By Ralph Chapaco, Alabama Reflector
A grand jury indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on charges of wire fraud, bank fraud and money laundering brought by the U.S. Department of Justice, which alleges payments the organization made to informants in extremist groups functioned as financial support for them.
Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday that a federal grand jury in the Middle District of Alabama returned an 11-count indictment against the SPLC, a civil rights nonprofit based in Montgomery, Alabama, that helped take down some of the most prominent white supremacist groups in the country.
“As the indictment describes, the SPLC was not dismantling these groups,” Blanche said. “It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”
SPLC interim CEO Bryan Fair said in a statement Tuesday evening that the organization was “outraged by the false allegations levied against SPLC — an organization that for 55 years 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.”
“Taking on violent hate and extremist groups is among the most dangerous work there is, and we believe it is also among the most important work we do,” Fair said. “To be clear, this program saved lives.”
Fair said in a video released earlier on Tuesday that SPLC was the subject of a criminal probe and that he believed it was connected with a now-discontinued paid informant program, which Fair said provided information and intelligence on extremist groups that was passed to law enforcement.
The indictment characterizes those payments, dating back to the 1980s, as funding for leaders and organizers of racist groups including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation and the National Alliance.
No individuals were named in the indictment, but Blanche at the news conference, referred to one individual who was paid $270,000 over eight years. In total, according to the indictment, between 2014 and 2023, SPLC paid at least $3 million to eight people.
The indictment also pointed to an imperial wizard of the United Klans of America, as well as an alleged member of the online leadership chat group that planned the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
Additionally, the indictment accuses the organization of funneling money to violent extremist groups by using the informants SPLC recruited.
FBI Director Kash Patel said at the news conference that SPLC tried to hide criminal activity from banks.
“They set up shell companies and entities around America so that the financial institutions that we rely on as everyday Americans were deceived in believing that the money was not coming from the Southern Poverty Law Center in perpetuation of this scheme and fraud, but rather fictitious entities they stood up to perpetuate this ongoing fraud,” Patel said.
The indictment includes six counts of wire fraud, alleging SPLC defrauded donors; three counts of making false statements to a federally insured bank and one count of money laundering.
Fair said earlier on Tuesday that the paid informant program operated “in the shadow of the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators, and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system.”
The interim CEO said that SPLC did not “share our use of informants broadly with anyone to protect the identity and safety of the informants and their families.”
“And while we no longer work with paid informants, we continue to take their safety seriously,” he said.
A spokesperson for the organization said Tuesday that the program “predates me and a lot of people here. Most people who were involved are not even with the organization, because it has been a very long time since it has ended.”
Fair accused President Donald Trump and the DOJ of targeting SPLC for political purposes.
“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 stood in the vanguard then, and we stand in the vanguard today. We will not be intimidated into silence or contrition, and we will not abandon our mission or the communities we serve.”
The SPLC, founded in 1971, rose to prominence by bringing lawsuits against the Klan and other organizations that forced them to declare bankruptcy. Members of the Klan bombed the organization’s headquarters in Montgomery, Alabama, in July 1983. The group has also done work on voting rights, immigration and labor issues.
The group has often been outspoken and critical of Trump, and Republicans and conservatives have made it a target for years, saying it lumps right-wing groups in with extremist organizations. The Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the SPLC in December.
Updated at 6:37 p.m. with details of indictment, comments from DOJ press conference and reaction from SPLC.
This story was originally produced by Alabama Reflector, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Oklahoma Voice, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
