The director of the FBI, Kash Patel, has severed the bureau’s ties with the Anti-Defamation League, blasting the group’s longstanding “love” affair with an embattled former FBI director, James Comey, and its decision to include Charlie Kirk’s Turning Points USA in a glossary of extremist groups.

“James 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. This FBI won’t partner with political fronts masquerading as watchdogs,” Mr. Patel said on X Wednesday. 

Speaking at a 2014 ADL National Leadership Summit at Washington, Mr. Comey, then director of the FBI, praised the bureau’s partnership with the Jewish civil rights organization, which included creating the Hate Crimes Training Manual and hosting ADL-sponsored FBI training sessions on terrorism, extremism, and hate crimes.

“If this sounds a bit like a love letter to the ADL, it is, and rightly so,” Mr. Comey said in 2014. Mr. Patel told Fox News on Wednesday that Mr. Comey’s “love letters” had “disgraced the FBI.”

He also accused Mr. Comey of “embedding agents with an extreme group functioning like a terrorist organization and the disgraceful operation they ran spying on Americans.”

Last week, Mr. Comey was charged with making a false statement and obstruction over Senate Judiciary Committee testimony in which he denied authorizing an FBI employee to “be an anonymous source in news reports” about the FBI’s investigations into both President Trump and Secretary Hillary Clinton. 

An FBI representative confirmed Mr. Patel was referring to the ADL as the “extreme group functioning like a terrorist organization,” and referred to two cases as examples: the ADL’s 2020 covert surveillance of writer and social activist Tatjana Rebelle, whom they labeled a “radical with antisemitic and hateful views,” and a 1993 class-action lawsuit accusing the ADL of using informants to access law enforcement files and conduct illegal surveillance of several progressive civil rights organizations. The ADL settled that case in 1999.

“In light of an unprecedented surge of antisemitism, we remain more committed than ever to our core purpose to protect the Jewish people,” the ADL said in a statement Wednesday. 

The ADL has also faced intense scrutiny for including TPUSA in its “Glossary of Extremism and Hate,” which describes Kirk, who was murdered last month at a speaking event in Utah, as promoting “Christian nationalism” through his group.

On Tuesday, the ADL announced it was retiring the glossary, “effective immediately,” citing a growing number of “outdated” or “intentionally misrepresented and misused” entries.

“The FBI was taking their ‘hate group’ definitions from ADL, which is why [the] FBI was investigating Charlie Kirk & Turning Point, instead of his murderers,” Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, said on X.

A writer and liberal social commentator, Yashar Ali, said Mr. Patel’s description of the ADL was a “massive gift to Neo-Nazis and other Jew haters.”

“Like any large organization that engages in a very heated space, the ADL is going to have plenty of opponents. But when you falsely refer to an organization focused on combating Jew hatred — an organization that is not accused of engaging in violence — as a terrorist organization, you’re giving Neo-Nazis exactly what they want,” Mr. Ali said on X. 

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, an anti-Israel Republican of Georgia, applauded Mr. Patel’s announcement, calling the ADL “a dangerous hate group that targets Christians.”