Biden FBI Cited SPLC in Taking Thousands of Actions Despite Knowing Org’s Deep Flaws

The Justice Department’s new report on the Richmond Catholic Memo reveals that the FBI had cited the Southern Poverty Law Center more than 22,000 times, at times without any caveats, even though FBI policies would require any SPLC citation to note potential bias and contested credibility.

The Richmond office of the FBI published the notorious memo on Jan. 23, 2023, claiming that “racially-motivated violent extremists” were seeking to recruit “radical traditional Catholics.” The memo didn’t just cite the SPLC, it did so without any caveats about the SPLC’s questionable credibility.

The SPLC has explicitly stated that it “did not provide any information or communicate with any FBI personnel involved in preparing this Richmond Field Office memo.” Yet newly released documents reveal the FBI citing the SPLC without caveats, at a time when the SPLC maintained close ties to the Biden Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

The FBI publicly retracted the Richmond Catholic Memo one day after it leaked, and a newly disclosed Feb. 21, 2023, Analytic Tradecraft Review explains why.

Among other things, the tradecraft review faults the memo for failing to “provide any details regarding any potential bias/credibility of the sources, including concerning SPLC.”

The review notes that the SPLC “is an important resource for the FBI because it centrally locates hate crime information and data the FBI might not otherwise be privy to.” Yet “the SPLC has a history of having to issue apologies and retract groups and individuals they have identified as being extremist or hate groups.”

When it comes to the Richmond Catholic Memo, “since this was reporting on a religious branch of Catholicism that SPLC identified as a hate group, there should have been extra care to caveat the information, which was more subjective than statistical, and examine SPLC’s threshold for determining a hate group and explain how it aligns or differs from the FBI’s definition,” the review states.

FBI Richmond Memo Not an Isolated Incident

The Justice Department reported that Richmond FBI leadership nevertheless ignored directives to “admonish” the memo’s authors and instead gave them positive performance reviews.

A March 1, 2023, email includes “talking points” for Richmond Special Agent in Charge Stanley Meador.

The analyst searched the case management system Sentinel, finding 9,040 references to “SPLC” and 13,250 references to “Southern Poverty Law Center.”

Even accounting for overlap among the search results, the totals reveal the SPLC’s substantial footprint at the FBI.

The analyst flagged 12 reports from January 2022 to January 2023 that cited the SPLC “with no caveated language,” though the email does not say how many reports the analyst reviewed.

Even so, the existence of multiple uncaveated citations at a time when the FBI’s tradecraft standards required greater scrutiny raises questions about whether the bureau cut corners when citing the SPLC, and whether agents viewed SPLC as an entirely reliable source.

“There are numerous serials in Sentinel containing SPLC and other advocacy groups’ Hate Group lists,” the document notes.

The email also notes that more than two dozen FBI employees viewed the memo before the leak and raised no concerns about it.

The Daily Signal reached out to Meador, who currently serves as Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s secretary of public safety and homeland security, for comment about the email, but he did not respond by publication time.

Questions About the SPLC’s Reliability

The SPLC gained prominence through suing the Klan and monitoring white supremacist groups. Yet the group now faces federal fraud and conspiracy charges tied to its paid-informant program, a program the SPLC says generated intelligence that led to criminal convictions.

The Justice Department claims the SPLC used the informant program to prop up the “hate” it claims it exists to oppose. That aligns with critics’ longstanding concerns that the SPLC exaggerates “hate” by placing mainstream conservative and Christian organizations on a “hate map” alongside Klan chapters. The SPLC maintains the map reveals the “infrastructure upholding white supremacy,” but even left-leaning critics such as former ACLU President Nadine Strossen have defended Alliance Defending Freedom, which the SPLC brands an “anti-LGBTQ hate group.”

Last year, FBI Director Kash Patel told the Daily Signal that he had severed the bureau’s ties to the SPLC, calling it a “partisan smear machine” that uses a “hate map” to defame Americans and inspire violence.

In its “extremist file” on the Ruth Institute, the SPLC cites a statement from Jennifer Roback Morse, the conservative nonprofit’s founder. “The church is very clear that same-sex sexual acts are intrinsically disordered and can never be morally acceptable,” Morse said. The SPLC quoted this statement as evidence of the Ruth Institute’s hate, but it comes directly from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the binding statement of faith for 1 billion people.

The Analytic Tradecraft Review is correct: the FBI Richmond office’s failure to include any caveats when citing the SPLC is a tremendous scandal. Yet the March 1 email reveals that the scandal was not limited to the Richmond Catholic Memo.

While the email does not reveal how frequently FBI personnel failed to caveat information from the SPLC, it presents at least 12 examples of just that—and reveals that FBI’s internal system had referenced the SPLC more than 22,000 times.

The documents do not reveal exactly how widespread such practices were across the bureau, but they do suggest other FBI offices treated the SPLC as reliable without the scrutiny the FBI’s own tradecraft reviewers later rightly demanded.

Kash Patel has since severed the FBI’s connection to the SPLC, and these documents show just how badly that break was needed.