Running a confidential informant program inside hate groups is expensive and dangerous work. For about four decades, the Southern Poverty Law Center has done it anyway. Its work contributed to the dismantling of the Ku Klux Klan as a political force. The SPLC’s work is so important that it routinely shared what it learned with the FBI. On Tuesday, the Trump Justice Department indicted them for it.
A federal grand jury in the Middle District of Alabama returned an 11-count indictment charging the SPLC with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of false statements to a federally insured bank, and one count of conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, taking a break from shielding Epstein’s sex trafficking network from public scrutiny, announced the charges alongside FBI Director Kash Patel, whose flimsy defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic has earned him the online nickname of “J. Edgar Boozer.”
“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” Blanche told the cameras. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked.” Of note, the federal government, through the DOJ and FBI specifically, have also paid confidential informants inside hate groups. Does the Trump administration manufacture racism to justify its existence?
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OK, well, yeah. But they don’t do it by investigating hate groups. Indeed, under Harmeet Dhillon’s leadership of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, its unclear whether the DOJ even keeps passing tabs on hate groups at this point.
Ah. Yes. Grand juries famously go out and draft their own legal theories from scratch as opposed to ratify charges that the DOJ drafts. Blanche is so allergic to responsibility he won’t even take credit for a prosecution he’s holding a grandstanding press conference to tout.
Contrary to Blanche’s thesis, the Ku Klux Klan, the National Socialist Movement, the National Alliance, or the Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club — all groups named in the indictment — all got into the white supremacist business with zero help from a civil rights nonprofit. It’s a beloved reactionary fairy tale that all these hate groups wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for lefty agitators like the SPLC propping them up to keep the donations flowing. It’s a convenient story for conservatives, because it allows them to pawn off responsibility for the right-wing domestic terrorists living comfortably under the Republican Party platform (and collecting the Trump administration’s pardons and conviction purges).
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When it comes to the SPLC, the conservative movement wants to have its cake and eat it too. The civil rights group is supposedly the real mastermind behind universally reviled hate groups like the Klan, but when the SPLC flags hate groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, the organization is just “attacking” innocent conservatives. The group, we’re intended to believe, is simultaneously nefarious and clueless. But therein lies the real motive behind this broadside against the SPLC. There was a day when the Republican Party tried to keep the most radical of right-wing bigots at arms length. Over the years, and accelerated by the Trump MAGA approach, the GOP has embraced support from more radical collections of bigots. Groups like the ADF don’t appreciate the well-known “SPLC designated hate group” brand, and the administration wants to make the SPLC pay for it.
The wire fraud statute — a law with enough malleability to shame Reed Richards — is being invoked to claim the SPLC’s donors were defrauded because they gave money for general civil-rights-y representations, but the SPLC spent some of it on paid informants embedded in violent extremist groups. The DOJ argues that the SPLC kept those payments off the books, routed through shell companies, to keep donors in the dark, as opposed to, for example, KEEPING THOSE SOURCES ALIVE.
Grand Wizard: Hey, Cletus, what’s that check you’ve got there?
Cletus: Oh, um, this one… it’s nothing.
Grand Wizard: Why does it say “Southern Poverty Law Center?”
Understanding why this would be a poor strategy is beyond Kash Patel’s crackerjack sleuthing skills.
If you donated money to the Southern Poverty Law Center and did not think that it supported gathering inside intelligence on hate groups, then you are a special kind of naive. The SPLC’s dossiers on these groups establish that they’ve got more information on these secretive groups than a Wikipedia search turns up. This “undisclosed to donors” framing only works if you assume a reasonable person donating to an organization known for infiltrating hate groups expects a line-item disclosure of how much it spends every year on confidential informants in each specific organization.
Patel was pointedly asked at the presser about the SPLC sharing information with law enforcement. He shrugged that he was “not surprised” the SPLC “never told anybody that they were paying off the Ku Klux Klan.” This is not an answer the actual question posed, and that was almost certainly by design. Of course, as SPLC’s interim CEO Bryan Fair pointed out, the organization “frequently shared what we learned from informants with local and federal law enforcement, including the FBI.” In bringing this prosecution, the DOJ is burning a long-standing, successful vector of actionable intelligence into hate groups in order to kneecap a civil rights organization. It fits perfectly within Patel’s publicly stated priority to pursue social media buzz over terrorists.
In reality, Patel is well aware of the SPLC’s cooperation with the FBI. He’s even got a draft report — seen by CBS News — laying the groundwork to claim that the SPLC’s intel was all false and designed to hurt “Christians”:
In a draft report from a task force on “anti-Christian bias” that CBS News has seen, Patel accused the SPLC and the Anti-Defamation League of providing the bureau with “false information.” He said analysts used that information to generate an internal intelligence memo that raised concerns about a possible link between racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists and radical Catholic ideology.
And yet, the indictment sure seems to be based on information from the SPLC that the DOJ considers very reliable! The document includes details about the activities of several anonymized informants — presumably informants that the government is leaning on to flip against the SPLC — and it strains credulity to imagine the DOJ uncovered these people from anything but information the SPLC previously conveyed to the FBI.
F-9 was affiliated with the neo-Nazi organization, the National Alliance and served as an F for the SPLC for more than 20 years. F-9’s activities included fundraising for the National Alliance. Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly paid F-9 more than $1,000,000.00. In 2014, F-9 entered the headquarters of a violent extremist group and stole 25 boxes of their documents. F-9 coordinated payment for the copying of the materials with a high-level SPLC employee who had knowledge the documents had been stolen. The original stolen materials were returned to the violent extremist group in a second illegal entry by F-9. Thereafter, the high-level SPLC employee utilized
the documents, in part, as the basis for a story published on the SPLC’s Hatewatch website and authored by the employee. Another F, F-39, was blamed for the theft and was paid approximately $6,000.00 by the SPLC to falsely take responsibility for the theft.
That sure reads like, “the SPLC gave the FBI these documents and told us they’d secured them from an informant, and that’s how we know they have an informant within the National Alliance.”
Even with all the latitude the government has under these statutes, the legal theory outlined in the indictment is tenuous. But this is beside the point, because even if this case eventually collapses, the DOJ already got what it came for.
The indictment explicitly puts a number of hate groups on notice that they have moles inside their organizations, allowing them to begin reverse-engineering the identities of their leaks. The DOJ materially improved the ability of these hate groups to operate and put any existing informants in grave danger. Any groups not included in the indictment will also take a hard look at their ranks to see if they’ve got informants that the DOJ missed.
Moreover, the indictment serves as a deterrent. Anyone currently considering turning on their violent extremist group or contemplating joining a group to help expose it will now lack both a financial incentive and face as a serious disincentive the likelihood that the Justice Department will expose them. This chilling effect is a feature and not a bug. The indictment severely curtails the SPLC’s hate-mapping work, removing an irritant for groups that the MAGA movement hopes will be prepared to run back January 6.
But there is one encouraging aspect of the indictment:
F-37 was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville, Virginia and attended the event at the direction of the SPLC. F-37 made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees. Between 2015 and 2023, the SPLC secretly paid F-37 more than $270,000.00.
Oh. The administration considers the Unite the Right rally organizers a hate group now? A little bit of growth from “very fine people on both sides,” I guess!
(Indictment on the next page…)
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.