The Justice Department on Tuesday accused the Southern Poverty Law Center, a storied civil rights organization, of defrauding donors and stoking “racial hatred” through payments it made to informants working for a variety of hate groups.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that a grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, returned an 11-count indictment against the nonprofit, charging it with bank fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy and money laundering. The SPLC’s chief denounced the investigation as an effort to weaponize the Justice Department against groups unfriendly to President Donald Trump.
“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 to create a multi-racial democracy where we can all live and thrive,” interim president and CEO Bryan Fair said in a statement. “Taking on violent hate and extremist groups is among the most dangerous work there is, and we believe it is also among the most important work we do. To be clear, this program saved lives.”
Speaking at a news conference in Washington, Blanche said the SPLC paid more than $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to at least eight individuals working inside groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the National Socialist Movement. In some instances, Blanche said, the source of the money was disguised through accounts associated with fictitious businesses.
“It was doing the exact opposite of what it told its donors it was doing — not dismantling extremism but funding it,” Blanche said.
He declined to comment on the origins of the Justice Department’s investigation, but said it began during a previous administration and was later closed during Joe Biden’s presidency.
The civil rights organization had revealed the existence of the Justice Department probe earlier Tuesday in a video message from Fair, who said prosecutors appeared to be preparing legal action against some of its employees.
“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,” he said, adding later, “We will not be intimidated into silence or contrition.”
In his statement, Fair said the SPLC began paying informants to infiltrate those organizations as a means to protect its staff and gather intelligence on hate groups that posed a threat. In 1983, the organization’s headquarters was firebombed, and it has received multiple credible threats in the years since, he said.
“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,” Fair said.
The SPLC has since abandoned the practice of paying infiltrators, a spokesperson for the organization said.
Specifically, the indictment accuses the organization of defrauding its donors by not telling them it was using money they provided to pay informants who were employees or members of, hate groups. It does not name any informants or accuse any specific SPLC employees of wrongdoing.
“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,” Blanche said.
One of the informants referenced in the charging document was an organizer of the 2017 Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville that resulted in the death of a counterprotester. The SPLC paid him $270,000 to inform on planning for the event, the indictment alleges.
In another case, prosecutors said, the organization paid $1 million to a member of the neo-Nazi group National Alliance. That informant allegedly stole more than 25 boxes of records which were later used by SPLC to expose the hate group’s activities in 2014.
The SPLC later paid another informant within the group $6,000 to take responsibility for the theft, the indictment alleges.
Founded in Montgomery in 1971, the SPLC was established with the goal of ensuring that the civil rights law passed by Congress and enshrined by the courts would become a reality on the ground. It is known for its efforts to monitor and take legal action against white-supremacist groups.
Tuesday’s charges follow years of Republican-led congressional inquiries into the SPLC. GOP lawmakers have demanded that the Trump administration investigate funding for the group, which critics on the right have accused of coordinating with Biden administration to unfairly malign Christians and conservatives exercising their First Amendment rights.
More broadly, the Justice Department under Trump has launched probes of several people and organizations viewed as politically unfriendly to the president. That has included groups such as ActBlue, the Democrats’ main fundraising platform, as well as outspoken critics from his first administration and law firms that represented Trump’s political adversaries.
Trump fired Blanche’s predecessor, Pam Bondi, earlier this month in part out of frustration over the slow pace of those investigations. Since taking the Justice Department’s helm, Blanche has worked to show he is moving quickly to meet the president’s expectations.
He has pushed to accelerate ongoing probes of some of some of the president’s critics, including former CIA director John Brennan, who during the Obama administration helped investigate alleged ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Last week, Blanche released the first report from the department’s Weaponization Working Group, detailing what he described as the Biden Justice Department’s improper targeting of antiabortion protesters.
Conservative criticism of the SPLC reached its peak following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk last year. The SPLC had identified the organization he led, Turning Point USA, as an epitome of the “hard right” in a 2024 report on hate and extremist groups. And FBI Director Kash Patel announced in October that the bureau was severing ties with the organization, which had long worked with agents to identify and provide tips on domestic extremist groups.
Still, Blanche insisted Tuesday that the charges filed against the SPLC had nothing to do with partisanship. “There is nothing political about this indictment,” he said.
Fair, in his statement, said the Justice Department’s actions would not shake his organization’s resolve.
“SPLC will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff and our work,” he said. “We will continue to fight hate; and we will continue to envision and create a safer and more just world.”
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