The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a prominent civil rights organization, has been indicted on federal fraud charges related to past payments it made to confidential informants to infiltrate extremist groups including the Ku Klux Klan, the justice department announced on Tuesday.
Speaking to reporters in Washington, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, said an Alabama grand jury returned an 11-count indictment against the civil rights group in the case brought by the justice department in Alabama, where the organization is based. The charges include wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
In his remarks, Blanche alleged that the group was “doing the exact opposite of what it’s told its donors it was doing – not dismantling extremism, but funding it”.
Blanche was joined by the FBI Director Kash Patel, who called the paid informant program “a serious and egregious violation of a group that purported to dismantle violent extremist groups, but in turn, actually only fueled the hatred”.
The investigation is being handled by the US attorney district for the middle district of Alabama, which includes Montgomery, the state capital where the SPLC is based.
The indictment was announced shortly after the SPLC’s CEO, Bryan Fair, revealed that the justice department had launched a criminal inquiry into the organization. In a video, Fair said details of the investigation were not entirely clear, though “the focus appears to be on the SPLC’s prior use of paid confidential informants to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups”.
Fair said the group used to use paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups and monitor them, but no longer does.
“This use of informants was necessary because we are no stranger to threats of violence. In 1983, our offices were firebombed, and in the years since, there have been countless credible threats against our staff,” he said. “For decades, we engaged in unprecedented litigation to dismantle the Klan and other hate groups. In light of that work, we sought to protect the safety of our staff and the public.”
The investigation comes as the Trump administration has pledged to crack down on non-profit groups opposed to its priorities. Conservative groups have long decried the way the SPLC has labelled certain right-leaning groups as “hate groups”.
Last year, the FBI announced it was ending its relationship with the organization, saying the organization had defamed right-leaning groups by labelling them hate groups.
“Today, the federal government has been weaponized to dismantle the rights of our nation’s most vulnerable people and any organization like ours that stands in the breach,” Fair said. “We will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff, and our work; we will continue to fight hate; and we will continue to seek a safer and more just world.”
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