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The Biden-era FBI’s 2023 memo that linked traditional Catholics with violent extremism relied on “biased and unverified materials, including Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) publications and foreign intelligence,” says a report released Friday by the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Weaponization Working Group.

The Richmond Domain Perspective Report follows the origins of the “Richmond Catholic Memo” that was leaked to the public in February 2023 by former FBI special agent Kyle Seraphin.

Seraphin exposed the agency’s Richmond Division’s memo that cited the disgraced and discredited SPLC to promote its warning to Virginia residents regarding its perspective of an association between “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists” (RMVE) and “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics [RTC].”

RTCs, Seraphin quoted the memo’s writer, are “typically characterized by the rejection of the Second Vatican Council.”

The former special agent added that the writer also “makes an unsubstantiated leap that a preference for the Catholic Mass in Latin instead of the vernacular and a number of more traditional views on other world religions can amount to an ‘adherence to anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ and white supremacist ideology.’”

One day after the memo was leaked, the FBI reportedly told The Daily Signal that it was rescinding its memo.

“The national FBI office claimed that the memo ‘does not meet the exacting standards of the FBI’ and promised to remove the document from its systems and ‘conduct a review of the basis for the document,’ but it refused to answer further questions about the move,” the Signal reported.

Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) later suggested that, during his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee about the memo, Biden FBI Director Christopher Wray may have lied under oath – an assertion the FBI denied.

The agency had produced another version of the Richmond memo that showed “the FBI’s actions were not just limited to ‘a single field office,’ as you testified to the Committee,” Jordan wrote to Wray.

“Thus, it appears that both FBI Portland and FBI Los Angeles field offices were involved in or contributed to the creation of FBI’s assessment of traditional Catholics as potential domestic terrorists,” Jordan observed.

“First, they went after moms and dads at school board meetings,” Jordan told the Signal. “Now, they’re going after traditional Catholics. When’s it going to stop?”

According to the DOJ’s press release, the report addresses not only the memo’s attempt to tie traditional Catholics to violent extremist ideology, but also the FBI’s investigation into two priests and its surveillance of one of them.

The report comes in the wake of President Donald Trump’s January 20, 2025 executive order, “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” in which he asserted that the Biden administration had implemented “a systematic campaign against its perceived political opponents, weaponizing the legal force of numerous Federal law enforcement agencies and the Intelligence Community against those perceived political opponents in the form of investigations, prosecutions, civil enforcement actions, and other related actions.”

“[T]his order sets forth a process to ensure accountability for the previous administration’s weaponization of the Federal Government against the American people,” the order stated, adding that “it is the policy of the United States to identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to the weaponization of law enforcement and the weaponization of the Intelligence Community.”

The DOJ Working Group reviewed “internal emails, assessments, and investigative records,” and ultimately concluded that the Biden FBI “engaged in improper and unjustified law enforcement and intelligence activity,” such as:

• Biden FBI agents conducted expansive investigations into two priests, scrutinizing their whereabouts and communications, even though they subsequently found they had no ties to criminal activity or violent extremism.
• The Biden FBI “relied on biased and unverified materials, including Southern Poverty Law Center publications and foreign intelligence materials, without assessing their credibility,” and ignored concerns about violation of First Amendment rights.
• Despite Biden FBI officials’ acknowledgment of the errors in the Richmond Domain Perspective, agency employees involved “received positive performance reviews,” with “Richmond leadership openly defend[ing] their work,” and staff continuing to work on the Perspective even after it was eliminated from FBI system.

“This Department of Justice will not tolerate a weaponized bureaucracy that chills First Amendment activity,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement. “The individuals who developed the Richmond Domain Perspective are no longer with the Department, and our Working Group’s efforts to investigate weaponization under the previous Administration will continue.”

FBI Director Kash Patel added that, although those who “developed the unacceptable Richmond Catholic memo under the previous administration have been held accountable, releasing information to the public about what occurred under the prior regime is an important part of the process.”

Patel said “addressing these abuses” must continue to ensure “they never happen again.”

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