A federal grand jury has indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center, a prominent civil rights organization known for its work researching and dismantling extremist groups, the Justice Department announced on Tuesday.
The 11-count indictment details an alleged multi-year effort by the SPLC to pay out at least $3 million to informants inside major extremist groups, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a press conference on Tuesday. The Justice Department alleges the SPLC deceived donors when collecting these funds and concealed the nature of the payments from banks and federal regulators using “sham” accounts and “fictitious companies.”
“The SPLC is a nonprofit entity that purports to fight white supremacist and racist hatred,” Blanche said.
“The SPLC was not dismantling these groups,” he continued. “It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”
The alleged funding went to individuals with ties to the KKK, neo-Nazis, and a leader within one of the groups that planned the infamous 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Such payments lasted until 2023, the grand jury found, Blanche said. He added that the investigation into the alleged payments began prior to the second Trump administration, but that it was paused during the Biden years.
“Money never lies,” FBI Director Kash Patel said at the press conference. “And they got caught.”
He called the alleged payments a “$3 million, decade-long scheme to fraudulently fleece Americans.”
“We are outraged by the false allegations levied against SPLC – an organization that for 55 years has stood as a beacon of hope fighting white supremacy and various forms of injustice,” SPLC CEO Bryan Fair said in a statement to The Independent.
“The actions by the DOJ will not shake our resolve to fight for justice and ensure the promise of the Civil Rights movement becomes a reality for all,” he added. “SPLC will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff and our work.”
In a video statement earlier Tuesday, Fair defended the organization’s past used of informants.
“These individuals risked their lives to infiltrate and inform on the activities of our nation’s most radical and violent extremist groups,” he said.
“There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives,” he added.
Fair framed the federal investigation as part of a wider Trump administration campaign to go after perceived opponents of the White House agenda, an effort that critics say has included threats or investigations against Democrat-aligned law firms, past political opponents of the president, and ActBlue, the main Democratic fundraising platform.
“Today the federal government has been weaponized to dismantle the rights of our nation’s most vulnerable people and any organization like ours that tries to stand in the breach,” Fair said.
Conservatives have increasingly taken aim at the SPLC in recent months, alleging it has unfairly painted individuals on the political right as threatening extremists.
In June, the SPLC included the conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA group on its “Hate Map” and labeled the organization an “anti-government extremist group,” angering large parts of the right.
In October, the FBI cut ties with the SPLC, alleging the group had become a “partisan smear machine.”
The group had previously provided research about hate crimes and domestic extremism to the bureau.
In December, House Republicans held a critical hearing about the group, alleging it had coordinated with the Biden administration to “target Christian and conservative Americans and deprive them of their constitutional rights.”
