What Is Jim Jordan’s Evidence That the FBI Is Using Undercover Agents to Infiltrate Catholic Congregations?

This is an explosive allegation. It needs to be backed with strong proof.

O bviously, it is outrageous that intelligence analysts at an FBI field office in Richmond, Va., proposed investigating Catholics, under the demeaning label of “Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology.” It would be all the more egregious if it turned out that the FBI had used one or more undercover operatives to infiltrate Catholic congregations in the Richmond area, as House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) alleges in a letter to FBI director Chris Wray.

That said, I am having trouble following Jordan’s letter, which is embedded in a report by our Ari Blaff, and is accompanied by a subpoena demanding that Wray testify before the committee. Specifically, what is Jordan’s evidence, which he says comes from the FBI itself, that the bureau has infiltrated at least one Catholic community with an undercover agent?

This is an explosive allegation. And, always ready with a gasoline can whenever a fire breaks out, Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) has quickly upped the ante. Taking Jordan’s accusation as a given, Hawley has sent a letter accusing Attorney General Merrick Garland of committing perjury in Senate testimony last month when he denied that the Justice Department has been developing sources inside churches. Fox News reports on Hawley’s letter, in which he accused the AG of “turn[ing] Catholic congregations into front organizations for the FBI” and demanded that Garland tell him exactly how many “undercover informants or other agents” had infiltrated houses of worship.

If the FBI and the Justice Department are conducting undercover investigations of Catholic congregations, on suspicion of terrorism no less, then Jordan and Hawley are right to be hounding them for an explanation. But what makes Jordan say, and Hawley thus assume, that they are doing this?

The intelligence analysis from the FBI’s Richmond office is an objectionable eight-page screed, preciously labeled a “Domain Perspective.” It maintains that suspected white-supremacist terrorists (labeled “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists,” or “RMVEs”) are drawn to an “ideology” they describe as “radical-traditionalist Catholic.” The authors distinguish “RTCs” from “‘traditionalist Catholics”: Though the latter, too, “prefer the Traditional Latin Mass and pre-Vatican II teachings and traditions,” you see, they resist RTCs’ “violent rhetoric” and “more extremist ideological beliefs,” such as disdain for post-Vatican II popes (especially Francis and John Paul II) and “frequent adherence to anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and white-supremacist ideology.”

As I read this claptrap, it reflects stupidity rather than action. That is, the FBI intelligence analysts who wrote it recommend that the bureau develop sources who might be in a position to report on efforts by the RMVEs — i.e., the suspected terrorists, or at least larval “violent extremists” — to exploit RTC social-media sites and churches in order to promote violence. The analysis does not indicate that the FBI has approved this recommendation, let alone acted on it. To the contrary, moreover, FBI headquarters has blasted the analysis and ordered its retraction.

Yet, Jordan writes:

Based on the limited information produced by the FBI to the Committee, we now know that the FBI relied on at least one undercover agent to produce its analysis, and that the FBI proposed that its agents engage in outreach to Catholic parishes to develop sources among the clergy and church leadership to inform on Americans practicing their faith.

The “limited information” to which Jordan refers is set forth in a March 23 letter to his committee, signed by the bureau’s acting assistant director, Christopher Dunham. Understandably, the chairman complains that the letter withholds much of the information the committee seeks, which leaves him the burden of deciphering what the bureau has grudgingly revealed based, in part, on what it is unwilling to say. Still, while Jordan claims that “the FBI relied on at least one undercover agent to produce its analysis,” he does not say this unidentified undercover agent infiltrated a Catholic community. That’s a strange thing for Jordan to leave out if he’s been told that’s what the agent did.

In any event, the Dunham letter is not public, so we don’t know what exactly the FBI said that leads Jordan to describe it as an acknowledgment that “the FBI relied on at least one undercover agent” in producing the Richmond analysis that FBI headquarters has condemned.

Jordan says that, based on Dunham’s letter, the committee knows that “the FBI, relying on information derived from at least one undercover employee, sought to use local religious organizations as ‘new avenues for tripwire and source development.’” He says an “example” of this is found in a section of the Richmond analysis entitled “Opportunities” (a section that is apparently redacted from the portions of the memo that were published on UndercoverDC.com). Jordan proceeds to describe this “example,” drawing on this recommendation in the analysis:

In addition to [redaction], engage in outreach to the leadership of other [Society of Saint Pius X] chapels in the FBI Richmond [area of responsibility] to sensitize these congregations to the warning signs of radicalization and to enlist their assistance to serve as suspicious activity tripwires. [Bolding and brackets in original; footnotes, which cite the Dunham letter, omitted.]

I don’t see any allusion to undercover activity in this passage. To be sure, we don’t know what “[redaction]” refers to. Perhaps I shouldn’t presume that Jordan doesn’t know what it means, either, but if he does know, and it has something to do with an undercover agent, he should explain that.

Although offered as an “example” of the FBI’s using an undercover agent, the passage Jordan excerpts suggests that the bureau’s office in Richmond should reach out to the leadership of specified Catholic groups — congregations of the Society of St. Pius X — to provide them with instruction on the “warning signs of radicalization” and “enlist their assistance to serve as suspicious activity tripwires.”

Now, however sinister that may sound, it is the opposite of undercover activity. Contrary to Jordan’s description, it is also not necessarily an FBI suggestion that the community leaders “inform on Americans practicing their faith.” If the wayward Richmond analysts believed that the practice of these Catholics’ faith was the equivalent of promoting terrorism, the last people to whom they’d suggest reaching out would be the faith leaders. Instead, their suggestion is to seek the help of the leaders in discerning “suspicious activity” — not the practice of religion but the kinds of activities commonly engaged in by religiously motivated terrorists (e.g., urging of violence, recruitment to paramilitary training, etc.).

