The IG report says that the FBI had been monitoring “Defendant A”—the details of the case match up with Lopez’s—since 2019, including posts that advocated murdering police officers and “conducting a mass shooting at a school for special needs children,” and manufacturing bombs and 3D-printed weapons.
Early in 2022, the report says, he began attending a church that “associated with an international religious society that advocates traditional Catholic theology and liturgy but is not considered by the Vatican to be in full communion with the Catholic Church.” The “religious society,” identified as “Organization 1,” is clearly the Society of St. Pius X, or SSPX. The local church is identified only as “Church 1.” Our Lady of Fatima Chapel in Richmond, which is affiliated with SSPX, declined to comment and referred me to James Vogel, U.S. spokesman for SSPX. He didn’t return an email and phone messages.
Lopez liked that his new church “was a traditional church that isn’t totally kiked,” as the report said he put it in a social-media post. SSPX has so often been linked to antisemitism that it maintains a web page for the news media stating, “Anti-Semitism is not Catholic.” That is, SSPX says its dispute is with Jewish beliefs, not Jews.
The IG report indicates that Lopez was apparently disappointed that his neo-Nazi views were not endorsed at the parish, where, according to the FBI memo, he was taking a catechetical class to prepare for baptism. The report said he posted on social media that he “had to deal with the priest and some (thankfully not all) the parishioners talking about how ‘Hitler bad’ though thankfully they do acknowledge that the allies were evil.”
The inspector general reports that, based on Lopez’s online communications, FBI agents determined that he “was attempting to actively recruit other individuals with similar belief systems into Organization 1 and had begun talking about an attack.”
The social-media posts became more overt, the report says, explaining that “Defendant A’s advocacy of violence included communications with two individuals who attended Church 1 in which he made antisemitic comments, discussed the purchase of a pressure cooker, and used other terminology consistent with building a pressure cooker bomb.”
At that point, the FBI agents in Richmond, concerned that their suspect was trying to recruit help for an attack, decided that they needed to put an informant inside the church to interact with him. The IG report said the Richmond office did in fact notify the FBI’s Sensitive Operations Review Committee in May 2022 because of First Amendment implications. The informant was instructed to report only information about the suspect, not about the church generally or about other parishioners, the case agent told the inspector general.
Further, the FBI rated its suspect under its Indicators of Mobilization to Violence, used to determine investigative priorities in terrorism probes. In a footnote, the IG’s report notes “Defendant A” was ranked the No. 4 overall threat in the country, adding that the FBI’s fifth-ranked subject was convicted in the May 14, 2022 shooting in Buffalo in which a white supremacist murdered ten Black people.
According to the IG report, “Defendant A” took further steps that sounded alarms for the FBI agents: He bought equipment that could be used to chain shut the doors on commercial buildings, “similar to what the Virginia Tech shooter did to prevent victims from escaping,” referring to the murder of thirty-two people in 2007.
The night before Lopez’s arrest, he bought a truck, “which he said in a video posted on his social media account would be the final step in his plan for an attack,” the inspector general’s report says.
After the arrest on November 13, 2022, the FBI case agent interviewed the priest, the choir director, and others at the church. I couldn’t get their perspective on the interview but, according to the inspector general’s report, the agent found that “everyone knew that he was calling about Defendant A because of Defendant A’s ‘unusual’ and ‘concerning’ behavior and openly racist views.”
By that time, the IG report says, FBI intelligence analysts in Richmond had already begun working on what became the leaked memo, which was dated January 23, 2023.
A key part of this saga is that when the “internal use only” memo became public on February 8, 2023, the information about Lopez’s case was either blacked out or covered over with another sheet of paper. Also blacked out was that the Portland, Oregon FBI office had investigated possible weapons violations by another white supremacist who had “gravitated to the SSPX.” It said that Robert Reynolds, who was deceased by the time the memo was written, had posted pictures of himself inside a church with the caption, “The holy sacrifice of the mass. Join the Catholic Taliban.” Likewise, the redacted memo eliminated a paragraph on a southern California extremist who attended an SSPX-affiliated church and was a member of the antisemitic group Legio Christi.
The fuller version of the memo that the FBI later provided to Congress would have shown that agency was not “targeting” SSPX churches; it was trying to enlist their help to deal with a dangerous situation.