House judiciary issues strongly worded letter after FBI chief’s false testimony

The House Judiciary Committee last week issued a strongly worded letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray after he gave false testimony to Congress concerning the bureau’s crackdown on Catholic Americans.

Earlier this year, the committee asked Wray to provide documentation concerning an internal memo from the FBI Richmond office titled “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities.” The memo, which had dozens of redactions, warned about “radical-traditionalist Catholic” (RTC) Americans who  embrace “anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and white supremacist ideology.”

These Americans, considered by the FBI to be “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists” (RMVEs), are also likely to have conservative views on immigration and abortion, the FBI memo said.

To support its claims, the FBI cited reports from mainstream media such as the Atlantic, Salon, and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which categorizes the term “Christian identity” as “hate” and has designated nine Christian organizations as “hate groups.”

The committee sent a letter to Wray in February requesting more information concerning the memo but received no response. The committee then subpoenaed Wray in April, and still received no response. In July, the committee threatened contempt proceedings and was only then provided with a copy of a less-redacted memo.

In March, Wray had testified to the committee that he was “aghast” to learn about the memo and claimed it was a product solely of the Richmond office.

“I will note,” Wray told the committee then, “it was a product by one field office, which, of course we have scores and scores of these products. And when we found out about it, we took action.”

But the original memo the committee received had been redacted to hide the fact that, contrary to Wray’s testimony, multiple offices had been involved in the project, not only Richmond’s. When the FBI produced the less-redacted version of the memo after being subpoenaed, it was clear the Portland and Los Angeles offices were involved too.

After discovering that Wray had provided false testimony before Congress and concealed the truth with a redaction, committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and member Mike Johnson (R-LA) sent a strongly worded letter to Wray.

“This revelation raises the question of why you redacted this information in previous versions of the document you produced to the Committee, and it reinforces the Committee’s need for all FBI material responsive to the April 10 subpoena, including the production of FBI’s Richmond document without redactions,” wrote Jordan and Johnson.

“This new information raises additional concerns about the accuracy, completeness, and truthfulness of your testimony. We invite you to amend your testimony to fully explain the nature and scope of the FBI’s assessment of traditional Catholics as potential domestic terrorists,” they added.

Jordan and Johnson are well-seasoned in issuing letters to top officials who provide false testimony.

Last year, they conveyed their disapproval to Attorney General Merrick Garland after he falsely testified that the Justice Department (DOJ) was not targeting parents who criticized COVID-19 mandates.

In October 2021, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) sent a letter asking the DOJ to root out parents who disagreed with COVID-19 restrictions on children, calling them “domestic terrorists.” The DOJ then indeed issued a memo to the FBI, instructing the bureau's counterterrorism division to investigate such parents as domestic terrorists. It was discovered in January that the Department of Education had secretly asked the NSBA to initiate the request with the Justice Department. 

When hauled before the House Judiciary Committee in October 2021, however, Garland testified that the FBI were not surveilling nor investigating parents. 

"I can’t imagine any circumstance in which the Patriot Act would be used in the circumstances of parents complaining about their children, nor can I imagine a circumstance where they would be labeled as domestic terrorism," he said at the time. 

But according to internal emails provided by DOJ whistleblowers, the FBI investigated numerous parents and added the tag EDUOFFICIALS to any threat against education officials, including school board members. 

In a letter to Garland in May 2022 that went unanswered, the Judiciary Committee registered its displeasure:

In sworn testimony before this Committee, you denied that the Department of Justice or its components were using counterterrorism statutes and resources to target parents at school board meetings,” the letter began. “We now have evidence that contrary to your testimony, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has labeled at least dozens of investigations into parents with a threat tag created by the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division to assess and track investigations related to school boards.