Today, a few minutes ago, in the Middle District of Alabama, a grand jury returned an 11-count indictment charging the Southern Poverty Law Center with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.
Charges in the Indictment Against the SPLC Southern Poverty Law Center
According to the charges in the indictment, the SPLC is a nonprofit entity that purports to fight white supremacy and racial hatred by reporting on extremist groups and conducting research to inform law enforcement groups with the goal of dismantling these extremist groups. As the Southern Poverty Law Center indictment describes, the SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.
SPLC Paying Leaders of Extremist Groups
The indictment describes this conduct as in detail but one troubling example is that the SPLC was paying a member of the leadership group that planned the Unite the Right protests in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 that resulted in the death of one person and injured dozens more. This particular person was being paid by the SPLC allegedly received approximately $270,000 over the course of eight years. In total, according to the indictment, between 2014 and 2023, SPLC paying at least $3 million to eight individuals at least in extremist groups. These individuals were affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan KKK, United Clans of America, National Socialist Movement, Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, the Nationalist Socialist Party of America, Nazis, and the American Front.
SPLC Southern Poverty Law Center Doing the Opposite of What it Was Suppose to do
Now, as the indictment lays out, after SPLC was paying members of these extremist groups, it created work product that reported on these activities that the members participated in or contributed to. To that end, it was doing the exact opposite of what it’s told its donors it was doing.
SPLC Southern Poverty Law Center was Paying Leaders of KKK and Other Extremist Groups
I’m not alleging it, the grand jury returned an indictment that says that. So what the investigation found according to the indictment that was returned today is that they were paying, so Southern Poverty Law Center is raising money, asking folks to give them money to dismantle racism. Over a very long period of time, they were using some of the money they raised from donors to pay to, they called them field, basically to informants, to for information for access to just pay them for arm for certain to do certain things and and so yes that’s exactly what the SPLC indictment charges.
