a 3D printer, lock-picking devices, “multiple Molotov cocktail-type improvised incendiary devices.”
They felt like they had enough to work with and arrested him. Crisis averted. (In June of 2023, the man was indicted in federal court and pleaded guilty.)
The FBI agents tried to document what they learned
But part of building their case meant talking with people who may have communicated with him during his planning process. So FBI agents interviewed the church’s priest, choir director, and other members. It seemed that all of them knew exactly why the FBI wanted to speak to them.
It was that guy, wasn’t it?
They cited his “unusual” and “concerning” behavior and racism. The FBI considered reaching out to nearby churches just to let religious leaders know what potential warning signs to look out for, and to give them a way to reach out to the FBI if they saw anything suspicious.
The point is: The church wasn’t the problem. It was just that one guy.
When two FBI analysts—both with decades of experience—began drafting a memo about all this (called a Domain Perspective), noting potential areas of concern for the future, one possibility was the link between the man’s extremism and his faith. But even that possibility was dismissed by the very same analyst, who pointed out that this guy was already on the FBI’s radar before he ever joined this church.
Still, if he was recruiting members for an assault through this church, perhaps there was reason to investigate further—if for no other reason than to help churches like theirs identify potential threats in the future.
Why did their memo include language like “rad-trad Catholic clerical fascist” and “radical-traditionalist Catholic”? Both analysts said those were the words the man himself used and that phrasing was common in his corner of the internet. They never defined it, though, which became an issue later on.
In fact, when the analysts did more research, they learned there were two other men on the FBI’s radar—through their offices in Portland and Milwaukee—who had similar extremist ideologies and a connection to the same kind of church. That’s what led to the publication of a report suggesting the link.
That report even included a legal caveat saying they were not infringing upon anyone’s First Amendment freedoms to practice their faith and they weren’t monitoring anyone in this church solely because of their religious beliefs:
Potential criminality exhibited by certain members of a group referenced herein does not negate nor is it a comment on the constitutional rights of the group itself or its members to exercise their rights under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The FBI does not investigate, collect, or maintain information on U.S. persons solely for the purpose of monitoring activities protected by the First Amendment.
After they wrote up that Domain Perspective, the analysts hoped to create a different, more simplified, version of the report that could be shared with others within the FBI—beyond their own office—so they enlisted the help of additional colleagues in drafting it.
But the FBI never got around to that.
The draft report was leaked to right-wing outlets
The original draft report—never meant to be seen by the public—was somehow leaked to right-wing media outlets, and conservatives began running with the story that the FBI, under the Biden administration, was targeting Catholic churches.
That was a lie. There was no anti-Christian bias here. It was a valid documentation of a potentially dangerous phenomenon. It wasn’t even against the Catholic Church, but rather a potentially extremist sect calling itself Catholic.
To ignore that possibility would have been malpractice on the FBI’s part. But right-wing websites were quick to claim the FBI was targeting Catholics who preferred a “Traditional Latin Mass.” (That was one of many descriptors of those churches.) They were misinterpreting everything those analysts had said, but true to form, conservatives began spreading those lies to feed their claims of religious persecution.
When word about this leak got back to the FBI, then-director Christopher Wray rescinded the original document, saying it “failed to adhere to FBI standards.” The agency also “formally admonish[ed] the employees involved.” Former Attorney General Merrick Garland said he was “appalled” by the memo, but he dismissed any claims that there was discrimination against Catholics. (Because there wasn’t any.)
Conservatives used those actions to insist the FBI was trying to cover up for religious persecution... AND THEY WOULD HAVE GOTTEN AWAY WITH IT, if not for the whistleblower who shared the original document.
But as the Inspector General later explained, that wasn’t the case. Documents like these go through layers of editing and there was no evidence of any malicious intent against a religious group. Just because this memo didn’t meet expectations, it didn’t mean anyone did anything wrong.
He said that the Domain Perspective didn’t include enough evidence of a link between extremists and Rad Trad Catholic ideology, and because of that, it looked like the FBI was targeting people’s religious beliefs, even though that wasn’t the case at all. Furthermore, he said, the document included incorrect terminology for cases involving domestic terrorism.
