Senator Releases Report On Biden-Era FBI Program

Newly released documents are casting serious doubt on former FBI Director Christopher Wray’s past testimony to Congress, revealing that the Bureau’s investigation into “radical traditionalist” Catholics under the Biden administration was far more extensive—and troubling—than previously acknowledged.

Senator Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, unveiled the findings Tuesday, accusing the FBI of obfuscation and political bias in what he called an “anti-Catholic” operation.

The documents show the FBI produced at least 13 internal records and five attachments referencing “radical traditionalist Catholics,” a term lifted directly from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an organization widely criticized for labeling conservative religious groups as hate-based.

This sharply contradicts Wray’s 2023 congressional testimony, where he claimed the issue stemmed from a single memo issued by the FBI’s Richmond, Virginia field office.

“It was a product by one field office,” Wray said at the time, insisting that when the agency became aware of it, “we took action.” But Grassley’s findings paint a different picture—one where the memo was widely disseminated to more than 1,000 FBI employees and supported by a draft second memo intended for agency-wide release.

Grassley’s investigation uncovered communications between FBI offices, including Buffalo, New York, discussing hate groups identified by the SPLC and flagging Catholic communities in their regions.

The original memo claimed that traditionalist Catholics posed a possible threat of violent extremism and identified their rejection of the Second Vatican Council and preference for Latin Mass as warning signs—linking these views to racially motivated violence without substantive evidence.

Most alarming, Grassley said, was the FBI’s use of “deeply-biased sources” like the SPLC to justify targeting a specific religious group, and its subsequent failure to disclose the full extent of this activity to Congress.

“These letters focused on the preparation of the memo, its dissemination, the use of biased sources such as the radical Southern Poverty Law Center, and later, the FBI's misleading representations to Congress,” Grassley wrote in a letter to current FBI Director Kash Patel.

The FBI acknowledged receiving the letter but declined to comment publicly.