Will the FBI Learn Its Lesson From Its “Radical Traditionalist Catholics” Scandal and End Its Reliance on Southern Poverty Law Center Smears?

You might support or loathe the views of the Family Research Council, which advocates traditional marriage and gender roles. But does its advocacy of traditional values make it a “hate group” worthy of being lumped in with the Klu Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party? And if it is, could the same be said for the Roman Catholic Church? How about two Catholic men from the American heartland, one of them now the Vice President of the United States and the other Pope Leo XIV? Are they terrorist adjacent?
 
These far-out assertions are natural conclusions of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which produces a “hate map” that was helpful to an outraged man who took a gun in 2012 to the headquarters of the Family Research Council with the intention, he told prosecutors, of killing as many staffers as he could. Thanks to the heroic intervention of one security guard, the gunman only managed to wound that one person. The SPLC has since designated a number of conservative, but by no means radical, organizations and people as “hate groups.” Now Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) are appealing to the FBI to direct field offices to not rely on the characterizations of the SPLC.
 
Thanks to the efforts of Sen. Grassley and the forthcoming response from FBI Director Kash Patel, we now know the role that SPLC played in inspiring the infamous memo from the Richmond, Virginia, field office that targeted “radical traditional Catholics.” The FBI’s assessment of traditional Catholics was rooted in smears from the SPLC, which Sen. Grassley correctly calls “thoroughly discredited and biased.”
 
A public release of internal FBI documents by Sen. Grassley undercuts dismissive statements from former FBI Director Christopher Wray that the Richmond memo was the product of one field office. Documents unearthed by Sen. Grassley reveal that the Richmond field office consulted with Bureau offices in Louisville, Portland, and Milwaukee to paint Catholics who adhere to “conservative family values/roles” as being as dangerous as Islamist jihadists. There were similar efforts in recent years in Los Angeles and Indianapolis.
 
The original memo from the Richmond field office found SPLC as a trustworthy enough source to assert that there will be a “likely increase” in threats from “radical traditional Catholics” in combination with “racially and ethnically-motivated violent extremism.”
 
Another memo produced by Sen. Grassley reveals the conclusion of the FBI’s Directorate of Intelligence after the memo was revealed and the Bureau found itself mired in a scandal. The FBI concluded: “The SPLC has a history of having to issue apologies and retract groups and individuals they have identified as being extremist or hate groups.” But this should have been clear to the FBI for years.
 
It is helpful, at least, that an FBI assistant director wrote that since the Richmond memo implicated First Amendment rights by targeting “a branch of a religious group,” that “there should have been more care to caveat this information.” Another memo from a leader of the FBI’s Counter Terrorism Division added that the FBI does not now use the phrase “radical traditionalist Catholic” and that “the FBI does not open investigations based upon First Amendment-protected activities … Political or religious affiliations (such as ‘far-right’) are not used to describe or identify violent extremists.”
 
Those critiques are welcome, although they might be seen as institutional posterior coverage in light of the firestorm ignited by the Richmond memo.
 
Let us hope that this searing moment for the FBI serves as a permanent reminder to take great care in surveilling Americans for the free exercise of religion and political expression, whether of the left or the right. Partisans may throw around loose accusations about their ideological opposites (and certainly some on the right do that), but the loose standards of the blogosphere make for poor criteria in terrorist threat assessments.
 
And above all, it is time for the FBI to end its reliance on the characterizations of the scandal-ridden Southern Poverty Law Center as a source of reliable information.

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