WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice announced Tuesday that a grand jury indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center for making fraudulent payments of millions of dollars to members of the Ku Klux Klan and other neo-Nazi organizations.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a news conference that the 11-count indictment filed in an Alabama federal court alleged the left-wing nonprofit had in the past decade paid at least $3 million to eight members of the far-right groups.
One leader of the 2017 Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville, Va., received roughly $270,000 over an eight-year period. Neither that person nor others were identified in the 14-page indictment.
Another embedded in a neo-Nazi organization was paid $1 million to steal 25 boxes of the hate group’s documents
Others had affiliations with the Ku Klux Klan, United Klans of America, Aryan Nations, the Nationalist Socialist Party of American Nazis and the Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club.
Earlier Tuesday, SPLC CEO Bryan Fair said in a statement that his group was being targeted for “prior use of paid confidential informants to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups.”
Starting in the 1980s, the SPLC began using informants who had infiltrated various groups.
But Blanche said in the press conference that the nonprofit never informed law enforcement that it was “paying off the Klu Klux Klan” or other extremist groups.
Several of the informants were also being paid while simultaneously being featured in SPLC publications — including on its public-facing “Extremist File” webpage — as members of the hate groups.
Prosecutors alleged in the indictment that the informants, or “field sources,” were also “engaged in the active promotion of racist groups.”
The unidentified field source for the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, for example, allegedly “helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.”
“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 groups,” Blanche told reporters.
“As the 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,” he said.
“There is nothing political about this indictment or this investigation,” Blanche added, claiming that investigation preceded the Trump administration and Biden’s DOJ had made a decision “to not pursue” it.
FBI Director Kash Patel added that the “widespread, decade-long multi-million dollar fraud” — which stretched from 2014 to 2023 — was concealed through a “banking network,” “shell companies,” and other fictitious entities.
The SPLC then “fraudulently raised money by lying to their donor network, thousands of Americans, to go ahead and actually pay the leadership of these supposed violent extremist groups,” Patel noted.
The sham entities included a “Center Investigative Agency,” or CIA, “Fox Photography,” “North West Technologies,” “Tech Writers Group” and “Rare Books Warehouse,” which “conducted no actual business,” the indictment stated.
The indictment, filed in US District Court for the Middle District of Alabama’s Northern Division, alleged four counts for making “false or misleading statements” about the entities to a federally insured bank on Dec. 10, 2016.
It also alleged six counts of wire fraud related to a series of payments totalling $13,905 on April 25, 2023.
The 11th count was for conspiracy to commit money laundering.
Donors were never “told that some of the donated funds were used for the benefit of the violent extremist groups or that some of the donated funds would be used in the commission of state and federal crimes,” the indictment noted.
The charges could result in forfeiture of the “gross receipts obtained, directly or indirectly, from the offenses” upon conviction.
