DOJ charges Southern Poverty Law Center with bank, wire fraud and money laundering offenses
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced Tuesday that a federal grand jury returned an indictment charging the Southern Poverty Law Center with wire, bank fraud and money laundering offenses related to its paying of informants to infiltrate hate groups.
"According to the charges in the indictment, the SPLC is a nonprofit entity that purports to fight white supremacy and racial hatred by reporting on extremist groups and conducting research to inform law enforcement groups with the goal of dismantling these groups," Blanche said.
"As the indictment describes, the SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred," said Blanche.
The indictment, which Blanche said was returned in the Middle District of Alabama Tuesday afternoon, was not immediately available on electronic court records.
Blanche said the indictment details several examples of the SPLC paying individuals hundreds of thousands of dollars to infiltrate hate groups, including those affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, National Socialist Movement, Aryan Nations, and other white supremacist groups.
"As the indictment lays out, after SPLC paid members of these extremist groups, it created work product that reported on these activities that the members participated in or contributed to, and to that end, it was doing the exact opposite of what is told its donors it was doing," Blanche said. "Not dismantling extremism, but funding it."
In a statement issued earlier Tuesday, SPLC interim CEO Bryan Fair said the organization was facing a DOJ probe and denied any criminal wrongdoing on the part of the group.
Fair did not elaborate in the statement on how the SPLC was alerted to the DOJ inquiry, though he said, "the focus appears to be on the SPLC's prior use of paid confidential informants to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups."
"For 55 years, the Southern Poverty Law Center 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," Fair said in the statement.
"We are therefore unsurprised to be the latest organization targeted by this administration. They have made no secret of who they want to protect and who they want to destroy," the statement said.
The indictment accuses SPLC of defrauding its donors by not informing them that funds would go to informants that the organization then used to infiltrate various hate groups and further foment racial hatred and violence.
In one instance, prosecutors say SPLC had a field source who was a member of the online leadership group chat that planned the 2017 "Unite the Right" event in Charlottesville, Virginia, who made racist postings and allegedly coordinated transportation for attendees.
To help pay the informants covertly, prosecutors say SPLC illegally set up shell accounts in order to funnel funds their way -- with a total of more than $3 million going to informants between 2014 and 2023.
The SPLC will likely dispute the DOJ's legal theory of the case, which appears to hinge on the claim that the SPLC sought to use informants to aid the hate groups they infiltrated rather than dismantle them by giving insider information to the SPLC -- which would then publish public reports exposing the groups or provide information to the FBI.
It's not immediately clear why the department opted to charge the organization of the SPLC rather than specific individuals from leadership, though Blanche said Tuesday that the DOJ's probe was very much ongoing.
Fair, in his statement, sought to frame the criminal inquiry as a continuation of the Trump Justice Department's efforts to crack down on groups opposed to the administration's policies.
