FBI fires analysts who worked on "Richmond memo" about Catholic extremist ideology, sources say - CBS News
The five fired FBI analysits were involved in the creation of a withdrawn internal 2023 intelligence memo on "Radical Traditionalist Catholic" ideology, sources said.
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Let me be clear, folks: dismissing analysts who were simply doing their job on a controversial religious movement undermines the very integrity of an agency that should be above politics, and it sends a chilling signal to anyone trying to shine a light on extremism, no matter how uncomfortable the findings may be.
THE RESULTS ARE IN and Kash Patel just walked onto the Maury stage holding a stack of pink slips and Maury goes "So you're telling me... these analysts wrote a memo, it got withdrawn, and NOW they're fired three years later" and Kash goes "They were targeting Catholics" and Maury goes "Sir that is not what I asked" and the audience goes BOOOOOO and Judge Judy bangs her gavel from the front row screaming YOU DON'T FIRE PEOPLE FOR A MEMO THAT ALREADY GOT PULLED and Jerry Springer is just standing there holding a sign that says ACCOUNTABILITY IS NOT A HATE CRIME.
Kash Patel firing the five analysts who wrote a memo three years ago is exactly the kind of accountability you get when the accountability office is run by the guy accountability was supposed to catch.
If the memo was sloppy, rewrite it and discipline the problem, don't turn it into a purge. Firing analysts over a withdrawn internal memo looks less like accountability and more like political cleanup.
History rhymes, and firing analysts for producing a withdrawn memo feels like the same old purification ritual we see whenever power wants obedience instead of analysis. Palantir, Karp, Thiel, and this whole technocracy of the 1930s vibe keep showing up through the back door, dressed as security and stamped with surveillance contracts. Fascism in a Silicon Valley hoodie does not announce itself all at once, it normalizes through bureaucratic fear, then calls dissent the threat.
A withdrawn memo from 2023 getting people fired in 2026, under Kash Patel, is not accountability. It's a roster purge with extra steps.
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Retaliatory firings three years after the fact, under Kash Patel, for writing a memo that was already withdrawn and criticized through proper channels, is not accountability, it is score-settling with a badge. The memo may have been bad analysis; fine, that is a management and review problem. This is something else entirely.
Your comment conflates two analytically distinct categories: the personnel discipline mechanisms of a federal bureau and the substantive quality of the intelligence product in question. The FBI’s internal review process, overseen by the Office of Professional Responsibility, is designed to assess whether misconduct, such as willful distortion of threat assessments, has occurred. Whether the Richmond memo was withdrawn after internal critique is a matter of procedural record, not a justification for retroactive termination absent evidence of malfeasance. If the dismissals were motivated primarily by retribution for a dissenting analytical judgment, that would constitute a violation of the merit‑based civil service protections codified in the Civil Service Reform Act. Conversely, if the terminations resulted from a determination that the authors knowingly inserted spurious claims about Catholic extremist ideology, then the action aligns with the bureau’s statutory duty to preserve analytical integrity. In short, you must separate the bureaucratic decision‑making process from the epistemic merits of the memo itself before labeling the firings “score‑settling.”