The apology had the funny smell of IRS tax-exempt chief Lois Lerner's initial "apology" to the public, prompted by a planted question in 2013, for illegally targeting Tea Party groups for delay and scrutiny.

Jes' a lil' ol' customer service problem, ya know. Everything's fixed.

According to the National Catholic Register:

The FBI says it is retracting a leaked document published on the internet Feb. 8 that appears to reveal that the bureau's Richmond division launched an investigation into "radical traditionalist" Catholics and their possible ties to "the far-right white nationalist movement." 

In response to an inquiry from CNA, the FBI said it will remove the document because "it does not meet our exacting standards."

The document, which was published on the website UncoverDC and is titled "Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities," the document singles out Catholics who are interested in the traditional Latin Mass as potentially linked to violent extremist groups.

Exacting standards?  That unfortunate wording only brings to mind the harried housewife in the 1980s commercial for Hostess pastries, whose protestations about "my tough standards" prompted laughter.  Twinkies aren't what come to mind when one thinks of "tough standards."

The FBI's "retraction," in other words, needs a bit more than just a sheepish claim to have gotten rid of the document, swiftly done, but only after a leak.

What prompted this obvious violation of the First Amendment right to freedom of worship?

Does the FBI have too much money and not enough ways to spend it?

How much did they spend on informants for this "exacting standards" project?  Whom did they recruit, how much time did they put into it, how many agents?

What are the political orientations of the perpetrators of this violation of the First Amendment?

How are they to be held accountable?

Who else is being spied on, because we doubt it was just the fringe Catholics, whose relationships with Rome, as I wrote here, can be pretty shifting and muddled.

And lastly, was the bureau under pressure from Joe Biden's White House to be violating the First Amendment?  We have the executive order commanding just that: a witches' brew of potential and real scandals that seems to be at the root of many of the Biden violations of the First Amendment that we have seen.

These questions are important and should be what the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government should be asking, because sure enough, it wasn't just Twitter and its FBI puppetmasters, or the "Lives of Others" wannabes at the U.K.-based, U.S. government–funded Global Disinformation Index, which was just caught trying to shut down the First Amendment in the U.S. 

This was a direct move by well funded federal law enforcement to spy on Americans of faith who have been falsely labeled domestic terrorist suspects, white supremacists, antisemites, and other invented trash as a means of shutting them down or pinning charges on them.  The only possible reason for it could have been that they are conservatives, people who think the "wrong" thing to Biden and his pals.

Who's going to pay for that one?  Because it's absolutely illegal.  Where are the arrests?  Busts, please, and names of everyone in that FBI hierarchy who approved such a scurrilous pretext for spying, based on claims from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a scandal-plagued NGO that has trafficked in smears in the past and which is not supposed to be the basis for any FBI investigation, as well as two left-wing news articles, one of which laughably claimed that the rosary is a dangerous "weapon" of gun nuts and white supremacists.  I wrote about that "FAIL" here.

A good starting point would be Joe Biden's June 2021 "National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism" paper, which has a fact sheet here, describing what's in it.  What's most noticeable about it is the low level of success it's had, given that $100 million was shelled out to go get all those domestic terrorists within law enforcement agencies and the military, the press, and religious organizations, as claimed, while at the same time, Antifa, church-bombers, crisis pregnancy center arsonists, and other plagues on society like Mexican cartels are getting off scot-free with no serious investigations into their very violent, very criminal activity.  We are even starting to see assassinations of Republican city council members in New Jersey, and there is no curiosity whatsoever from the Bidenites, who aren't going to take any of that $100 million to investigate that kind of potential threat to democracy and free elections.  That document seems to be at the root of the current scandal, with the FBI now taking garbage from the SPLC as a pretext to spy on people and violate their First Amendment rights, just as it once took the Steele dossier as gospel during its phony Trump-as-a-Russian-agent Russian collusion investigations, which involved many civil rights violations and fabricated evidence.

It's ugly stuff, and you can bet there are going to be violations found as a result of this position paper.  It's imperative on Congress to investigate this, because we have gone deep into "The Lives of Others" territory at this point.  Is the FBI now becoming a Stasi?  Congress must save it from that fate because under a clown and election cheat like Biden, it doesn't seem to know how to save itself.

Image: Screen shot from YouTube "The Lives of Others" movie trailer from "Mr. Jones."  Image filtered.