Ever since the Justice Department charged the Southern Poverty Law Center in April with defrauding donors by using its money to secretly pay informants inside extremist organizations, the prominent civil rights group’s lawyers have wondered how the investigation came about.
After all, the law center’s informant program had faced an earlier round of scrutiny — for potential tax violations — during President Trump’s first stint in the White House, but the inquiry was closed during the Biden administration.
In court papers filed on Monday night, the lawyers shed new light on the origins of the renewed investigation using records recently provided to them by the F.B.I. They said the inquiry appeared to have been prompted, at least in part, by a letter sent in September from several right-wing organizations that had been criticized by the law center. It was addressed to Stephen Miller, the powerful aide to Mr. Trump who has often exercised significant influence over decisions at the Justice Department.
The letter, jointly written by groups including Moms for Liberty and Turning Point USA, used language about the law center that was almost identical at times to language that appeared in an F.B.I. document from October that laid out the basics of the new investigation.
“To put it succinctly,” the lawyers wrote, “the Justice Department’s justification for opening a ‘full’ investigation into the S.P.L.C. in October 2025 — that led to the indictment in April 2026 — appears to be a rehashing of a letter sent by conservative groups to Stephen Miller complaining about being designated as hate groups by the S.P.L.C.”
The lawyers acknowledged that the documents the F.B.I. provided did not explicitly reveal whether Mr. Miller had directed the Justice Department to reopen the investigation, but they added that “the facts suggest that may be the case.”
They also suggested that Mr. Miller had another potential reason “to set the Justice Department after the S.P.L.C.”: In 2019, the group wrote a series of articles drawing on hundreds of Mr. Miller’s emails to assert that in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, he promoted white nationalist literature and “racist immigration stories.”
A Justice Department spokeswoman said Mr. Miller had nothing to do with the investigation of the law center and that the letter had been provided to investigators by the one of the groups that signed it. The White House did not respond to a message seeking comment.
The renewed inquiry into the law center focused, at least at first, on a publication called the Hate Map. For more than 20 years, the law center has used the map to detail the inner workings of well-known extremist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nations. It has also included more traditional conservative groups like Turning Point USA, which works on college campuses and was run by Charlie Kirk, the pro-Trump activist who was fatally shot in September.
According to the F.B.I. document, the bureau had concluded that the law center placed groups on the Hate Map “as a smear tactic solely because they disagree with the ideology of the S.P.L.C.” That language closely tracked the language in the letter to Mr. Miller, which said “the S.P.L.C. places many groups on its Hate Map as a smear tactic solely because they disagree with its radical left-wing ideology.”
Both the letter and the F.B.I. document also cited identical quotations from critics of the law center who called the Hate Map “a partisan progressive hit operation” and “a willful deception designed to scare older liberals into writing checks.”
The letter urged Mr. Miller to ask Mr. Trump to issue an executive order removing all information from the law center from federal websites and barring the administration from using the group’s writings in any government programs going forward.
While the president never issued such an order, Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, announced in October — the same month the investigation was formally reopened — that the bureau was severing its ties with the law center. Mr. Patel said the organization had “long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine,” singling out their use of the Hate Map, which, he added, unfairly targeted “mainstream Americans.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center was formed in 1971 in Alabama and is best known for investigating white supremacy groups like the Klan. But in their letter to Mr. Miller, the right-wing groups, echoing a broader sentiment among Mr. Trump’s supporters, accused the center of moving away from its early work and becoming “biased, politicized and unmoored from its original mission.”
The filing by the law center’s lawyers, in Federal District Court in Montgomery, Ala., was the latest effort to persuade Judge Emily C. Marks, who is overseeing the case, that the charges were brought as an act of retribution against an organization deemed to be among Mr. Trump’s “political enemies.”
Last month, when the lawyers asked Judge Marks to dismiss the case because they believe the indictment was vindictive, they claimed that the Justice Department had reawakened the case only after Mr. Trump returned to office vowing to seek vengeance on his adversaries.
Vindictive prosecution motions are notoriously hard to win, given that defendants have to prove that prosecutors filed charges against them out of animus while they were seeking to vindicate their rights. But there have been some recent successes, including in Nashville last month, where a federal judge dismissed a human smuggling indictment against the immigrant Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, calling the case “an abuse of prosecuting power.”
Lawyers for the law center claim that the F.B.I. documents show the case was brought only to punish the civil rights group for exercising its First Amendment right to criticize right-wing organizations.
“The record before the court establishes that this investigation and these criminal charges were instigated because the administration disagrees with the S.P.L.C.’s protected speech on the Hate Map and elsewhere,” they wrote.
In their filing to Judge Marks this week, the lawyers said that if she believed the case was filed vindictively, she should force the administration to turn over information about the case. That could include communications, they said, between Mr. Miller and the Justice Department concerning the Southern Poverty Law Center and communications between department officials in Washington and prosecutors in Alabama about why the case was restarted.
The post Letter From Conservatives Prompted Inquiry of Civil Rights Group, Lawyers Say appeared first on New York Times.
