The FBI Lied, They Did Investigate a Priest
How'd this happen?
Congressman Jim Jordan’s office has given the Catholic News Agency an exclusive on a preliminary staff report showing the FBI lied, they did investigate a priest of the SSPX in Richmond. Up to this point all we had was the SPLC memo which the Bureau circulated. Tyler Arnold of the Catholic News Agency was given the exclusive.
The Biden administration lied in that they claimed it was a single field office that was the problem, when in fact the memo was distributed more widely in the Bureau, but the investigation of the priest is the real problem.
There are many circumstances in which a priest might legitimately be compelled to be deposed or comply with a subpoena, but just turning one as an ongoing confidential informant is very inappropriate. For his decision to refuse to become an informant on his flock, it appears the FBI investigated him.
“The FBI expanded its scope from investigating a single subject under investigation, who served as the basis for the Richmond memorandum, to shifting its focus on a clergy member,” as the committee staff put it. That’s a serious problem. And they turned it into an international terrorism case, by contacting the London office of the FBI.
This is separate from the matter at issue in the Washington State court case, in which a judge ruled that forcing a priest to break the seal of confession violated religious liberty. These are conversations outside the confessional, and the penitential privilege is interpreted more broadly—to encompass, for instance, the ordinary guidance that might be provided by a protestant pastor.
In general any right-winger is shit out of luck when it comes to any potential exoneration of the accusation of holding extremist views. There’s a plan for the fish-eating bead counters no matter who’s in power. In Democrat administrations anyone who has voted for a Republican and holds views to the right of John McCain is a right-wing extremist, and in a neocon Republican administration the desire not to send one’s children to fight wars for Israel is an unmistakable sign of extremist isolationism—only the “kooks,” as Sean Hannity put it, feel that way.
In fact, a “tendency toward isolationism” is one of the tells in the memo. In fact it’s anti-war Catholics of a traditional bent who are being targeted by a Bureau whose former director, James Comey, once said they were “in love with” the ADL. You may not like the SSPX, and it would be better if they were not canonically irregular, but the criteria by which this priest came under scrutiny could apply to a multitude of more ordinary Catholics.
These paint-by-numbers extremism pamphlets put out by the ADL or in this case the SPLC are quite dangerous in the hands of an agent of low quality, which many of them are. The reward structure tends against the determination, once someone is accused of extremism, that they are in fact not.