That didn’t take long. Earlier this week, as Jazz explained yesterday, a whistleblower gave Uncover DC an internal FBI memo alerting its agents to a potential domestic-terrorism threat from so-called “radical traditionalist Catholic ideology,” and gave its adherents the very FBI-esque acronym RTC. Supposedly, these RTCs had formed an intent to commit domestic terrorism that the FBI felt with “high confidence” they could head off by recruiting sources within the Catholic Church.

That leak led to an explosion of criticism, and a very quick retreat yesterday afternoon from the FBI. Despite the clear effort in producing this intelligence estimate produced by the FBI, the bureau claimed yesterday that the memo “does not meet our exacting standards.” Oh really?

The FBI’s national press office confirmed to CNA that the document came from the Richmond office but stated that it will “remove the document from FBI systems” because it does not meet the “exacting standards of the FBI.”

“While our standard practice is to not comment on specific intelligence products, this particular field office product — disseminated only within the FBI — regarding racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism does not meet the exacting standards of the FBI,” the statement read.

“Upon learning of the document, FBI Headquarters quickly began taking action to remove the document from FBI systems and conduct a review of the basis for the document. The FBI is committed to sound analytic tradecraft and to investigating and preventing acts of violence and other crimes while upholding the constitutional rights of all Americans and will never conduct investigative activities or open an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity,” concluded the statement from the FBI National Press Office.

Marked “UNCLASSIFIED/FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY,” the document includes a list of organizations with Catholic ties that are listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) list of hate groups.

Jazz mentioned the SPLC yesterday as well, but this connection raises some serious questions. The SPLC may have at one time been a nonpartisan group focused on going after real hate groups, but has long since morphed into a political organization that targets policy opponents. Among the more ridiculous “listings” at the SPLC is their labeling of Alliance Defending Freedom as a hate group for its legal representation of clients fighting speech codes in all levels of government.

The SPLC can do whatever it wants with its listings, of course, and whatever its donors will tolerate. The problem isn’t really the SPLC. It’s the fact that the FBI is taking its investigatory clues from the SPLC rather than using objective and non-partisan means to determine if crimes are being committed. Counter-terrorism clearly requires some level of what we call “pre-crime,” and that requires informants. But those informants should be directly related to actual potential threats from specific people and groups, not a dispute over the use of liturgy in the Catholic Church whose political views clash with the SPLC’s.

Of course, the question could be asked as to whether the FBI did have other information about “RTCs” that prompted this memo. If so, the memo didn’t outline it, as Kyle Seraphin wrote at Uncover DC, and the SPLC apparently didn’t have any evidence of crimes or even plans for violence:

The attached appendices refer to a number of articles and the out-of-FBI-policy Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) at the end of the document. For example, Appendix D is a direct copy of the SPLC list of “Radical Traditional Catholicism Hate Groups,” including the web address accessed. The SPLC appears to be a source for the intelligence analyst’s beliefs that RTCs exist and that they are anti-Semitic. The SPLC description for this “hate group” states RTCs “may make up the largest single group of serious anti-semites in America.” Often in the intelligence world, this type of statement without any established evidence is often followed by the acronym “NFI” or “No Further Information” to indicate it is an unsubstantiated opinion. Additionally, SPLC states RTCs “embrace extremely conservative social ideals with respect to women.” Nothing reported by the SPLC indicates the number of adherents to this alleged ideology nor any instances of violence. This lack of evidence and blatant partisan blindness is one of many reasons the FBI has distanced itself from the SPLC as a source in the past 10 years.The intelligence product includes endnote citations from two other sources: the far-Left online magazine Salon and the equally left-leaning The Atlantic. The Salon articles cited are typical of partisan click-bait writing: “Traditional Catholics and White Nationalist Groypers Forge a new Far-Right Youth Movement” and “White Nationalists Get Religion: On the Far-Right Fringe, Catholics and Racists Forge a movement.” These articles were released a day apart as a series but include substantially the same information. The articles offer only circumstantial suggestions of affiliations between inflammatory figures like Milo Yiannopoulos and Nick Fuentes and a man pictured standing on the steps of a Catholic church in New York after the Dobbs decision. The Salon writer makes the wild leap that using a photo of someone at a church indicates the pictured individual or his beliefs are relevant within a religious institution with 70 million adherents in the United States alone and over 2000 years of tradition and history.

And the triggering factor for the SPLC seems to be — wait for it — the fact that “RTCs” oppose “abortion rights”:

The impetus of the writer can be assessed by the fixation on abortion and the repeated use of the phrase “abortion rights.” Documents like these can be used to drive the FBI’s priorities in specific regions and boost the visibility of non-existent threats. There is a reason the writer refers to the document as a “first of its kind” Domain Perspective: it is generally out of bounds. However, intelligence products like this help focus on alleged “hostility towards the abortion-rights advocates,” which the FBI has used to justify significant enforcement actions tied to the FACE Act (18 USC 248). Americans will remember a flood of conservative news outlets covering arrests of numerous pro-life protesters at the end of 2022, which are coming back into focus after the January 30, 2023 acquittal of defendant Mark Houck. While over 100 instances of attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers occurred in 2022, the SPLC reported an unsubstantiated 200 “bombings or arson attacks” on abortion clinics in the past 20 years.

The fact that the FBI quickly withdrew this after its emergence almost certainly indicates that all they had was the SPLC’s opinions on the matter. And the references to “abortion rights” in promulgating this “intelligence” advisory on “RTCs” is clearly political, although apparently someone forgot to tell the FBI that the entire Catholic Church opposes abortion, not just the “RTCs.”

The use of SPLC’s opinions alone to trigger an infiltration effort involving First Amendment freedom of religious expression make the FBI look even more politicized and weaponized … and this is a bad time for that bad look. The rapidity of the FBI’s retreat seems very much motivated by the new House committee hearings on the political corruption and weaponization of law and regulatory enforcement, especially at the federal level. The FBI-SPLC partnership and its results here will likely prompt the committee to start asking Christopher Wray and Merrick Garland why the FBI is taking its investigatory cues from a political action committee. And they know it, which is why the FBI quickly hit reverse when this memo got leaked to Uncover DC.

In fact, this is a great example of such weaponization, because the so-called “rad trad” movement is particularly disconnected from the FBI’s mission. The “RTC” beef is with government, all right, but it’s with the government of the Vatican. It has nothing to do with domestic American politics, except that its adherents tend to be more politically hard-line conservative as well as theologically conservative. The debate in Catholic circles between “RTC” splinters and the mainstream is provocative and sharp, but it’s not within the purview of the FBI or the government, as the First Amendment makes very clear to everyone outside of Quantico.

And for that reason, don’t expect the FBI interest in “RTCs” to fade away after this event. They retreated because the heat is on in this new Congress. Once the focus shifts elsewhere, the same people who keep looking to the SPLC’s enemies list for targeting purposes will pick up right where they left off.

My pal Larry O’Connor and I had a lot of fun last night with this topic on his show O’Connor Tonight for Salem News Channel. We’re both mystified by this “intelligence” from the FBI, as well as mystified a bit by the sedevacantists. We recorded this before the FBI’s retreat, which probably would have provided a little more fodder for our laughter. Enjoy this, and be sure to sign up for our VIP membership for our Monday show Off the Beaten Path, in which Larry and I talk about the values behind and apart from the headlines every week.