National News

GOP Senator Calls for Further Investigation Into 2023 Anti-Catholic FBI Memo

June 11, 2025
By
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, left, speaks with Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., before a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee business meeting to vote on U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson on Capitol Hill in Washington April 4, 2022. (Photo: CNS photo/Michael A McCoy, Reuters)

PROSPECT HEIGHTS — A GOP senator has released FBI records, which he claims confirm that an anti-Catholic memo produced by the bureau’s Richmond Office in 2023 was actually distributed to more than
1,000 FBI employees across the country.

Ahead of publishing the records on June 3, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote a letter to FBI Director Kash Patel informing him that the 2023 memo was “widely distributed”
within the bureau — including with agents in the Louisville, Kentucky; Portland, Oregon; and Milwaukee field offices — before it was ultimately retracted.

In the letter, Grassley asked Patel to search for more records related to the Richmond memo’s origins and look into whether former FBI Director Christopher Wray’s “misleading and obstructive response” to the senator’s original oversight of the memo was “part of a pattern of intentional deception.”

“I’m determined to get to the bottom of the Richmond memo, and of the FBI’s contempt for oversight in the last administration,” Grassley wrote in a June 2 letter to Patel. “I look forward to continuing to work with you to restore the FBI to excellence and prove once again that justice can and must be fairly and evenly administered, blinded to whether we are Democrats or Republicans, believers or nonbelievers.”

The Richmond memo was publicly disclosed by a whistleblower in 2023.

A spokesperson for the FBI could not be reached by The Tablet for a request to comment. Neither Patel nor the bureau has publicly commented on Grassley’s findings or the letter.

However, Patel reposted a June 3 post on X calling Grassley “a key partner in the Bureau’s commitment to transparency.”

Last year, a Department of Justice review found “no evidence” of religious bias in the creation of the Jan. 23, 2023, Richmond memo.

The memorandum stated that “Radical Traditionalist Catholics” are “typically characterized by the rejection of the Second Vatican Council,” highlighting that the ideology can align with antisemitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and white supremacist ideology.

The memo, which was ultimately retracted in February of last year, was condemned by both then-Attorney General Merrick Garland and Wray, who was appointed to his post by President Donald Trump during his first term.

After the memo came to light, Wray tightened approval requirements for reports and reprimanded the employees involved in the case.

Wray, a Republican, described himself as “aghast” at the contents of the memo when pressed on it by Republicans in a July 2023 Congressional hearing.