The [FBI Inspection Division (or INSD)] report found that although there was no evidence of malicious intent or an improper purpose, the [Richmond Virginia Domain Perspective or DP] failed to adhere to analytic tradecraft standards and evinced errors in professional judgment, including that it lacked sufficient evidence or articulable support for a relationship between [Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists or RMVEs] and so-called [Radical Traditionalist Catholic or RTC] ideology; incorrectly conflated the subjects’ religious views with their RMVE activities, creating the appearance that the FBI had inappropriately considered religious beliefs and affiliation as a basis for conducting investigative activity; and reflected a lack of training and awareness concerning proper domestic terrorism terminology. As a result, the INSD report concluded that the employees involved in drafting, editing, and reviewing the Richmond DP failed to adhere to FBI standards. The INSD report also examined the approval process for the Richmond DP, concluding that it was insufficient, and the circumstances surrounding its removal from FBI systems following the disclosure of the document into the public domain. Based on the results of the FBI’s Strategic Review, the FBI instituted a number of corrective actions, including enhancing approval requirements for intelligence products involving a sensitive investigative matter and formally admonishing the employees involved in the Richmond DP.
It was a perfectly normal explanation for why a Domain Perspective might have been rescinded, but that wasn’t how everyone took it.
Wray, who was appointed by Trump during his first administration, said the memo “violated the agency’s policies on conducting investigations based on religious affiliation,” which was a ridiculous reason to dismiss a memo that necessitated the mention of a guy’s religious affiliation.
Whether or not you agreed with the FBI’s assessment on the memo, though, it appeared that they handled it all internally. The report never should have seen the light of day for reasons they explained and the analysts were, fairly or not, admonished. That sounds like the government working as it should.
It didn’t matter to right-wing propagandists. They ran with the lie, as they so often do.
Republicans used the incident to rile up their base
The GOP-led Judiciary Committee, run by Rep. Jim Jordan, said in its report in December of 2023 that this proved the “FBI abused its counterterrorism tools to target Catholic Americans as potential domestic terrorists,” saying that the FBI “singled out Americans who are pro-life, pro-family, and support the biological basis for sex and gender distinction as potential domestic terrorists.”
None of that was accurate.
But Republicans got the headlines they wanted, and this past June, FBI Director Kash Patel fired all the agents involved in this investigation.
Several FBI analysts tied to the creation of a 2023 memo warning of a potential threat from Catholic “violent extremists” were fired Friday, according to their lawyer, the latest wave of terminations under the leadership of its director Kash Patel.
The fired employees included four intelligence analysts and a supervisory analyst. The FBI declined to comment.
“This action is manifestly unjust, completely unsupported by the facts, and subverts standard FBI policy and procedure,” their lawyer, David Laufman, said in a statement. “These individuals deserved far better for the exceptional and faithful public service they rendered to protect our country.”
The lawyer, of course, was correct. There was no indication of any anti-religious bigotry on the part of the analysts. They successfully prevented a domestic terrorist attack, and this was their reward. Their only mistake, if anything, involved more technical elements of producing a report based on their findings. Substantively, however, they didn’t do anything wrong. They were just trying to protect the country from a potential attack.
Yet it was easy for Patel to get rid of them because the entire incident had become a cause célèbre among conservatives to the point that the memo was even included in a report by Trump’s sham “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias.”
The Trump administration was so dead-set on pretending they’re saving the country that they quite literally fired the very people who keep the country safe.
What the “Weaponization Working Group” claims really happened
And that brings us to the Justice Department’s “Weaponization Working Group,” which, last week, issued its own report on the matter attempting to prove that the Biden administration was out to get conservative Catholics. The 231-page report, mostly consisting of internal documents, sets out to justify the right-wing outrage, even if the details within the report point in the other direction. The group claims without evidence that “To many Americans, the Richmond Domain Perspective came to embody the misuse and weaponization of government power.” (I assure you “many Americans” have no idea any of this happened.)
They specifically make three claims to bolster their argument that religious conservatives were unfairly demonized while the people who supposedly went after them were rewarded:
FBI agents “made extensive inquiries into two priests and monitored their travel and communications.”
The FBI relied on “biased and unverified materials, including Southern Poverty Law Center publications and foreign intelligence materials, without assessing their credibility.”
The FBI’s office in Richmond didn’t do enough to punish the agents, giving them “positive performance reviews” and “openly defend[ing] their work.”
It’s worth explaining why all three of those conclusions are ridiculous.
Why FBI agents investigated two priests
I mentioned that the suspected terrorist began attending a non-Catholic “Catholic” church. That church was the Our Lady of Fatima Chapel and it’s associated with the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), a breakaway sect that the Catholic Church formally disavows.
When the FBI agents wanted to know if their target was recruiting church members for a potential attack, they spoke privately with the church’s priest. At first, he was very helpful. He noted that he didn’t know the suspect well, but he knew the guy had never been to confession, had “crazy views on race,” and was a white supremacist. When the FBI agents asked if the suspect “ever discussed committing violence,” the priest got a bit jittery and said he wanted to speak to church leadership “and/or a lawyer.” That’s partly because the priest was new and “did not want this to look bad on the church.”
