Catholic League president Bill Donohue has denounced recent attacks by President Joe Biden’s FBI on what it calls “radical-traditionalist Catholics.”
Dr. Donohue cites a report by the FBI’s Richmond Field Office titled “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities.”
Kyle Seraphin has a leaked FBI document that purports to show the extremism of “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics.” The document outlines opportunities for agents to recruit assets within the Catholic Church itself.
What’s astonishing about the document is the shoddiness of its analysis and sourcing. The belief that “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics” are a potential threat seems to come entirely from an old report from the Southern Poverty Law Center. This is buttressed in the appendices with a clickbait piece from the Atlantic — about populist and hyper-masculine depictions of rosary beads — and a few more from Salon.
This coming week a new House select subcommittee will hold its first hearing on the FBI and the possible “weaponization” of government agencies. A variety of such controversies have contributed to plunging public trust in government and the FBI in particular.
The role of the FBI in prior scandals will remain a point of heated debate in Congress. However, members of both parties should be able to agree on the need to investigate one of the most serious allegations: Censorship by surrogate.
When Charles McGonigal, a former counterintelligence chief with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was accused of using his position to benefit an associate’s business in Eastern Europe, it represented a startling turn for a high-ranking official who had been entrusted with access to some of the most sensitive secrets held by the American intelligence community.
But it also set off a scramble within the bureau to assess the potential damage and determine whether any counterintelligence or law enforcement operations were compromised, according to two people familiar with the review, with the F.B.I.’s director, Christopher A. Wray, treating the case as a top priority.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation tried to recruit Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian billionaire, as an informant around 2014, hoping he might shed light on organized crime and, later, possible interference in the presidential election.
A decade later, Mr. Deripaska may have turned the tables on the F.B.I.: Prosecutors say the oligarch recruited one of the bureau’s top spy catchers, just as he entered retirement, to carry out work that they say violated U.S. sanctions.
A former FBI official involved in the investigation of the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia was charged Monday for violating sanctions on behalf of a Russian oligarch sanctioned by the U.S. government.
The FBI revealed how the bureau uses the CIA and National Security Agency to probe the private lives of Americans without a warrant in its updated rulebook, which is the first version made public since the Obama administration.
The handbook, rewritten in 2021, confirms a decade-old leak showcasing the bureau’s collaboration with the CIA and NSA for FBI probes that may involve surveillance without court orders against people not accused of any crimes. Such probes are known as “assessments” at the FBI.
Besides addressing the crisis at the southern border, there is no more urgent matter for the new Republican House majority to direct its attention to than the conversion of the federal government into a progressive cudgel against civil rights. And there is nothing less surprising than the media-Democrat complex’s determination to strangle the probe in its cradle.
In the left’s playbook, everything is either about race or Donald Trump — if not both. So as night follows day, with House Republicans poised to establish a much needed Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Democrats and their press accomplices are framing the panel as an adjunct of the 2024 Trump presidential campaign.
With the Twitter files revelations, we learned that the FBI had a “master-canine” relationship with the tech barons of Twitter to censor conservative accounts. When the FBI said ‘fetch,’ Twitter came running.
Well, now we see something probably even more embarrassing from the New York Times and we don’t need secret Twitter files to know about it.
The FBI has repeatedly flagged Twitter accounts for the social media platform to review and censor over the last few years, raising questions as to whether the agency violated the First Amendment rights of Twitter users, legal experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Twitter Files, a series of revelations by several journalists based on internal Twitter communications, revealed that FBI agents colluded with Twitter executives to censor users and suppress information, while the agency paid Twitter $3.5 million to compensate them for their time processing the FBI’s requests. This partnership raises questions as to whether the FBI may have violated user’s constitutional rights, legal experts told the DCNF, with some arguing the agency’s involvement in Twitter censorship constitutes a First Amendment violation.
The FBI and intelligence community discredited factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings both after and *before* The New York Post revealed them in October 2020
Over the last two weeks, a team of journalists that includes me has enjoyed extraordinary access to the internal emails and other documents of the social media platform Twitter. The only condition we agreed to was to first publish our findings on Twitter, which I have done so twice, first, on December 10 in Twitter Files Part 4: The Removal of Donald Trump, and yesterday in Twitter Files Part 7: The FBI and the Hunter Biden Laptop. This report was made possible by Bari Weiss and The Free Press, an exciting new publication to which I am proud to contribute.
Just imagine for a moment that Donald Trump, Jr. (or Eric) sat on the board of directors for a foreign company and “earned” millions of dollars for literally doing nothing. He didn’t know the industry and didn’t speak the language. The only thing Junior brought to the table was his last name. He made deals with foreign agents and foreign corporations to acquire rare materials like cobalt (used in electric cars) that was sold to Chinese interests for profit. While on an extended drug binge, he took a computer with lots of incriminating evidence to a repair shop and forgot or didn’t care what he’d done with it. Then he ignored all the calls from the shop telling him to come pick up his computer. That would be huge news, wouldn’t it?
Members of the intelligence community, and censors at Twitter, stress that they just didn’t know the Hunter Biden laptop was real, so they erred on the side of caution. “It has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” the infamous letter from 50 former officials said.
Now we know that was a lie.
The FBI already had Hunter’s laptop — it was handed over to them by the owner of a Delaware repair shop, the same man who would provide it to The Post nearly a year later.
This is why they are persecuting Trump.
1. TWITTER FILES: PART 7
The FBI & the Hunter Biden Laptop
How the FBI & intelligence community discredited factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings both after and *before* The New York Post revealed the contents of his laptop on October 14, 2020
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 19, 2022
Part Six of the Twitter Files was released by journalist Matt Taibbi on Twitter Dec. 16, revealing just how closely the platform worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to censor Americans prior to Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform. “Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary,” Taibbi tweeted.
