On March 17, 2023 — five weeks after the FBI publicly claimed it had pulled its controversial operation targeting traditionalist Catholics — an analyst at the Bureau sent an email about continued work on it.
The FBI withdrew the Richmond memo about the operation the way a teenager cleans their room: shove everything under the bed and tell Mom it's done.
The Weaponization Working Group released over 1,800 documents on August 28, 2026, and buried in that pile is the evidence that the FBI's Richmond Field Office never actually stopped the operation that flagged Traditional Latin Mass parishes as potential vectors for domestic extremism. The operation's memo, first published internally on January 23, 2023, used reporting from the Southern Poverty Law Center — an organization so discredited that even its own former employees have called it a money-making scam — to build a framework for monitoring American Catholics who attend the wrong kind of church.
When the operation's details leaked publicly on February 8, 2023, the Bureau scrambled. Leadership said the operation had been suspended. Congressional testimony confirmed the memo was pulled. Case closed, nothing to worry about, move along.
Except newly uncovered documents show that two priests were investigated as part of the effort. Neither was found to have done anything wrong. Zero. The FBI opened investigative work on Catholic clergy based on a memo sourced from a left-wing activist organization, found absolutely nothing, and then told Congress the whole thing was over.
Attorney General Todd Blanche addressed the fallout, stating that the people who developed the Richmond memo "were no longer with the department." That's a carefully constructed sentence. It doesn't say they were fired for what they did. It doesn't say the work product was destroyed. It says they're gone — which could mean anything from termination to retirement to a lateral move to a different three-letter agency.
FBI Director Kash Patel framed the document release as part of "holding the bureau accountable." The 1,800-plus pages suggest accountability was long overdue. The internal communications show an agency that treated congressional oversight the way it treated the Fourth Amendment — as a suggestion, not a rule.
The disciplinary response, according to the records, consisted of admonishments, additional training, and heightened review requirements. In federal bureaucracy, that translates to a sternly worded email, a PowerPoint presentation, and one extra signature on a form. Nobody went to prison. Nobody lost a pension.
The institutional pattern here is worth noting. The FBI used outside activist groups to justify domestic surveillance of religious Americans. When caught, leadership told Congress it was handled. The documents prove it wasn't. And the consequences for the people involved amounted to the government equivalent of a timeout.
This is the same Bureau that had the manpower to send a SWAT team to a pro-life activist's home at dawn but couldn't be bothered to follow up on tips about actual mass shooters. Priorities.
The timeline is now in black and white: memo published January 23, leaked February 8, "withdrawn" in February, and still being actively developed on March 17. That's not a bureaucratic oversight. That's an agency that lied to Congress about stopping something it had no intention of stopping.