Republican Congressman from Florida Matt Gaetz is pushing for House Republicans to open an investigation into the FBI’s potential ties to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) due to the recent arrest of an SPLC attorney for domestic terrorism.
Gaetz’s calls come on the heels bureau’s recently exposed anti-Catholic memo based on SPLC data. The internal memo came out of the Richmond, Virginia, FBI field office claimed to have identified “radical-traditionalist Catholic[s]” as potential “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists,” based on this SPLC data.
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Then, on Sunday, just weeks after Thomas Webb Jurgens, an attorney for the SPLC, was arrested as one of 23 suspected domestic terrorists. The arrests connected with attacks on a planned police training facility by setting cars on fire and assaulting officers by throwing bricks and Molotov cocktails at them.
The anti-catholic memo has, predictably, since been rescinded. Still, Republicans in both chambers of the legislature have caught the scent and are now looking to follow the trail through FBI and Department of Justice leadership to get to the bottom of where the memo came from and how it was used.
Gaetz clarified his suspicions about the SPLC in a statement to Fox News Digital.
“The SPLC has essentially converted to SPL-Qaeda. They gaslight violence against conservatives while masquerading as an authority on civil rights.”
Gaetz then expanded on the questions that his proposed investigation would be asking.
“Why does the FBI rely on a group who now has definitive ties to staff coordinating and participating in activities that local law enforcement categorizes as domestic terrorism? This is yet again another area of investigation that House Republicans must look into when conducting oversight of these weaponized agencies.”
The FBI claimed that the memo was not acted upon due to not meeting its “exacting standards” of evidence.
“While our standard practice is to not comment on specific intelligence products, this particular field office product – disseminated only within the FBI – regarding racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism does not meet the exacting standards of the FBI.”
The agency also claimed it removed the memo as soon as it became aware of it, raising troubling questions as to how the Bureau could have been unaware of an internal memo in the first place. Nevertheless, the Bureau insisted it would never investigate citizens based on First Amendment-protected activity alone.
“Upon learning of the document, FBI Headquarters quickly began taking action to remove the document from FBI systems and conduct a review of the basis for the document. The FBI is committed to sound analytic tradecraft and to investigating and preventing acts of violence and other crimes while upholding the constitutional rights of all Americans and will never conduct investigative activities or open an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity,”
However, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan isn’t buying it. He sent a letter last month to FBI Director Christopher Wray pointing out that the SPLC “identifies the broad term ‘Christian identity’ as a hate group — a term that could arguably encompass millions of Americans with sincerely held religious beliefs.”
Jordan wrote that the memo’s existence proved FBI was parroting the biased SPLC blindly, raising the question: what other political biases have hooks in the Bureau?
“The fact that the FBI would blindly accept and regurgitate the SPLC’s spin is highly concerning and undercuts the FBI’s assertion that it is unbiased and politically neutral,”
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