FBI Director Kash Patel announced this week that the bureau is formally ending its partnership with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), distancing the agency from a relationship that began under former FBI Director James Comey.
“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,” he added.
The break comes years after Comey openly praised the organization during his tenure. On May 8, 2017, Comey addressed the ADL National Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C. and declared his and the FBI’s “love” for the group.
He began his remarks by referencing a 2014 speech he described as a “love letter to the ADL,” adding, “Three years later I can say, from the perspective of the FBI, we’re still in love with you.”
“We are not only educating ourselves, we are working with the ADL to build bridges in the communities we serve,” Comey told attendees. “For more than 100 years, you have advocated for fairness and equality… And for all of that, we are grateful. As a law enforcement and national security agency, yes. But also as Americans. As humans.”
The ADL itself is now facing renewed scrutiny after Elon Musk and Republican lawmakers accused the group of mislabeling conservative organizations as extremist. The controversy escalated after the ADL listed Turning Point USA (TPUSA), the group founded by Charlie Kirk, as an extremist organization.
The group responded to the backlash this week by removing its entire “Glossary of Extremism and Hate,” which included over 1,000 entries.
“With over 1,000 entries written over many years, the ADL Glossary of Extremism has served as a source of high-level information on a wide range of topics for years. At the same time, an increasing number of entries in the Glossary were outdated,” the ADL wrote on X. “We also saw a number of entries intentionally misrepresented and misused.”
The organization said retiring the glossary would allow it “to explore new strategies and creative approaches to deliver our data and present our research more effectively.”
“It will keep us focused on ensuring we do what we do best: fighting antisemitism and hate in the most impactful ways possible.”
Musk, however, blasted the ADL in recent posts, writing that “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 later referred to the ADL as “a hate group.”
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) also criticized the ADL’s labeling of TPUSA, saying the group owed the public an explanation.
“Seems to me like if they don’t agree with you, they will label you a ‘hate group,’” Luna wrote on X.
On its website, the ADL’s description of TPUSA remains under its “Center of Extremism” section, where it accuses the conservative organization of having ties to “a range of right-wing extremists” and generating support from “anti-Muslim bigots, alt-lite activists and some corners of the white supremacist alt-right.”
Patel’s move to cut ties marks a sharp reversal from Comey’s approach, signaling that the FBI will no longer lean on the ADL in its counterterrorism or extremism work.
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