When the Justice Department charged the Southern Poverty Law Center in April with defrauding its donors, the theory of the case was that the storied civil rights group had secretly funneled money to informants inside white supremacist groups in an effort to support them, not bring them down.
But according to court papers filed on Wednesday, federal prosecutors have turned one of the center’s most active and successful informants into an informant of their own.
The papers, written by the law center’s lawyers, assert that the department capitalized on the informant’s financial problems and exposure to indictment to help him pivot from assisting the center in infiltrating hate groups to helping the government build its criminal case.
Prosecutors are, of course, free to seek information from whomever they want. But the law center’s lawyers said that this informant — known in the papers only as F-9 — went far beyond serving as a normal government witness and came to resemble a member of the government’s investigative team.
While it remains unclear if the government’s lawyers will be able to use F-9’s participation in the case to their advantage, the court papers offer the most detailed portrait yet of a person who has played an outsize role in the prosecution.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
F-9 started speaking to investigators as far back as March 2022 in an earlier tax inquiry against the law center that ended without charges. But at least in part at his urging, the court papers said, that investigation was revived last year and retooled to focus on the center’s informant program, which he took part in for decades.
The papers, filed in Federal District Court in Montgomery, Ala., where the case is being heard, made two requests. The law center’s lawyers asked for a judicial order forcing F-9 to preserve any documents in his possession related to the case. They also asked for permission to issue a subpoena to F-9 for all materials related to the informant program or to his discussions with the government.
After receiving immunity, F-9 has met with the prosecution more than 20 times since last November, and has exchanged about 1,800 text messages with investigative agents from the F.B.I. and the Internal Revenue Service, the court papers said. The papers also noted that he had given prosecutors at least four “intelligence briefings,” suggesting charges that could be brought, identifying potential witnesses and laying out new “investigative directions.”
A PowerPoint presentation F-9 gave to prosecutors as part of a briefing last December bore the official seals of the F.B.I. and I.R.S., as though “he were an actual member of the prosecution team,” the papers said.
The law center’s stable of informants, known internally as the F Program, enabled its researchers for years to gather substantial information on highly insular neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups. That insight was often published in the center’s publications.
One of those publications, called the Hate Map, drew the ire of the Trump administration after its focus was broadened to include not just traditional far-right extremist groups but also more mainstream Republican organizations, some of them aligned with the MAGA movement.
Defense lawyers have asserted that the current investigation began after a coalition of those groups wrote a letter to Stephen Miller, one of President Trump’s top aides, accusing the law center of going well beyond its mandate to examine hard-core right-wing organizations to focus on them as well.
In October 2025, around the time the inquiry into the law center was revived, Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, announced that the bureau was severing its ties with the center, which had long shared information from its informant program with federal investigators. Mr. Patel said the center had “abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine,” singling out its use of the Hate Map, which he argued had unfairly targeted “mainstream Americans.”
According to defense lawyers, F-9 started working with the law center in 1996.
His missions included infiltrating the National Alliance, a group that was once the country’s most dangerous neo-Nazi organization. With F-9’s help, the law center was able to learn about a bomb lab on the National Alliance’s property, and helped law enforcement officials shut it down. Prosecutors say that over a 16-year period, the law center paid F-9 at least $1.2 million.
F-9 has described his work with the center as “God’s work,” providing his employers with “the most accurate, relevant, timely and actionable intelligence he could collect,” the court papers said.
Starting in late 2021, however, things began to change. Within two years, F-9’s life was upended.
He discovered there was an I.R.S. investigation into whether informants in the law center’s F Program had failed to pay taxes. During that period, the center ended the program, and he stopped getting payments from it. A relationship he had maintained with the woman who ran the program, Heidi Beirich, also came to an end.
Ms. Beirich, one of the country’s foremost experts in far-right extremism, was added to the case over the summer as prosecutors expanded their indictment to include her in the fraud and conspiracy charges. Prosecutors say that while Ms. Beirich was overseeing payments to informants, she was in a romantic relationship with F-9, and the two shared a house and bank accounts. Between 2015 and 2021, prosecutors said, about $140,000 of the money F-9 received from the center ended up in those accounts.
According to the center’s lawyers, when investigators approached F-9 last year and started asking questions, he did not defend his former lover or employer. Instead, the lawyers said, his impulse was “to protect himself and turn on the S.P.L.C.” But his help came with strings attached, the lawyers said. They added that F-9 had asked the government for payment in exchange for his assistance several times.
“I need to be paid,” he told one law enforcement official in February. “I don’t wanna come down there and not be paid. I spent a lot of time and resources now on this. You don’t work for free. I am absolutely broke.”
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