FBI agents in Richmond secretly investigated two Catholic priests who had broken no law and posed no threat.
A new Justice Department report just revealed exactly what happened to those agents once headquarters found out.
That answer alone is enough to make faithful Catholics and honest conservatives furious all over again.
FBI Richmond Agents Ran Credit Card Checks on Priests Who Broke No Law
The Justice Department's Weaponization Working Group released a 231 page report Thursday on the FBI's 2023 Richmond Domain Perspective memo.
The memo treated ordinary Catholic practice as a warning sign of violent extremism.
Attendance at the Traditional Latin Mass counted against you.
So did opposing abortion, believing in traditional family values, and rejecting the modern world's politics.
The investigation began after one priest turned out to know a felon who had made violent threats.
Instead of chasing that felon, Richmond analysts pulled in a second priest connected to the first by family ties.
They tracked both men's travel.
They monitored their communications.
They ran credit card checks on two Catholic priests.
The report found neither priest had done anything wrong.
That did not stop the FBI from building a domestic extremism framework around them and pushing it out to more than a thousand agents nationwide.
Analysts leaned on the Southern Poverty Law Center to define who counted as dangerous, and never checked whether the source was credible.
They pulled in foreign intelligence material nobody bothered to vet either.
An internal FBI review obtained by the Working Group said the memo "almost explicitly states that RTC ideology is violent and extremist without offering any evidence."
That is the federal government deciding your parish is a threat before you have done a single thing.
The Agents Who Built the File Got Rewarded, Not Punished
This is where the story turns from bad to infuriating.
FBI headquarters eventually pulled the memo after admitting it was garbage.
Richmond leadership disagreed and defended the work anyway.
Staff kept refining the assessment even after it was removed from FBI systems.
The analysts who created it received positive performance reviews.
Attorney General Todd Blanche did not soften what his department found.
"This Department of Justice will not tolerate a weaponized bureaucracy that chills First Amendment activity," Blanche said.
FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed the personnel responsible are gone.
"Weaponization will never be tolerated at this FBI," Patel said.
Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward called the memo exactly what it was.
"The Richmond Memo was a clear abuse of power, targeting conservative and religious beliefs," Woodward said.
The Working Group combed through more than 1,800 pages of internal FBI records to reach that conclusion.
The analysts who built a file on two innocent priests were finally dismissed this past June – three years after they started.
Two Weaponization Reports in One Year Point at the Same Target
This is not the first Weaponization Working Group report to land on Biden's Justice Department this year.
Back in April, the same team found Biden's DOJ worked hand in glove with Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Federation to go after pro-life activists under the FACE Act.
Prosecutors sought sentences more than twice as long for pro-life defendants as for pro-abortion defendants caught breaking that same law.
One operation targeted priests over their doctrine, the other targeted pro-life Catholics over their activism, and both leaned on the same trick – borrow a definition of extremism from a left wing advocacy group and point it at people of faith.
That is the FBI Christopher Wray ran, rewarding the analysts who targeted your church and only showing them the door once Trump's team retook the department.
That is not one rogue field office making a mistake – that is a system that worked exactly as designed until Kash Patel and Todd Blanche's Justice Department found the paper trail.
Sources:
- Jennifer Oliver O'Connell, "First They Came for the Catholics: DOJ Releases Report on Biden's Weaponization of the Faith," RedState, August 30, 2026.
- Office of Public Affairs, "Weaponization Working Group Releases Report on 2023 FBI Richmond Field Office Memo That Targeted Non-Mainstream Catholics," U.S. Department of Justice, August 27, 2026.
- Office of Public Affairs, "Justice Department Reveals the Biden Administration's Weaponization of Federal Law Against Pro-Life Americans," U.S. Department of Justice, April 14, 2026.
- Mariane Angela, "DOJ Report Exposes Biden FBI's Weaponized Bureaucracy Targeting Traditional Catholics," Breitbart, August 29, 2026.
- Misty Severi and John Solomon, "FBI Targeted Two Priests During Controversial Extremism Probe Into Traditional Catholics, DOJ Says," Just the News, August 28, 2026.
