SW News: US Attorney General Merrick Garland came under scathing attack from Senator Josh Hawley on Tuesday, April 11, for providing false testimony to the Senate in March saying that he and his department were not cultivating sources within Catholic churches. Hawley said he wanted to know how many sleuths are providing information to the department from within these religious sites.

In a letter addressed to Garland, Hawley said, "Let’s be clear: your Department has decided to turn Catholic congregations into front organizations for the FBI, and when asked about it, you’ve decided to fudge the truth before Congress." He termed it an unconscionable attack on the First Amendment rights of American Catholic believers and “an abdication of duty to enforce the law without fear or favor."

He sent the letter to the Attorney General after the House Judiciary’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government blamed the FBI for planting secret agents in Catholic groups in the Richmond, Virginia area. In March, too, Hawley had locked horns with Garland on the same issue when the Senate Judiciary Committee was hearing it. He asked Garland to reveal whether his department nursed any bias against Catholics. At that time, the Attorney General had responded by saying, "Our department protects all religions, all ideologies. It does not have any bias against any religion of any kind."

Hawley accused the Attorney General of lying while citing the details of their verbal exchange during the hearing in March. "I went on to ask you whether the Department was ‘cultivating sources and spies in Latin mass parishes and other Catholic parishes around the country.’ And again, your response could not have been clearer: ‘No, the Justice Department does not do that. It does not do investigations based on religion,’" he wrote in his letter to Garland.

"Finally, I asked you ‘how many informants do you have in Catholic churches across America?’ You denied the claim a third time: ‘I don’t know, and I don’t believe we have any informants aimed at Catholic churches.’ All of this was false, as recent investigative findings by the House Judiciary Committee show," says the letter.

All this happened in the background of an FBI memo getting leaked. It discussed Radical Traditionalist Catholic groups alleging that these groups adhered to an “anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ and white supremacist ideology."