On Thursday, former FBI agent Nicole Parker, an 11-year veteran of the agency before she quit four months ago, testified before the House Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government.
She quit because the agency has now become a weapon pointed at innocent Americans:
For me, distancing myself from egregious mistakes, immoral behavior, politically charged actions taken by a small but destructive few FBI employees became exhausting.… [I] no longer felt [that I was] the type of agent the FBI valued.
Her testimony came just a day after another former agent released a document that the Richmond, Virginia, office of the FBI had generated urging field agents to infiltrate the Catholic church looking for terrorists.
Kyle Seraphin, a former FBI special agent, federal whistleblower, and USAF veteran, posted a copy of the report dated January 23, 2023, regarding “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology.” The report referred to “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics” (RTCs) and expressed “high confidence” that agents can mitigate their terrorist objectives by infiltrating local Catholic churches.
And where did the FBI get such information? Wrote Seraphin:
The attached appendices refer to a number of articles and the out-of-FBI-policy Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) at the end of the document.
For example, Appendix D is a direct copy of the SPLC list of “Radical Traditional Catholicism Hate Groups,” including the web address accessed. The SPLC appears to be a source for the intelligence analyst’s beliefs that RTCs exist and that they are anti-Semitic. The SPLC description for this “hate group” states RTCs “may make up the largest single group of serious anti-semites in America.”
Seraphin didn’t spend any ink excoriating the SPLC for its anti-Christian, anti-traditional values or anti-American bias. He didn’t have to. Readers can go to DiscoverTheNetworks.org and find dozens of pages of examples of its bias, along with connections to 56 hard-core left-wing individuals intent on destroying American culture and turning the nation into a socialist nightmare.
All of which is well known to the FBI, which formally disassociated itself from the outfit back in 2014. But that hasn’t changed how propagandists at the top of the agency obtain their “information.”
Seraphin gives the agency just a tap on the wrist:
Poorly sourced and highly speculative intelligence products [such as this report] lead to opening badly articulated … investigations into Americans in violation of their God-given, First Amendment-protected civil liberties.
He’s right about one thing: the agency’s poor intelligence products can and will lead to grievous infringements of those rights unless the agency is reined in, reorganized, or eliminated altogether:
Opening the door to associating white supremacists with traditional religious practices based on common Christian positions on abortion and the LGBTQ political agendas is a dangerous step. Such investigations can easily lead to the same analysis of Radical Traditional Baptists, Radical Traditional Lutherans, and Radical Traditional Evangelicals. [Emphasis added.]
The FBI is forbidden from opening cases or publishing products based solely on First Amendment-protected activities. By tolerating the publishing of intelligence products as shoddy as this, they are crossing a line many Americans will find themselves on the wrong side of for the first time in history.
This is what a politicalized FBI looks like; it should not be tolerated if Americans expect to enjoy the protections of our Bill of Rights.
Another former FBI agent, this one the former chief of FBI intelligence, Kevin Brock, weighed in on the perfidy:
[The report] is lazy, it is absurdly speculative, it provides no evidence for its thesis, and it relies exclusively on sources known to be aligned with the political left, such as the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center, Salon, and the Atlantic, that have been known to be habitually critical of the Catholic Church. That’s not intelligence analysis. It’s parroting.
When the FBI discovered that Seraphin had leaked the incriminating report, it backtracked immediately, saying that it was only distributed in-house and not meant for public consumption, and that, once found out, the agency brass declared it inoperative. The walk-back language is remarkable for its dissemblance and deceit:
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 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.
Happily for the security of the American people, more than two dozen FBI whistleblowers have emerged in recent months alleging FBI bias in cases ranging from the Hunter Biden corruption scandal, to claims that parents attending school board meetings are terrorists, to faux claims surrounding President Trump and Russia.
Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.), a member of the House committee who heard Nicole Parker’s testimony last week, said that that testimony adds to the increasing body of evidence that the FBI has habitually and intentionally overstepped its bounds, engaging in promoting cancel culture, encouraging censorship on Twitter, treating parents at school board meetings as domestic terrorists, and on and on:
When the FBI is being tasked to go after parents who have expressed concerns at their local school boards about what their children are being taught, and labeled a domestic terrorist … that’s a problem.
When you have the FBI and the administration and agencies coordinating with Big Tech, essentially pressuring a private company to do their bidding in deplatforming, censoring, or silencing dissenting voices, that’s a problem….
Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and whistleblowers like Parker, Seraphin, and Brock are shining that light at the core of the problem: the very top brass at the FBI.
