Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger has tapped Stanley Meador, the former head of the FBI's Richmond field office whose shop produced a since-retracted memo calling for surveillance of Catholic churches, to co-chair a new state council on prison reform. The appointment, first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, puts Meador back in a high-profile government role months after the FBI ousted him over the same controversy that made his name a byword for federal overreach against people of faith.
Spanberger announced the Community Partnership Council on Corrections on June 23, naming Meador, her secretary of public safety and homeland security, and Virginia Department of Corrections director Joseph Walters as co-chairs. The governor said the body would hear from corrections staff, incarcerated individuals, and community groups on topics including reentry, public accountability, and conditions of confinement.
The council includes reserved seats for faith-based organizations, a detail that drew immediate fire from Catholic advocacy groups given Meador's record.
In January 2023, the FBI's Richmond field office, then under Meador's leadership, issued an internal memo with the unwieldy title "Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities." The document called for surveillance of Catholic churches in Virginia and based its concerns about traditionalist Catholics being domestic terrorists on findings from the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization with a long track record of labeling mainstream conservative groups as extremist and which now faces wire fraud charges.
The memo leaked within weeks. The FBI retracted it in February 2023, but the damage was done. Bishop Barry Knestout of the Diocese of Richmond called it a "threat to religious liberty" and urged lawmakers to "ensure that such offenses against the constitutionally protected free exercise of religion do not occur again."
Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, pressed by Senator Josh Hawley at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing weeks after the retraction, did not hold back:
"It's appalling. It's appalling. I'm in complete agreement with you. I understand that the FBI has withdrawn it and it's now looking into how this could ever have happened. This is an inappropriate memorandum, and it doesn't reflect the methods that the FBI is supposed to be using."
By July 2023, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray sat before the House Judiciary Committee and offered his own assessment. Then-Chairman Jim Jordan pressed Wray on the difference between a "traditional" Catholic and a "radical traditional" Catholic, the distinction the memo had tried to draw.
Wray's response was telling:
"As soon as I found out about it, I was aghast and ordered it withdrawn and removed from FBI systems."
When pushed further, Wray conceded, "I'm not an expert on the Catholic orders."
A December 2023 congressional report from the House Judiciary Committee, titled "The FBI's Breach of Religious Freedom: The Weaponization of Law Enforcement Against Catholic Americans," found that Meador had met with Diocese of Richmond leaders and apologized for the "negative attention" the memo generated, but not for its contents.
That distinction matters. And an internal email from July 2023 sharpened the picture further. When one of the memo's co-authors sent Meador an apology, Meador replied:
"No apology needed. I'm glad you are on the team and thankful for your commitment. Keep that head up, this too shall pass. Will make for a great chapter in your memoirs some day!"
In April 2024, the Department of Justice's own Inspector General delivered a formal finding: the memo didn't meet "analytic tradecraft standards and evinced errors in professional judgment, including that it lacked sufficient evidence or articulable support." The FBI "repeatedly said" the document failed to meet its "exacting standards."
Meador was placed on leave and ousted from the FBI in June 2025.
Spanberger then appointed Meador as Virginia's secretary of public safety and homeland security in December, placing roughly ten major state agencies under his purview. Now he will co-chair a council that includes seats for the very faith-based organizations whose civil liberties his former office targeted.
Logan Church, national political director for CatholicVote, did not hold back:
"It tells every Catholic in America that violating our civil liberties isn't a problem, it's a pathway to advancement."
That line captures something the governor's office has yet to address. Meador never apologized for the memo itself, only for the attention it drew. His own internal email praised the co-author who helped write it. And now Spanberger has handed him a leadership role in a council that will shape how Virginia handles some of its most sensitive institutional reform questions, including those involving religious communities.
Spanberger, for her part, framed the council as a necessary step. She said it "will create a permanent, structured forum for dialogue and action on the issues that matter most" and would "ensure that these reforms we've undertaken take root, and build a foundation for Virginia long after I am no longer in this office." She acknowledged that "many things" are "systemically wrong" with the state's corrections system.
The governor's announcement came alongside a Department of Corrections report touting progress. The administration claimed a 56 percent decrease in "serious" inmate-on-staff assaults and a 47 percent drop in confirmed overdoses. The report also stated that the administration had "immediately actioned" about 85 percent of concerns advocacy groups raised during meetings with Meador and Walters, though the only examples cited were "simple actions like extending visitation hours and ensuring consistent application across all facilities."
Those numbers, however, sit against a grim backdrop. In May 2025, MS-13 gang members who had entered the United States illegally and were serving time for violent crimes including murder stabbed three Virginia corrections officers and injured two more. Around a year before that, at least six inmates at Red Onion State Prison allegedly burned themselves.
Spanberger's administration also issued a new code of ethics for the Department of Corrections, a one-page document that includes directives like "Do the Right Thing" and promotes a "People First" culture. Whether a single-page aspirational statement addresses the systemic problems the governor herself identified remains an open question.
The Meador appointment is not an isolated personnel choice in a vacuum. It fits a pattern. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin recently accused Spanberger of "criminalizing" federal immigration enforcement during an early-morning ICE raid in Manassas, Virginia, that netted a three-time deported felon with drug charges and a DWI on his record. "She's criminalized us to some degree," Mullin said. "She went out there, she's warned all law enforcement not to work with us."
The federal government has also sued Virginia over laws restricting ICE operations, warning the state is heading down California's path on immigration enforcement.
Spanberger built her political career on a moderate image, a former CIA officer who won a swing congressional district and then the governor's mansion by appealing to centrist voters. But her record in Richmond tells a different story.
She signed a sweeping gun ban that drew immediate legal challenges from the NRA, the Trump DOJ, and Second Amendment groups. Local prosecutors have refused to enforce that ban, calling it unconstitutional.
Now she has elevated a man whose most notable federal accomplishment was presiding over an office that treated churchgoing Catholics as potential terrorists, a memo so poorly constructed that the DOJ's own inspector general said it lacked "sufficient evidence or articulable support."
As of the article's publication on July 13, Spanberger had not named any additional council members beyond Meador and Walters. She said only that "in the coming days, we will begin inviting a diverse group of stakeholders to participate in this council." Whether any of those stakeholders will include representatives of the Catholic community whose rights Meador's office violated remains unclear.
The broader pattern of Virginia Democrats retreating under legal and political pressure on constitutional questions makes the Meador appointment all the more striking. When your own inspector general, your own FBI director, and your own attorney general all called the work product "appalling" and substandard, rewarding the man in charge with a promotion is not reform. It is a statement about what you actually value.
In Washington, they call this failing upward. In Richmond, Governor Spanberger just made it official policy.
