I can see that the hill of giving the Alphabet agencies and the DOJ more power in the 2000s to own those people who are concerned about internet privacy who just want to get away with pedophilia or buying drugs on the dark web is doing wonders for us. We gave the FBI, CIA, and NSA the power to spy on every American 24/7 and they somehow aren’t there every time a mass shooting happens. The Right dismissed all claims the FBI was helping the Democrats sabotage Trump’s presidency because they believe its somehow apolitical. Now that the political weaponization of it is now explicit and blatant under Biden now its a problem for the Right who would pass every increase of its power in the name of “stopping terrorism” 22 years after 9/11.

The first time the Right got mad at the FBI being as it is when it was exposed they were launching an operation on spying on Traditional Catholic groups because they said they were going to cause “Right Wing extremism” because they perform the Tridentine Mass over Novus Ordo. Some people launched their campaigns under stopping the FBI from going after these groups since this was a blatant attack on Conservatives under Joe Biden.

Well after making the FBI director go to House hearing (I forget the number since all of them don’t do anything.) Garfinkle just absolves them of the memo and claims that actually no the memo wasn’t what it was despite the name of it being about spying on Traditional Catholics.

Fox News

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been exonerated by a Department of Justice review that found investigators did not intend to target traditional Catholics as potential “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists.”

The Justice Department Inspector General review noted, however, that analysts “incorrectly conflated” an investigative subject’s religious views with his alleged domestic terrorism activities. 

Findings from the 120-day review, which was handled by Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz and ordered by Congress, were outlined in a letter sent to members of Congress on Thursday.

An FBI Richmond, Virginia, internal memo, titled “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities,” was leaked in January 2023 and drew instant criticism from Republicans, who demanded immediate answers from the agency.

According to the inspector general’s report, the memo, which has been dubbed the “Richmond Product,” was circulated amid an investigation of a potentially violent individual who was identified in the report as “Defendant A” and has since been arrested.

This whole Defendant A story reads like a ChatGPT prompt. He was some random man who got radicalized on social media and his identity will forever be a mystery.

Though Defendant A was not been identified in the report, the dates and details of the case match the case against Xavier Lopez, who was indicted on federal weapons charges last June.

The FBI had been monitoring the suspect since 2019 due to his extremist views on social media, according to the inspector general’s review. 

The review stated that the suspect expressed neo-Nazi rhetoric and described himself as a “Catholic clerical fascist.” The FBI said he wrote in a letter to a family member that he needed to “build guns, explosives, and other forms of weaponry” in order to “make total war against the Satanic occultist government and the Zionist devil worshiping bankers who control it.”

The indictment against Lopez did not mention the church he attended or that he was monitored ahead of his arrest in November 2022, when a search of his apartment uncovered Molotov cocktails and firearms he was not allowed to possess. Lopez was on probation at the time after pleading guilty to felony vandalism for slashing tires.

So this one story about some random Mexican who got radicalized by looking at the Latin Mass on social media was enough to write a whole memo about the threat of all of Traditional Catholics organizations as being hotspots for “Right Wing extremism.”

Now that they are absolved of the memo high chance they are going to do it again since Garfinkle also supports this new push against all Right Wing Christian groups and American Patriots.

The FBI are not your friend and even under a Republican president you are still going to be spied on and arrested for being considered a potential “threat” of being a RW shooter.