FBI Director Kash Patel said Wednesday he had cut the FBI’s ties with the Anti-Defamation League, a leading Jewish civil rights group that has partnered with law enforcement agencies for decades to educate authorities on extremism and antisemitism.
The Washington Post couldn’t immediately verify what had motivated the move. But Patel’s decision comes as the ADL has been the target of conservative ire in recent days.
Patel said the ADL had served as a “political front” and spied on Americans. Patel also denounced the FBI’s previous involvement with the ADL, which was supported by former FBI director James B. Comey.
“James B. Comey wrote ‘love letters’ to the ADL and embedded FBI agents with them – a group that ran disgraceful ops spying on Americans. That era is OVER,” Patel wrote on social media, apparently referring to Comey’s 2014 speech that praised the ADL for its work against hate groups and extremism.
Comey said in the speech that the ADL’s work on “anti-Semitism to voting rights and immigration issues … from gender and LGBT equality to anti-Muslim prejudice,” was laudable. “If this sounds a bit like a love letter to the ADL, it is,” Comey also said.
The FBI has worked with the ADL on civil rights and hate crime training for state and local law enforcement agencies. Some training courses conducted with the ADL, such as the Law Enforcement and Society workshop, which “examine[s] the history of the Holocaust, the role of police under the Nazis, and the implications of the Holocaust for law enforcement today,” were mandatory for new agents. The FBI also created a hate crimes manual with the ADL, according to Comey’s 2014 remarks.
The FBI could not be reached for comment late Wednesday.
Patel’s announcement comes in the wake of heightened conservative criticism of the ADL and Comey, a political foe of President Donald Trump. Comey was indicted last week on allegations that he lied to Congress. The indictment was delivered over the objections of career prosecutors who insisted there was insufficient evidence.
The ADL has been targeted by conservatives online after the shooting death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The ADL had listed Kirk’s youth group Turning Point USA on its now-closed glossary of extremism. In it, the ADL described TPUSA as a right-wing student organization that provided a “platform for extremists and far-right conspiracy theorists.”
The ADL’s “Glossary of Extremism,” which contained more than 1,000 entries, was abruptly shut down this week. The ADL said that it had noticed that “an increasing number of entries in the Glossary were outdated,” and that some entries were being “intentionally misrepresented and misused.”
Elon Musk, one of the most prominent figures to target the ADL in the wake of Kirk’s murder, said on social media that the “FBI was taking their ‘hate group’ definitions from ADL, which is why FBI was investigating Charlie Kirk & Turning Point, instead of his murderers.” Musk later said the ADL “absolutely needs a major overhaul.”
The ADL could not be reached for comment. But the group said in a statement that it had seen Patel’s announcement and that it had “deep respect for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and law enforcement officers at all levels across the country who work tirelessly every single day to protect all Americans regardless of their ancestry, religion, ethnicity, faith, political affiliation or any other point of difference.”