So the agents contacted the priest a week later for updates… but this time, the priest was less talkative. “I don’t want to be involved,” he told them. Naturally, this made it harder for the FBI agents to get information about the suspect.
Around the same time, the FBI agents realized that the SSPX was a radical group on its own and there was reason to believe it was “attempting to radicalize individuals through the Catholic religion towards Neo-Nazi extremism.” So was the suspect a lone wolf or was the church itself part of the problem? They weren’t sure. But they also found out that the priest’s uncle was a fairly high-ranking member of the breakaway sect. So the FBI agents began looking into that guy (“Priest 2”).
In short, the FBI was already worried about what their suspect might be doing. But they were also wondering how far the extremism rabbit hole went: Were the priests also involved in this? Lacking further information, they began investigating the priests just to be safe, looking into their travel history, contact with other government agencies, credit card records, and phone records.
What they found was… nothing of importance to their investigation. While their beliefs may have been considered extreme, there was no reason to believe the priests were doing anything the FBI needed to be concerned about.
So they stopped monitoring both priests.
That was it.
Were they monitoring those two priests because they were priests? No.
Were they doing it because they were Catholic (or “Catholic”)? Of course not.
They were doing it because, working off of minimal information, they wanted to know if those priests were involved in the kind of radicalization that could lead to a terrorist attack. Once they felt confident nothing of the kind was happening, they stopped looking into the priests and put their focused back on the suspect.
None of this, in other words, was religious persecution or anti-Catholic bias. But the Trump administration wants people to think otherwise.
Why FBI agents cited the Southern Poverty Law Center
What about the claim that the FBI agents relied on the Southern Poverty Law Center for information?
When doing background research on these breakaway Catholic sects in preparation for their Domain Perspective report, the FBI agents learned that the SPLC had reported on several “radical-traditionalist Catholic” groups in their database of “hate groups,” so they felt compelled to mention that.
In case you’re curious, the SPLC says that one church leader was obsessed with the “alleged evils of the Jews.” Another believes “every sane thinker must be an anti-Semite.” Another promotes books with titles like “Did Six Million Really Die?” and “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century,” both about the Holocaust. (A more updated version of the page is here.)
Is the Trump administration, which claims to oppose antisemitism, bothered by any of this? Apparently not.
The point is: These churches aren’t called hate groups because members are conservative Catholics. They’re hate groups because they espouse hate. It’s not that complicated.
In any case, while the SPLC’s website explains in great detail why these particular churches are considered hateful, the particulars were not included in the Domain Perspective. The report simply mentioned the SPLC’s labeling of those churches as hate groups:
As of 2021, the Southern Poverty Law Center identified nine RTC hate groups operating in the United States… Open source reporting and FBI investigations have noted a growing overlap between the far-right white nationalist movement and RTCs. Illustrative of this has been the increasing collaboration of the far-right Catholic media outlet Church Militant (and its activist wing, the Resistance network) with the America First “groyper” movement… The ongoing convergence of the far-right white nationalist movement and RTCs was further demonstrated through the increase in violent hostility toward abortion-rights advocates on social media sites in the run-up to and aftermath of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade… Far-right white nationalists and RTCs interact primarily online, and adherents of RTCs and other far-right white nationalist groups frequently share language and symbolism, such as crusader references or anti-Semitic discourses.
That’s it. That’s literally it. In a single paragraph explaining the growing, disturbing trend of Rad-Trad Catholics, they cited a report from the SPLC to point out that this is hardly a brand new phenomenon. And, again, the SPLC website explains in depth why the churches they included on their list were deemed extreme. (Spoiler: It’s not because they’re conservative.)
But this new report from the “Weaponization Working Group” acts like everything the FBI did was based on the SPLC—a group that conservatives have railed against for years because they don’t like it when groups highlight their hateful rhetoric and beliefs. (Just last week, the Trump administration announced that it’s going to try and revoke the tax-exempt statuses for liberal non-profit groups including the SPLC.)
It’s just not true, though, that the SPLC’s reporting played a significant role in anything the FBI agents did. The report would have stood on its own without the citation.
For what it’s worth, the report also goes after the FBI agents for citing articles in Salon and the Atlantic. But those articles merely point out (with citations!) that there are links between far-right Catholics and white nationalists. But because those publications are also deemed liberal by the right, they’re included as proof that the FBI is biased.
