President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has accused the Biden administration of “zealously” probing traditional Christians—including by tracking the priest of a self-described “Clerical Fascist” caught hoarding firebombs.
A 200-page report from the DOJ-led Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias was released Thursday. It devotes considerable space to a January 2023 FBI memo from the bureau’s Richmond, Virginia, field office that flagged “radical-traditionalist” Catholics as a domestic extremism concern, the New York Post reported.
The task force, set up by Trump’s February 2025 executive order, says officials under President Joe Biden, 83, demanded Christians choose between living their faith and breaking federal law.
The Trump-era report buries the inconvenient context for the FBI’s actions, however—the case of Xavier Louis Lopez, then 25, a self-styled “radical traditional Catholic Clerical Fascist.”
Lopez was found by agents with eight Molotov cocktails laced with a napalm-like additive, ammunition, and parts for a 3D-printed handgun, in his Henrico County, Virginia, bedroom, the Department of Justice announced in February 2025, when he was sentenced to eight years and one month in jail.
On his wall hung a giant Nazi flag, with a crucifix and rosary fixed neatly above the swastika.
Federal agents had been tracking Lopez since 2019 over neo-Nazi posts urging followers to shoot police and attack Black Americans and Jews. He also boasted he could do better than Anders Breivik—the far-right killer who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011, Commonweal Magazine reported.
After Lopez began attending Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) Chapel, agents placed an informant inside the parish to find out whether he was trying to recruit fellow worshippers for a violent attack.
It is this investigation—plus the resulting and now-recalled Richmond memo—that has the Trump administration so incensed.
Then-FBI Director Christopher Wray, 59, and then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, 73, both publicly apologized for the memo at the time and confirmed it had been pulled from FBI systems. But the task force has surfaced an internal email that suggests senior FBI staff felt very differently in private.
Stanley Meador, who at the time ran the FBI’s Richmond field office, wrote to the memo’s author, in correspondence dated July 8, 2023, “No apology needed.” He went on to predict the affair would one day make a colorful chapter in the analyst’s memoirs.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, 51—who took the DOJ helm this month after Trump fired Pam Bondi reportedly over her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files—chairs the task force and said in a statement reported by the Post: “No American should live in fear that the federal government will punish them” for their religious beliefs.
A 2024 review by the Justice Department’s own inspector general previously found the underlying FBI investigation to be entirely lawful, with no evidence of “malicious intent” by agents.
Blanche has, separately, just authorized a federal prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center—the same civil rights group cited in the FBI Richmond memo as a source.
The Daily Beast has contactd the DOJ, White House and FBI for comment.
