Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Feb 2, 2024 / 15:00 pm
More than a dozen senators are demanding that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) come clean about its efforts to surveil traditionalist Catholics, with the lawmakers accusing the agency of deleting records, withholding details, and giving misleading information about those undertakings.
Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley and 15 other Republican senators expressed their demands in a Jan. 31 letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray. The letter requested that the FBI provide intact records to the Senate, explain why the bureau allegedly “permanently deleted” files related to an anti-Catholic memo in the bureau’s Richmond field office, and clear up perceived contradictions between Wray’s testimonies to Congress and newly revealed information of the FBI’s surveillance of Catholics.
The letter references in part information obtained through a Dec. 4, 2023, House Judiciary Committee report on a controversial memo out of the Richmond office last year. That memo alleged a link between so-called “radical traditionalist Catholics” and “the far-right white nationalist movement.”
The memo also suggested “trip wire or source development” within parishes that offer the Traditional Latin Mass as well as within traditionalist Catholic online communities.