FBI Director Kash Patel has severed the bureau’s partnership with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a relationship forged during former FBI Director James Comey’s tenure.
“James Comey disgraced the FBI by writing ‘love letters’ to the ADL and embedding agents with an extreme group functioning like a terrorist organization and the disgraceful operation they ran spying on Americans. That was not law enforcement, it was activism dressed up as counterterrorism, and it put Americans in danger,” Patel told Fox News Digital. “That era is finished. This FBI formally rejects Comey’s policies and any partnership with the ADL.”
Comey’s ties to the ADL date back years. Speaking at the ADL National Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C., on May 8, 2017, he professed his and the FBI’s “love” for the organization, recalling a 2014 speech he described as a “love letter to the ADL.” He praised the group for advocating “fairness and equality” for over a century and ended his remarks declaring, “Love, the FBI.”
The ADL has recently come under fire from Elon Musk and Republican lawmakers for labeling the conservative group Turning Point USA (TPUSA), founded by Charlie Kirk, as an extremist organization. The criticism prompted the ADL to remove its entire “Glossary of Extremism and Hate” on Tuesday.
Elon Musk accused the FBI of relying on the ADL’s definitions to target conservatives. “The FBI was taking their ‘hate group’ definitions from ADL, which is why FBI was investigating Charlie Kirk [and] Turning Point, instead of his murderers,” he posted on X, later calling the ADL “a hate group.”
On its website, the ADL’s backgrounder on TPUSA, listed under its “Center of Extremism” tag, portrays the organization as having ties to “a range of right-wing extremists” and drawing support from “anti-Muslim bigots, alt-lite activists and some corners of the white supremacist alt-right.”
