The ACLJ has just uncovered internal FBI emails through our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation that expose how senior FBI officials reacted after the FBI’s targeting of traditionalist Christians under the Biden Administration became public.

The records reveal that the FBI’s own intelligence leadership quickly identified the fatal flaw in the now-infamous Richmond memorandum: The Bureau relied on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) subjective “hate group” labels without first determining how the SPLC made those designations or whether its standards even aligned with the FBI’s own definitions.

Then the FBI’s Office of General Counsel raised an even more disturbing concern — whether Deep State officials were treating the SPLC like an official arm of the government.

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The FBI Targeted Traditionalist Christians

On January 23, 2023, the FBI’s Richmond Field Office issued an intelligence product claiming that interest in “radical-traditionalist Catholic” ideology among racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists presented “new mitigation opportunities.”

Those opportunities included developing sources, establishing “tripwires,” conducting outreach to Catholic parishes, and developing sources with “placement and access” inside traditionalist Catholic communities.

The memorandum named Catholic organizations, publications, chapels, and a seminary. It relied in part on the SPLC’s list of purported “hate groups” to identify organizations associated with what the memo called “radical-traditionalist Catholic ideology.”

This was not simply an assessment of a known violent suspect who happened to attend Mass. The FBI proposed using Catholic communities themselves as potential avenues for intelligence collection.

The FBI’s Intelligence Chief Flagged the SPLC........

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