As a Catholic, I’m stumped on both questions, and especially the latter. More to the point, Christopher Wray has taken over five months to address this — and he still doesn’t know the answer. That led to a contentious confrontation this morning at the House Judiciary hearing with committee chair Jim Jordan.

The highlighted question in the C-SPAN tweet is just the appetizer. Stick around for the homina-homina from Wray when it comes to the purpose of the memo — and how the plan to infiltrate supposed “rad-trad Catholic” parishes got approved in the FBI’s Richmond office, all the way up to its chief counsel (via RealClearPolitics):

"What the difference between a traditional Catholic and a radical traditional Catholic?"

WATCH: Tense exchange between Rep. @Jim_Jordan and FBI Director Christopher Wray on an FBI memo about abortions and Catholics. pic.twitter.com/tMh8JnKYAc

— CSPAN (@cspan) July 12, 2023

Had this memo just been discovered, this might have been unfair. However, this Richmond office memo leaked out five months ago, which exposed it as a joint project with the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Richmond FBI office promulgated this advisory despite having no evidence that “radical traditional Catholics” had any connection to violence. The SPLC fed this to the FBI office on the claim to be protecting “abortion rights,” which was nonsense on its face, as I explained after the main FBI office retreated immediately from the project:

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.

That brings us to today, over five months since this attempt to target Catholics on the basis of their faith got exposed. This should have taken days to investigate and settle, not weeks or months. The FBI is supposedly the premiere investigative agency in the world, and they were investigating themselves. Why would it take five months to determine what happened and what the Richmond office thought it could do to surveil rad-trad Catholics?

Whatever the answer might be, the FBI is working hard to keep people from discovering it. Catholic Vote sued the FBI in April after the bureau refused to respond to a FOIA request for information on the development of their rad-trad response. The FBI filed a response just this past Friday arguing it’s none of Catholic Vote’s business:

The FBI issued a seven-page response to the lawsuit and rejected CV’s assertion that the organization has a right to know about the FBI’s records regarding Catholics and a January memo that targeted Roman Catholics as potential domestic terrorists, according to documents reviewed by the DCNF.

“The remaining paragraphs of this subsection of the Complaint consist of Plaintiffs’ characterization of the relief sought in this action, to which no response is required,” the FBI wrote. “To the extent that a response is required, Defendant denies the allegations and denies that Plaintiffs are entitled to the relief requested or to any relief whatsoever … Plaintiffs are not entitled to compel the production of records, or portions thereof, properly protected from disclosure by one or more FOIA exemptions or exclusions.”

That’s not how FOIA requests work, or at least not how they’re supposed to work. This effort to surveil people on the basis of their religion in the absence of any evidence of threat is flat-out unconstitutional. The fact that the memo — as Jordan reminds a squirming Wray — explicitly mentions the 2024 election and various potential rulings from court cases makes a very good case that this was a politically motivated attempt to suppress dissent and opposition, not an actual security issue. And if it had been an actual security issue, the FBI would have informed Congress about it rather than immediately withdraw the memo.

Wray’s contention that he needs more time to unravel the mystery is beyond absurd. So too is the FBI’s stonewalling in the Catholic Vote FOIA request. There is no other possible explanation for this than a massive cover-up, and Jordan needs to subpoena everyone involved until the FBI comes clean.

As a last word, let’s recall just how the FBI treats those it starts labeling as extremists, especially on the issue of abortion:

FBI Director Wray today refused to condemn the FBI's treatment of Mark Houck.

Here is what actually happened that day, in the Houck family's own words: pic.twitter.com/h1oIQwfRm5

— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) July 12, 2023

Addendum: Chip Roy’s adviser Nate Madden tried to answer Jordan’s initial question:

Correct answer: Tweed, pipe tobacco, lack of social skills https://t.co/wZL495VrQ0

— Nate Madden (@NateOnTheHill) July 12, 2023

Eh … close enough.