DOJ Decides It’s Going To Try To Prosecute The Southern Poverty Law Center Out Of Existence

Legal Issues

from the white-makes-right,-says-the-DOJ dept

The DOJ continues to be the Trump Administration’s preferred avenue of vengeance. Since his return to office, multiple prosecutions targeting the president’s critics and political opponents have been mounted. To date, not a single one has succeeded. (And more than a few have been stalled completely by Trump’s refusal to engage in the legally required appointment process.)

Now, it’s going after the Southern Poverty Law Center, claiming (incredibly) that paying informants to infiltrate hate groups is exactly the same thing as funding hate groups. It’s some truly insane spin, which is being delivered by some of the federal government’s top hucksters.

Here’s how it reads in the DOJ’s official press release on the SPLC indictment:

“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “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.”

“The SPLC allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public,” said FBI Director Kash Patel. “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.”

There’s a lot of stupid stuff being said here, but clearly the stupidest thing is Blanche’s opening sentence. “Manufacturing racism?” This assertion deserves all the derision it will earn, but I’ll let Liz Dye of Public Notice run with it because hers is the best I’ve read yet:

The indictment is a grotesque attempt to recast white people as the real victims of racism. In the Trump DOJ’s telling, the civil rights advocates who spent decades mapping and dismantling the Klan are somehow its secret benefactors, “enriching” themselves by secretly creating racism — something which is apparently in such short supply that it can only be generated with constant infusions of cash.

People who actually believe racism is something that’s “manufactured” or otherwise blown out of proportion generally tend to be racists or, at the very least, throw their support behind bigoted politicians. The acting attorney general is running with this narrative, implying that racism would cease to exist if alleged fraudsters like SPLC weren’t so busy keeping it alive just to turn a profit.

Patel’s follow-up makes it sound like the indictment is full of caught-in-the-act crimes perpetrated by the SPLC and its employees. “State and federal crimes,” he says, suggesting there’s far more to it than [checks official statement] the profitable manufacturing of racism.

But you can read it [PDF] for yourself below. It portrays every payment to an informant as deceptive funding of hate groups. That might have meant something if anyone who’s given their money to the SPLC had ever expressed concern about misuse of their donated funds. Back to Liz Dye at Public Notice:

No donor has come forward to complain about the covert informant program, or even to express surprise. Indeed, the FBI itself was likely aware of it, thanks to its longstanding coordination with SPLC.

For reasons everyone knows (but will never be admitted by the administration), no one at the FBI or DOJ considered this to be a form of fraud until after Trump took power again, following years of the SPLC flagging some of Trump’s biggest fans as members or operators of hate groups. This is pure vengeance being dressed up to look like a standard criminal prosecution.

Oh, and back to those alleged crimes Kash Patel crowed about. The “federal” crime is the use of dummy corporations to obscure the source of money being paid to informants. Sure, it’s a crime to sign your name to false statements, but this wasn’t done to hide the payments from donors or launder illegally obtained funds. It was done to protect the informants, which is something the FBI does all the time.

On top of that, this “fraud” had already been detected and handled by the bank. The end result of the bank’s 2020 internal investigation was SPLC voluntarily closed the accounts and informed the bank that these had been opened on behalf of the Center. That happened in 2021. Even though the bank had a full admission/confession from the SPCL in its hands, it never tried to pursue criminal charges against the Center.

And the DOJ isn’t content to settle for mere wire fraud charges. It also alleges actual money laundering was happening here, a statute that requires the funds to have been obtained illegally. If the DOJ tries to connect the dots, it’s going to end up presenting a circle with no origin point in court because both the fraud and money laundering allegations involve the same set of bogus bank accounts. The money that traveled back and forth between these accounts originated elsewhere and nowhere in the indictment does the DOJ even attempt to claim the origin point was illegal activity.

The “state crime” is this:

In 2014, [Informant] 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.

Even if this can all be proven, it still doesn’t amount to much direct criminal activity by SPLC itself. The indictment says this informant was paid “more than $1,000,000” from 2014 to 2023, it doesn’t say the SPLC directed the person to engage in this theft. The indictment also alleges SPLC paid another informant $6,000 to take the fall for the theft, which is a bit more worrying. (And I can’t imagine that informant is going to be too happy about that after seeing how much the other informant was allegedly paid.)

If that state crime needed to be prosecuted, it could have been handled by the state it occurred in more than a decade ago. Bringing it up now just means the DOJ is looking for anything it can stack on top of a bunch of overblown accusations to drag the SPLC into court for the sole purpose of putting it out of business. The last three pages of the indictment set out the DOJ’s forfeiture demands, which makes it clear that the government hopes to drain it of its resources while it engages in its completely bullshit prosecution.

The SPLC is far from perfect. But it’s not being targeted because it strayed too far from the constraints of the law. It’s being targeted because it has repeatedly pissed off Trump and his supporters. It might be almost impossible to get a court to agree on record that this is a vindictive prosecution (at least without something showing up in discovery), but everyone involved — including the judge who eventually handles this case — knows that that’s exactly what this is.

Filed Under: doj, hate groups, kash patel, todd blanche, trump administration, vindictive prosecution, white nationalists
Companies: southern poverty law center, splc