The FBI's leadership under the Biden administration actively defended the employees responsible for a 2023 internal memo that targeted traditional Catholics as potential domestic terrorism threats, a new Department of Justice inspector general report has found.
The report, released by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, concluded that FBI officials rallied around the personnel involved in crafting the Richmond field office memo rather than holding them accountable for what congressional Republicans and Catholic advocacy groups condemned as religious profiling. The Washington Examiner first reported on the inspector general's findings, which detail how Bureau leadership handled the fallout once the memo became public.
The original memo, produced by the FBI's Richmond, Virginia, field office in early 2023, identified "radical-traditionalist Catholic ideology" as a potential gateway to domestic violent extremism. It cited the Southern Poverty Law Center and suggested that interest in the Latin Mass could serve as an indicator of radicalization. The document drew immediate outrage from Republican lawmakers, Catholic organizations, and civil liberties advocates who called it a textbook case of government targeting Americans for their faith.
The Richmond memo proposed that FBI agents develop sources inside traditional Catholic parishes to monitor for extremist threats. It linked attendance at Latin Mass services with a cluster of ideological indicators the Bureau associated with racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism.
FBI Director Christopher Wray pulled the memo after it leaked publicly and called it inappropriate. Wray told lawmakers at the time that the document did not reflect Bureau standards and should not have been produced. But the inspector general's investigation found that the internal response told a different story.
Horowitz's team determined that FBI leadership took steps to protect the employees who drafted and approved the memo rather than pursuing meaningful disciplinary action. The IG report found that officials within the Bureau treated the episode as a public relations problem to manage, not an institutional failure to correct.
The inspector general's findings paint a picture of an agency more concerned with insulating its workforce from criticism than with addressing the civil liberties implications of the memo. FBI officials pushed back against external pressure to discipline the staffers involved, the report found.
Republican members of Congress had demanded accountability after the memo surfaced. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan subpoenaed documents and testimony related to the memo's creation and approval chain. Jordan and other GOP lawmakers argued that the memo revealed a broader pattern inside the Bureau of treating conservative religious practice as suspicious.
The IG report confirmed that the memo was not an isolated product of a single rogue analyst. Investigators found that multiple layers of review within the Richmond office approved the document before its distribution. That approval chain made the Bureau's subsequent defense of its staff all the more striking to critics who said the problem was systemic.
Jordan's committee had already been investigating what Republicans described as the weaponization of federal law enforcement against conservative Americans. The Catholic memo became a centerpiece of that investigation, alongside allegations that the FBI had used counterterrorism tools to monitor parents at school board meetings and had treated pro-life activists as potential threats.
The inspector general's report lands as the Trump administration has moved aggressively to restructure the FBI and reassert political accountability over the Bureau's operations. Attorney General Pam Bondi has signaled that rooting out politicized intelligence work inside the DOJ and its agencies remains a top priority.
Catholic advocacy groups seized on the IG findings as vindication. Critics of the memo had long argued that the Bureau's initial response, pulling the document and calling it a mistake, was cosmetic. The IG report now confirms that behind closed doors, leadership treated the staffers as victims of political backlash rather than authors of a civil liberties violation.
Investigators have not publicly confirmed whether any of the employees involved in drafting or approving the memo faced formal discipline. The report examined the Bureau's internal posture but left open questions about whether the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility took independent action.
Authorities have also not said whether similar intelligence products targeting other religious communities were produced by field offices beyond Richmond. Jordan's committee had pressed for a broader audit, but the IG's scope focused on the Richmond memo and the leadership response that followed it.
The report did not address whether the Southern Poverty Law Center's materials, which the memo cited as a source, remain in use across other FBI field offices for threat assessment purposes. That question has persisted since the memo first surfaced, and no public answer has been provided by Bureau officials.
The findings arrive with the FBI operating under new leadership installed by the Trump administration. Kash Patel, confirmed as FBI Director earlier this year, has pledged to refocus the Bureau on criminal and national security threats and away from what he has called politically motivated investigations.
For Republicans, the IG report validates years of warnings that the FBI's institutional culture under Biden-era leadership had drifted toward treating conservative Americans as security risks. The Catholic memo was never just about one document from one field office. It was about whether the people who approved it faced consequences or protection.
The inspector general just answered that question.
When a federal agency circles the wagons around staff who profiled Americans for going to church, the problem is not a single memo. It is the institution that decided the memo's authors needed defending.
