Straight Talk with Bill Frady 8/7/2026 Hour 1 - Bill Frady critiqued FBI oversight on traditionalist Catholics, leftist policies, housing costs, and globalism.

What this episode covers

Transcript Bill Frady: All right, sports fans. Here we go. I completely understand when the federal government works with a third party. I do not understand when the federal government works with a third party and then they begin to defer to the third party. I do not believe that is the way to go. If you're going to use a third party or an outside contractor, you're doing that to augment what you're already doing. You're doing that because they bring something that they can deliver, probably a little faster, a little easier, and it saves you resources. But something called the ACLJ has uncovered internal FBI emails through the Freedom of Information Act that expose how senior officials in the FBI reacted after they were targeting traditional Christians under the Biden administration became public. And it reveals that their own intelligence quickly identified the fatal flaw in the now-infamous Richmond memorandum. They were relying on the Southern Poverty Law Center's very subjective hate group label without determining how they made these designations or whether their standards even aligned with what the FBI had for a definition. But then, the FBI also... they found something even more concerning, which was that the deep state officials within the FBI were treating the SPLC like an official arm of the government. All of this coming... this was all known during the Biden administration. This was all happening during the Biden administration. On January 23rd, 2023, the FBI's Richmond Field Office issued an intelligence product claiming that interest in "radical-traditionalist Catholic ideology" among "racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists" presented new mitigation opportunities. I love the way they put some of this: "new mitigation opportunities." And this included developing sources and establishing tripwires, conducting outreach to Catholic parishes, and developing sources with placement and access inside traditionalist Catholic communities. So they were placing human assets in there. They had spies... they were putting spies in the Catholic Church. And this memorandum named Catholic organizations and publications and chapels and the seminary. And it was all based on the SPLC list of purported hate groups to identify organizations associated with what the memo called "the radical-traditionalist Catholic ideology." Now, this was not simply trying to figure out what was going on with a known violent suspect who also happened to attend Mass. The FBI was proposing using Catholic communities themselves as potential avenues for intelligence collection. And this reached senior FBI officials almost immediately after the memorandum was exposed. On February 9th, 2023, Tanya Ugoretz, then the Assistant Director for the Directorate of Intelligence, emailed a broad group of various people, and she relayed a preliminary review of the memorandum and directly addressed its reliance on the SPLC. Her words: "With respect to sourcing, in particular SPLC: SPLC has been a source for statistics and data not otherwise available to law enforcement; however, this product cites more subjective information from SPLC (a list of hate groups) without examining SPLC's threshold for determining a hate group or explanation of how that threshold aligns with the FBI's definition." That would be referred to as a smoking gun. That was a remarkable admission to put to paper. The Bureau had incorporated their subjective hate group labels into an intelligence product involving traditionalist Catholics without first examining: one, how they determined that an organization was a hate group; two, what was the evidence that they used; and three, whether their threshold aligned with the FBI's own definition. Then they started to import the conclusions of a private advocacy organization without first performing the basic analytic work necessary to figure out whether those conclusions satisfied federal law enforcement standards. And that was not r ...

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