The FBI Richmond office's notorious anti-Catholic memo reached more staff at the bureau than previously suggested, and some FBI staff were aghast to see it, according to new documents released by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, Tuesday.

The memo urged FBI agents to develop sources and surveil Catholic churches, citing the Southern Poverty Law Center's list of "radical traditional Catholic hate groups." The SPLC's "hate map" plots conservative and Christian groups alongside Ku Klux Klan chapters. While the SPLC claims to be exposing "the infrastructure upholding white supremacy," critics say it uses the map to silence political opponents.

The FBI rushed to rescind the document after a whistleblower leaked it in February 2023. Then-FBI Director Christopher Wray testified in July 2023 that the memo came from "a single product by a single field office, which, as soon as I found out about it, I was aghast and ordered it withdrawn and removed from FBI systems." Yet Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, has claimed Wray may have lied under oath because multiple FBI offices were involved in creating the memo.

Grassley announced Tuesday that he found evidence that the memo had been disseminated to at least 1,000 FBI staff.

"Is anyone really asking for a product like this?" an FBI employee in Phoenix, Arizona, wrote in a February 2023 email responding to the memo. "Apparently we are at the behest of the SPLC..."

An FBI employee in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, responded, "And yeah, our overreliance on the SPLC for hate designations is ... problematic."

In addition to these emails, Grassley found the FBI produced at least 13 additional documents and five attachments that used the term "radical traditionalist Catholic" and relied on the SPLC.

[...]

In January 2024, The Daily Signal exclusively reported that SPLC President Margaret Huang bragged to donors that "we've had many agencies in the new Biden administration reaching out to solicit our expertise and our knowledge and information to help shape the policies that the new administration is adopting to counter the domestic terrorism threat."

Justice Department staff met with the SPLC shortly after the center added the parental rights nonprofit Moms for Liberty to its "hate map."

Kristen Clarke, who headed up the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, appears to have met with the SPLC.