The Department of Justice on Tuesday charged the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that has for decades investigated and exposed hate groups, with fraud, money laundering and other financial crimes. The DOJ secured a grand jury indictment against the SPLC centered on its now-discontinued practice of paying informants to infiltrate violent extremist organizations.
The indictment charges the law center, whose “stated mission included the dismantling of white supremacy and confronting hate across the country” with secretly funneling more than $3 million in donated funds from 2014 to 2023 to the leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance (a neo-Nazi organization) through its paid informants, called “field sources.”
At a news conference on Tuesday, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, said the SPLC was “doing the exact opposite of what it told its donors it was doing — not dismantling extremism, but funding it” and “paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”
“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” Blanche said. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked.”
Among the alleged criminal activity by the law center the DOJ cited was its financial support of one informant who was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 “Unite the Right” event organized by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia. The informant “made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees,” and was paid $270,000 for his undercover work for the group from 2015 to 2023, the indictment said.
That rally included torch-wielding marchers chanting anti-Semitic slogans and violent clashes that culminated with one participant ramming his car into a group of counter-protestors, killing a woman and leaving at least 19 others injured, noted The New York Times.
Another SPLC field source was affiliated with the National Alliance for more than 20 years and was paid more than $1 million, the DOJ said. In 2014, that informant “entered the headquarters of a violent extremist group and stole 25 boxes of their documents,” copied them with the help of an SPLC employee, then “illegally” broke back in and returned the documents, which later served as a basis for a story published on the SPLC’s Hatewatch website, the DOJ said.
In a video statement issued before the charges were filed, SPLC interim CEO Bryan Fair argued that until recently, the center used paid confidential informants to gather intelligence on extremist violent groups. “This use of intelligence was necessary because we are no strangers to threats of violence,” he said, noting the SPLC’s offices were firebombed in 1983 and have since faced “countless credible threats against our staff.”
The SPLC, formed in Alabama in 1971 to investigate the KKK and other white supremacist organizations, also works on voting rights and criminal justice reform. It has used covertly gathered information in “unprecedented litigation to dismantle the Klan and other hate groups,” Fair said. “We frequently shared what we learned from informants with local and federal law enforcement, including the FBI. We did not, however, share our use of informants broadly with anyone to protect the identity and safety of the informants and their families.”
He said the informants “risked their lives to infiltrate and inform on the activities of our nation’s most radical and violent extremist groups” at a time when bombings of churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators and the murders of activists “went unanswered by the justice system. There’s no question that what we learned from the informants saved lives.”
The Trump administration is targeting the SPLC for political reasons, Fair said, and has “made no secret of who they want to protect and who they want to destroy.”
Criticism of the Southern Poverty Law Center by the White House and conservative leaders intensified after the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in September, reported The New York Times. A 2024 report from the SPLC included a description of Kirk’s group, Turning Point USA, as “a case study of the hard right.”
In October, FBI Director Kash Patel announced the bureau was severing its ties with the law center, saying the organization “long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine.” He mentioned the SPLC’s use of a “hate map” that listed anti-government and hate groups as unfairly targeting mainstream Americans.
During a December congressional hearing, House Republicans accused the group of “being partisan and profitable.”
“The SPLC is a hate group,” Missouri GOP Sen. Eric Schmitt wrote on X after the indictment was announced on Tuesday.
“Reminder that the Biden FBI was actively colluding with the SPLC to target traditional Catholics as domestic extremists,” wrote Rep. Brandon Gill, a Texas Republican. “They also labeled organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom, Family Research Council, and Moms for Liberty as hate groups as well. It turns out they were actively funding the ‘hate’ that they claimed to be fighting while targeting innocent conservatives.”
“Today the federal government has been weaponized to dismantle the rights of our nation’s most vulnerable people and any organization like ours that tries to stand in the breach,” Fair said on Tuesday, decrying the “false allegations.” He added, “We will not be intimidated into silence or contrition and we will not abandon our mission or the communities we serve. … We will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff, and our work.”
