On Tuesday, April 21, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) launched a legal salvo targeting one of the country’s premiere civil rights organizations directly. In the crosshairs is the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an organization that has stood against extremism for more than half a century.
A Grand Jury in Montgomery, Alabama, returned an indictment charging the SPLC with 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. The United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama Northern Division filed two forfeiture actions to recover alleged proceeds of the organization’s fraud scheme. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigated this case with assistance from the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI).
“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who only recently took the reins of the agency after the ousting of Pam Bondi. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked. This Department of Justice will hold the SPLC and every other fraudulent organization operating with the same deceptive playbook accountable. No entity is above the law.”
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The indictment alleges that, starting in the 1980s, the SPLC began operating a covert network of individuals who were either associated with violent and extremist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, or who had infiltrated violent extremist groups at the SPLC’s direction. Unbeknownst to donors, some of their donated money was being used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups at the same time that the SPLC was denouncing the same groups on its website.
News of the indictment sent shockwaves through the civil rights community at large. Michael Edison Hayden, a noted journalist with experience at the SPLC and known for his coverage of the far right in the U.S. responded quickly.
“We need to hear more, and I’ll leave open the possibility that investigators have uncovered something serious that isn’t yet public,” Hayden wrote in his Substack. “But the DOJ appears to be focusing on something old and obscure in order to make MAGA’s long-standing rhetoric about the SPLC as a ‘criminal enterprise’ seem real. Throughout my time there, angry reactionaries regularly replied to my posts online making exactly that sensational claim.
“This fits into a broader effort within MAGA to stigmatize reporting on them—or even expressing informed opinions about how their rhetoric lands outside the movement. We took on many bigots who became very powerful. While at the SPLC, I reported on figures who have since become central to MAGA, including Stephen Miller and Jack Posobiec. Given that context, it was almost inevitable that a weaponized DOJ would try something like this. Discrediting the SPLC is a way of retroactively rehabilitating everyone the SPLC ever exposed.”
FBI Director Kash Patel, who is under a firestorm of scrutiny himself after an article in The Atlantic reported episodes of him being severely intoxicated in front of White House staff and was at times difficult to reach for work as a result. Patel has denied these claims and has filed a $250 million lawsuit in response.
“The SPLC allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public,” Patel said. “They lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups, and actually turned around and paid the leaders of these very extremist groups – even utilizing the funds to have these groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes. That is illegal – and this is an ongoing investigation against all individuals involved.”
The DOJ claims that between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals who were associated with various violent extremist groups including:
- Ku Klux Klan
- United Klans of America
- Unite the Right
- National Alliance
- National Socialist Movement
- Aryan Nations affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club
- National Socialist Party of America (American Nazi Party)
- American Front
According to the indictment, the objective of the scheme and artifice was to obtain money via donations through materially false representations and omissions about what the donated funds would be used for.
In order to covertly pay the individuals, the DOJ says that the SPLC opened bank accounts connected to a series of fictitious entities. They claim the covert nature of the accounts allowed the SPLC to “disguise the true nature, source, ownership, and control of the fraudulently obtained donated money the SPLC paid the individuals.”
The DOJ added that, “in order to keep the scheme going, the SPLC made a series of false statements related to the operation of the accounts.”
A conviction would result in the forfeiture of financial gains from any alleged illegal activities.
