The Southern Poverty Law Center is under indictment, but not for reasons you might think.
In a news conference on Tuesday, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced federal fraud charges were levied against the longtime nonprofit civil rights organization, alleging that it improperly raised millions of dollars to pay informants to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups.
Per the indictment, the Justice Department is alleging the group defrauded donors by using donations to fund extremist groups it was sworn to fight against. From 2014 to 2023, $3 million was paid out to individuals who were affiliated with groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, and the National Socialist Party of America.
In total, the group is charged with bank fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The SPLC itself revealed the existence of a criminal investigation into their program for the informant scheme as a means to infiltrate said extremist groups and gather information on their activities. The group also said the program was created to monitor threats of violence, and that the information gathered from informants was shared with local and federal law enforcement.
“When we began working with informants, we were living in the shadow of the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators, and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system,” SPLC CEO Bryan Fair said. “There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives.”
Fair said the organization will “will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff, and our work.”
“The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred,” Blanche said.
He added, “They’re required to under the laws associated with a nonprofit to have certain transparency and honesty in what they’re telling donors they’re going to spend money on and what their mission statement is and what they’re raising money doing.”
Under Patel, the FBI severed ties with the organization last December after a push from MAGA allies, calling it a “partisan smear machine” that established a “hate map” that highlighted anti-government and hate groups inside the United States. Conservative Republicans accused the group of working with the Biden administration “to target Christian and conservative Americans and deprive them of their constitutional rights to free speech and free association.”
