By Tom Gantert
The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted on federal fraud charges that accused it of illegally raising millions of dollars to pay informants in white supremacist and other extremist groups, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said.
An Alabama grand jury returned an indictment on April 21 with 11 counts of wire fraud, making false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering, according to the Justice Department (DOJ).
The indictment covered the years from 2014 through 2023 and alleged that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) paid at least $3 million to at least eight informants affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, United Klans of America, the National Socialist Movement, Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, the National Socialist Party of America, and the American Front.
One of the SPLC’s paid informants was a member of the leadership group that planned the Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 that resulted in one death, according to the DOJ.
“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” Blanche said in a statement. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked. This Department of Justice will hold the SPLC and every other fraudulent organization operating with the same deceptive playbook accountable. No entity is above the law.”
The SPLC did not respond to requests for comment via email from The Epoch Times.
The SPLC earlier on Tuesday said the Trump administration has launched a criminal investigation into the group during its investigation of what it called “radical and extremist groups.”
Bryan Fair, interim president of the SPLC, said in a video posted on its website before the DOJ news conference that the investigation was “the most serious” of recent acts against it.
“Although we don’t know all the details, the focus appears to be on the SPLC’s prior use of paid, confidential informants to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups,” Fair said. “This use of informants was necessary because we are no stranger to threats of violence.”
Fair said the SPLC no longer works with paid informants but did frequently share the information gained by them with law enforcement. Fair said the informants risked their lives to infiltrate radical groups and the SPLC began working with them during the height of the Civil Rights Movement.
“There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives,” Fair said.
Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-N.Y.) defended the SPLC on X.
“The DOJ uses paid informants all the time—why is it OK for them but not the SPLC?” Goldman wrote.
He said that the organization “plays a vital role in fighting hatred, yet has been unfairly targeted by President Donald Trump and House Republicans since day one.”
“This politicized intimidation needs to stop, now,” he said.
Kyle Shideler, the director for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy, said the issue is not the use of informants—as long as the informants were not involved in criminal activity, which he presumed the DOJ investigation would determine.
“The issue is that the SPLC always sought to use its supposed expertise on Right Wing Extremists to slander their non-extremist opponents,” Shideler said on X. “Linking groups like Turning Point USA or my employer to actual violent actors by putting them all on the same list was the political purpose.”
The Republican National Committee adopted a resolution in 2020 refuting the legitimacy of the SPLC when it came to identifying hate groups.
The resolution said the SPLC “makes a practice of incorrectly labeling persons and organizations as ‘hate groups,’” which mobilizes people to act “in hate and violence” against the people on the SPLC’s list.
The resolution mentioned the Family Research Council, which the SPLC labeled as a hate group in 2010.
The SPLC stated that the Family Research Council “often makes false claims about the LGBTQ community based on discredited research and junk science.”
“The intention is to dehumanize LGBTQ people as the organization battles against LGBTQ rights,” it said.
The Family Research Council disputed the SPLC’s claims, saying that they were inaccurate and that there was no justification for the “false labels such as ‘hate.’”
