Jessica Schwalb writes for the Washington Free Beacon about the latest evidence that Virginia’s governor is no moderate.
A cabinet official “moderate” Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger (D.) tapped to co-lead a prison reform council headed the FBI field office in Richmond that issued an infamous, since-retracted Biden-era memo identifying traditionalist Catholics as potential domestic terrorists. DOJ leaders subsequently said they were “aghast” at the memo, which they described as “appalling.”
Stanley Meador, Spanberger’s secretary of public safety and homeland security, will co-chair the newly formed Community Partnership Council on Corrections alongside Department of Corrections director Joseph Walters, Spanberger announced on June 23. The panel is dedicated to advancing “safety reforms by hearing directly from [corrections] staff, incarcerated individuals, and communities across Virginia” on topics like “reentry and reintegration,” “public accountability,” and “conditions of confinement.”
Spanberger said the council “will create a permanent, structured forum for dialogue and action on the issues that matter most” and will “ensure that these reforms we’ve undertaken take root, and build a foundation for Virginia long after I am no longer in this office.” She said “many things” are “systemically wrong” with the state’s corrections system.
Leading that dialogue is Meador, who was the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Richmond field office when it issued an internal memo titled “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities” in January 2023. The document called for surveillance of Catholic churches in Virginia and based its concerns that traditionalist congregants could be domestic terrorists on findings from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has a long history of labeling conservative groups as extremist and is now facing wire fraud charges.
The memo leaked a few weeks later, and the FBI retracted it shortly thereafter.
Bishop Barry Knestout of the Diocese of Richmond called the memo a “threat to religious liberty” and urged lawmakers to “ensure that such offenses against the constitutionally protected free exercise of religion do not occur again,” the Catholic outlet EWTN News reported.