Why FBI agents were given positive reviews
What about the third claim that the Richmond FBI office gave the agents “positive performance reviews” and “openly defended their work”? OF COURSE THEY DID. Those agents didn’t do anything substantively wrong. Their work may have literally saved lives and the complaints against it were clearly politically motivated. Unlike FBI Director Kash Patel jetting around to parties and his girlfriend’s concerts, these people were actually doing their job.
One of the agent’s supervisors even wrote in an evaluation that the employee “oversaw an extremely difficult threat during the review period, which became increasingly so following the leak of one of the products related to the threat [the employee] resided over [and she led] her team despite the distractions and difficulties stemming from the aforementioned product.”
That sounds… like a perfectly sensible review given everything we know.
Anyone who’s had a real job knows that great employees can still make mistakes, and if you want to argue that these FBI agents made technical mistakes in the Domain Perspective, that wouldn’t negate the incredible and essential and potentially life-saving work they did to keep the country safe.
How the Trump administration is spinning all this
And yet this is how Trump’s bootlickers conclude the report:
… History will rightly judge the Richmond Catholic Memo as a grave failure of the FBI Richmond Field Office to uphold that responsibility.
Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel, this Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation will protect the constitutional rights of all Americans and ensure law enforcement activity is based on legitimate law enforcement interests.
The FBI personnel involved in the creation of the Richmond Catholic Memo have been terminated from their positions.
The press release for the report reads like a victory lap for Trump’s hand-picked allies:
“This Department of Justice will not tolerate a weaponized bureaucracy that chills First Amendment activity,” said Attorney General Todd Blanche. “The individuals who developed the Richmond Domain Perspective are no longer with the Department, and our Working Group’s efforts to investigate weaponization under the previous Administration will continue.”
“Weaponization will never be tolerated at this FBI,” said FBI Director Kash Patel. “Even while those who developed the unacceptable Richmond Catholic memo under the previous administration have been held accountable, releasing information to the public about what occurred under the prior regime is an important part of the process. I want to thank the Weaponization Working Group for their partnership as well as Attorney General Todd Blanche for his leadership addressing these abuses and making sure they never happen again.”
Even Christian Nationalist Tony Perkins, who defends this administration no matter how corrupt it is, claimed that this report “further confirms the Biden FBI used the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center to target Catholic priests and parishes for simply practicing their faith.”
He’s lying because that’s what conservative Christians do when the facts don’t fit their preferred narrative.
Other right-wing commentators are cherry-picking elements from the report to pretend that the Biden administration was targeting conservatives. Eric Schmitz, who works for GOP Speaker Mike Johnson, falsely claimed that this proved the FBI was going after Catholics who appreciate a Traditional Latin Mass. A Justice Department communications official insisted this showed “More evidence of Biden-era weaponization.” Another White House staffer claimed this was evidence of the Biden administration going “against faithful Catholics.”
They’re all lying. They’re all delusional. They all don’t know how to read.
What’s truly disturbing about this entire situation is that the Trump administration transformed a successful domestic terrorism investigation into a pretext for purging the people who carried it out, all so they could convince gullible conservatives that the previous administration was out to get them.
Those FBI agents did exactly what they should have done and we owe them a debt of gratitude. Instead, they have to look for new jobs because the Trump administration would rather promote a false narrative than keep Americans safe.
The “Weaponization Working Group” had their conclusion before they ever began this report. All they did was repackage debunked right-wing grievances into an official-sounding report.
None of this protects religious liberty.
All this does is shield extremists so that Trump, Patel, Blanche, and their Christian Nationalist allies can keep pretending they’re the victims.
"This Department of Justice will not tolerate a weaponized bureaucracy that chills First Amendment activity."
*spit take* WHAT!?! Says the guy whose entire fascist regime is doing everything in its power to weaponize and take a blowtorch to the Constitution?
Another day, another lie from the Trump administration. Basic Question: Does anyone here actually believe that Joe Biden would suggest / promote / insist on an unwarranted investigation of Catholic priests WHEN HE HIMSELF IS CATHOLIC??? It MIGHT be possible if there was a foundation for such a study in the ongoing issue of child sexual abuse or some other serious crime, but nope. What they apparently are after are those Catholics who favor the original, traditional Latin Mass. Whoop-whoop. What's worse is just how easily the pants were pulled down on this ridiculous effort by Kash Patel and the FBI.
And all of this was tiresome 10 squares back. Honestly, the midterms cannot come soon enough and with them a Democratic tsunami sufficiently large enough to put quietus to this and other brands of Trumpian stupidity.