News update
FBI Director Kash Patel announces break with anti-Semitism watchdog amid outrage over description of Charlie Kirk.
The top law enforcement agency in the United States has cut ties with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), accusing the Jewish advocacy organisation and anti-Semitism watchdog of spying on conservatives.
FBI Director Kash Patel made the announcement on Wednesday after prominent conservative influencers, including Elon Musk, pounced on the ADL’s inclusion of the murdered right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in its “Glossary of Extremism and Hate”.
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In a brief statement, Patel singled out the ADL’s associations with former FBI Director James Comey, a strident critic of President Donald Trump who was indicted last week on charges of obstruction and lying to the US Congress.
Patel said Comey had written “love letters” to the ADL and embedded agents within the group, which he accused of running “disgraceful ops spying on Americans”.
“This FBI won’t partner with political fronts masquerading as watchdogs,” Patel said in a social media post.
Patel did not elaborate on, or provide evidence for, his claims.
In a 2014 speech to the ADL’s National Leadership Summit, Comey said the FBI had made the advocacy group’s Law Enforcement and Society training mandatory for personnel and partnered with it to draft a “Hate Crimes Training Manual”.
Comey called the ADL’s experience in investigating hate crimes “essential” and its training “eye-opening and insightful”.
“If this sounds a bit like a love letter to the ADL, it is, and rightly so,” he said.
While Patel did not mention Kirk in his statement, his announcement came just a day after the ADL removed more than 1,000 entries about alleged extremism from its website amid right-wing outrage over references to the late activist.
The ADL said it made the decision as many of the terms were outdated and a number of entries had been “intentionally misrepresented and misused”.
In a since-deleted entry on Kirk and his youth organisation Turning Point USA (TPUSA), the ADL said Kirk promoted “Christian nationalism” and “numerous conspiracy theories about election fraud and Covid-19 and has demonised the transgender community”.
The entry also said TPUSA attracted racists, that its representatives had made “bigoted remarks” about minority groups and the LGBTQ community, and that white nationalists had attended its events, “even though the group says it rejects white supremacist ideology”.
Kirk himself strongly criticised the ADL while he was alive, once describing it as a “hate group that dons a religious mask to justify stoking hatred of the left’s enemies”.
In a statement responding to Patel’s remarks on Wednesday, the ADL said it had “deep respect” for the FBI and all law enforcement officers who work to protect Americans regardless of their ancestry, religion, ethnicity, faith and political affiliation.
“In light of an unprecedented surge of antisemitism, we remain more committed than ever to our core purpose to protect the Jewish people,” it said.
