Is This the Start of an American Stasi?
Last year, a whistleblower exposed an FBI memorandum that proposed infiltrating churches to deal with “radical traditional Catholics,” who were characterized as a domestic terror threat. The bureau interviewed clergy as part of the effort, and at least one undercover agent was involved. When this was exposed, FBI director Christopher Wray initially claimed that the investigation was the product of one rogue FBI field office before a Congressional committee reported that several field offices across the country were involved in the effort—suggesting the director’s statements were intentionally misleading.
Further, no serious attempt was made to establish that a threat existed before launching an investigation into the private religious beliefs of American citizens. The FBI didn’t even have a working definition of the “Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology” that was at the core of their investigation. “FBI employees could not define the meaning of an RTC when preparing, editing, or reviewing the memorandum,” according to the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
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From National Review last December… when all this happened.
“According to Tuesday’s report, the Richmond field office lacked a cohesive definition of radical-traditionalist catholic ideology when it issued the memo and, instead, relied on a single individual’s self description. “The basis for the Richmond memorandum relied on a single investigation in the Richmond Field Office’s area of responsibility in which the subject ‘self-described’ as a ‘radical-traditionalist Catholic,’” the report reads. “However, FBI employees could not define the meaning of an RTC when preparing, editing, or reviewing the memorandum. Even so, this single investigation became the basis for an FBI-wide memorandum warning about the dangers of ‘radical’ Catholics.”” https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fbi-struggled-to-define-radical-traditionalist-catholic-ideology-in-memo-on-extremism-report/https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fbi-struggled-to-define-radical-traditionalist-catholic-ideology-in-memo-on-extremism-report/
There was not really “an investigation into the private religious beliefs of American citizens.”