The Justice Department is charging the Southern Poverty Law Center with fraud. The SPLC claims to fight racist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, but acting Attorney General Todd Blanche accuses the SPLC of paying large sums of money over several years to the very groups it said it was trying to destroy.
“The SPLC was not dismantling those groups,” he said. “It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”
An Alabama grand jury found the SPLC failed to disclose to its donors that between 2014 and 2023, it paid more than three million dollars to at least eight individuals from groups it claimed to oppose. FBI Director Kash Patel named them at a news conference on Wednesday.
“The Ku Klux Klan, the United Clans of America, Unite to Right, National Alliance, the National Socialist Movement, the Aryan Nation Motorcycle Club, and the National Socialist Party of America, and also the American Front,” Patel said.
The non-profit is charged with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.
Blanche described to reporters what the grand jury found.
“To carry out this scheme, SPLC created bank accounts in the name of at least five completely fictitious organizations that had no bona fide employees or legitimate business purpose,” he said. “The money was passed from SPLC to one sham account to a second sham account and then loaded onto prepaid cards to give to the members of the extremist groups. This was designed to shield the source of those funds, and because of this, SPLC is charged with one count, as I said earlier, of conspiracy to commit money laundering.”
Blanche gave an example that he called “troubling.”
“The SPLC was paying a member of the leadership group that planned the Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 that resulted in the death of one person and injured dozens more,” he said. “This particular person being paid by the SPLC allegedly received approximately $270,000 over the course of eight years.”
The SPLC labeled the indictment “false allegations” and says the money was part of a now-defunct program to pay informants who shared information on the plans and activities of extremist groups, including threats of violence, which saved lives.
In a statement, SPLC CEO Bryan Fair said the organization will “vigorously defend ourselves, our staff and our work.”
Christian and conservative groups have long-charged that the SPLC unfairly labels their organizations, as well as churches, as “hate groups” for their stands on Biblical sexuality and other social issues, in some cases resulting in violence.
In 2012, Floyd Lee Corkins, armed with a gun, stormed into the Family Research Council’s Washington offices and shot a guard. He told police he targeted the group based on the SPLC’s list of what they called anti-gay groups.
Wednesday, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins called the SPLC indictment “a welcome development, especially if it marks the beginning of the end of its long pattern of misrepresentation and harm.”
The 11 charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center could be just the beginning. The investigation is ongoing, and it’s possible future indictments could name SPLC executives as defendants.