Furthermore, for all its many flaws, the focus of the Richmond analysis is not members of the Catholic congregations, at least not directly. The target is the so-called RMVEs — the suspected terrorists. In particular, the analysis highlights the RMVEs’ use of “RTC social media sites or places of worship as facilitation platforms to promote violence.” The idea is that the RMVEs are drawn to RTC facilities and may try to use them for terrorist purposes, and that members of the RTC congregations may notice this and be disturbed enough to report it.

This is reminiscent of the community outreach the FBI did with Muslim groups in the post-9/11 era. Top FBI officials — not undercover agents — would contact leaders of the Islamic community centers that often develop around local mosques. Whatever you thought about these efforts (I was not a fan), their objective was to avoid the need to have undercover operatives infiltrate Muslim communities.

To that end, the FBI would try to open lines of communication with the Islamic elders and explain the kinds of behaviors the bureau typically detected in young Muslims who might be falling under the spell of jihadist groups. The jihadists were known to recruit in Islamic community centers — that was not speculation, it was an indisputable fact that had been proven in court. The idea was to have community leaders either use their (hopefully moderating) influence to counter the jihadist exhortations or, if the “radicalization” had advanced to a dangerous point, report the situation to the FBI.

I am sensitive to this for two reasons. First, Jordan has a history of getting out over his skis on this sort of thing. I’ve recounted how, from the premise that the FBI had used “threat tags” to categorize investigations instigated by Attorney General Merrick Garland’s noxious directive to probe parents who were protesting woke indoctrination in the schools, Jordan leapt to the conclusion that the bureau was using Patriot Act counterterrorism authorities to conduct those investigations. In reality, there is to date sparse evidence that the FBI did much investigating at all, and no evidence (to my knowledge) that Patriot Act authorities were employed. And for his part, Wray took pains to distance the FBI from Garland’s directive and to emphasize that the bureau regards political dissent (First Amendment–protected expression) as, by itself, an unconstitutional basis for an investigation.

Second, I have helped the FBI run the kinds of undercover investigations that Jordan suggests would be objectionable. Indeed, I wrote a book about one of them, Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad. In 1990, after a jihadist named Sayyid Nosair murdered Rabbi Meir Kahane (founder of the Jewish Defense League) in midtown Manhattan, the FBI exploited the occasion of Nosair’s trial — a cause célèbre for metropolitan-area Muslim radicals — to place an informant in Nosair’s circle, which turned out to be led by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a renowned jihadist who had issued the fatwa approving the murder of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981. In short order, the investigation yielded evidence that the group was plotting bombings and political assassinations, and was using area mosques for proselytism, recruitment, fundraising, conspiratorial planning, and the storage of firearms.

The FBI was naturally uneasy about using an informant to infiltrate an enterprise that was tied together by its fundamentalist interpretation of religious doctrine, and about the fact that the investigation involved not only surveilling mosques but also recording incriminating conversations inside them. But here’s the thing: After the bureau shut down the undercover operation in September 1992 over a dispute with the informant, it did not try to replace him with another undercover agent, and as a result it was left with no window into the conspiracy; five months later, on February 26, 1993, the same jihadists bombed the World Trade Center.

Now, there are night-and-day differences here. The FBI investigations of jihadists beginning in the late 1980s were triggered by some surveillance of paramilitary exercises and firearms training, and by the fact that Nosair and others implicated in the training were complicit in the Kahane murder. In stark contrast, the FBI’s Richmond memo was triggered by a political smear promoted by the hard Left — namely, that America is under siege by white-supremacist domestic terrorists — which the bureau’s Richmond intelligence analysts exacerbated by their hunch (fueled by the Leftist propagandists at the Southern Poverty Law Center) that these supposed terrorists see traditionalist Catholics, or at least the “radicals” among them, as potential confederates.

Consequently, Jordan and his committee are right to be hounding the FBI to produce its evidence that there is a terrorist enterprise, analogous to the jihadist onslaught, in which white racists and traditionalist Catholics are conspiring. Like many of us, I suspect such evidence is scant, at best. Instead, I believe that the FBI, or at least parts of it, has been put in the service of a progressive political narrative. This has been happening since the Obama years. Eventually, it is going to lead to a dramatic overhaul of the bureau.

Still, Jordan needs to be careful here. The Judiciary Committee investigation of the FBI is extremely important. We need an effective top federal law-enforcement agency. We also need a Congress that can probe abuses of investigative authorities without demagoguing those authorities, which are vital to protecting Americans from real threats.

Jordan’s investigation must not devolve into a red-meat exercise for a Trump base bent on settling scores with feds cast by their man as his chief tormentors. If Jordan’s got proof that the FBI is using undercover agents to infiltrate Catholic groups, he should tell us what it is — his letter, for all the hoopla about it, does no such thing.

In sum, Chairman Jordan’s current letter suggests that at least part of the FBI (in Richmond) has considered doing with Catholic congregations what the FBI has done with Muslim congregations in the past. I am open to the argument that the two situations are not comparable, and that there is thus no reason, beyond political correctness and woke hostility to Catholicism, to subject Catholic congregations to such treatment.

Nevertheless, such treatment is not the same as undercover infiltration. Moreover, undercover infiltration should not be condemned as if it were an inconceivable investigative measure for dealing with violence motivated by religious beliefs. It is not that long ago, after all, that our concern was whether the FBI was being aggressive enough in infiltrating hubs of fundamentalist Islam.