The use of paid confidential informants is standard practice at many law enforcement departments, including DOJ agencies, noted USA Today.
A House Oversight Committee hearing found that between 2012 and 2017, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Drug Enforcement Administration paid confidential informants a sum of nearly $260 million.
“The FBI has long paid, and likely is still paying, confidential sources across the country to gather intelligence on extremist groups, including racist organizations like those named in Tuesday’s indictment,” Javed Ali, a public policy associate professor at the University of Michigan and a former senior counterterrorism official at the FBI and the Department of Homeland security told USA Today.
Paying people to take serious risks — and working with private organizations who pay their informants — is a tried-and-tested way to access the inner workings of criminal and extremist organizations, said Pat Cotter, a former public prosecutor who helped investigate and prosecute Mafia crime families in the 1990s.
“If you want to know what’s going on in the sewer, you have to walk through a lot of sh–,” Cotter said. “If you want to know what the Nazis are doing, you have to talk to a Nazi.” The SPLC indictment, he continued, is “ludicrous and idiotic.”
The indictment says the SPLC secretly funneled donated money to the informants through bank accounts opened in the name of fictitious entities, including Center Investigative Agency, Fox Photography, and Tech Writers Group, which were never incorporated, had no bona fide employees and conducted no actual business. SPLC employees then attempted to defraud donors by “materially false representations and omissions about what the donations would be used for.”
While telling donors the money would be used to dismantle violent extremist groups, the DOJ says the SPLC “did not tell donors that some of the funds were used for the benefit of violent extremist groups or that some of the donated funds would be used in the commission of state and federal crimes.”
The SPLC committed wire fraud by executing the fraudulent scheme by means of wire communications and interstate commerce, specifically citing $13,905 in transactions between two SPLC bank accounts and several informants’ bank accounts.
“It was the objective of this conspiracy to conduct financial transactions designed to conceal the true nature, source, ownership, and control of fraudulently donated money” the SPLC paid to field sources, the indictment’s author, Kevin P. Davidson, Acting U.S. Attorney, wrote. The DOJ intends to recover funds traceable to the law center’s illegal activity, he added.
The indictment only charges the SPLC, though Blanche said individuals may later be charged and that the investigation is ongoing.
“The idea that people who contribute to the Southern Poverty Law Center would have objected that some of their funding was going to pay people who infiltrated extremist far-right groups like the Ku-Klux Klan is ridiculous on its face,” Cotter said. “It’s stupid. It doesn’t pass the laugh test.”
Other civil rights groups this week defended the SPLC and said the federal government’s case was meritless and politically motivated.
“The investigation into the Southern Poverty Law Center is yet another example of the Trump administration’s extreme attempts to silence its critics. This administration’s continued weaponization of the Justice Department to target organizations speaking out against its agenda is anti-American behavior harkening back to the McCarthy era,” the American Civil Liberties Union said in a statement.
National Urban League President and CEO Marc H. Morial called the indictment of the SPLC “a deeply troubling escalation in efforts to weaken and delegitimize the civil rights movement.”
“Let us be clear: this action is not about accountability. It is about intimidation,” he said. “It is about silencing organizations that have spent decades confronting hate, protecting vulnerable communities, and advancing justice under the law.”
The SPLC “has helped make this nation safer, stronger, and more just,” Morial continued. “Targeting that work is a direct assault on the principles we stand for: equal opportunity, racial justice, and the fundamental right of every person to live free from fear and violence.” The DOJ’s legal action, he said, “reflects a broader and deeply concerning effort to criminalize civil rights advocacy, distort truth, and punish those who challenge entrenched power.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday that President Trump is turning the Department of Justice into the “Department of Vengeance” with its indictment of the SPLC, The Hill reported.
“I just want to say a quick word about the deeply disturbing charges the Justice Department has brought against the Southern Poverty Law Center,” Schumer said on the Senate floor. “These charges should send a chill down the spine of every American who cares about free expression and the rule of law in the Justice Department. It should send a chill down the spine of every American who cares about civil liberties and the fight against [violent] extremism.”
