The Justice Department’s indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center appears to be yet another escalation of the Trump administration’s push to limit how civil rights groups operate, and it could cast a chill on similar groups around the country.
The Justice Department indicted the SPLC on Tuesday, accusing the nonprofit group of having “secretly funneled” over $3 million to extremist hate groups and networks like the Ku Klux Klan via alleged wire fraud, false statements to banks, and a money laundering conspiracy.
At a press conference this week, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche characterized the SPLC’s history of surveilling and monitoring white supremacist and hate groups as disingenuous, asserting that the SPLC’s work had boosted, not dismantled, these groups. One of the key accusations was that SPLC’s paid informants, or “field sources,” allegedly promoted the racial hate groups, and that paying these informants financially supported the groups themselves.
But the 11-count indictment lacks much in the way of material or factual statements to support its claims, which are usually crucial in criminal cases where the federal government alleges a sweeping decades-long criminal conspiracy. And SPLC’s use of paid informants has long been known, both publicly and within the extremist circles it penetrated.
When reached for comment, the White House referred to a post on social media where White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News the Southern Poverty Law Center was a “criminal organization, run by fraudsters, who are paying for, and inciting this very racism that they claim to stand against.”
Experts say that the indictment reeks of hypocrisy and intimidation in a way that can have a deep chilling effect on organizations seeking to counter extremism.
“They want to put them through the wringer and chill similar organizations,” said Glenn Kirschner, a former U.S. Army prosecutor and former assistant U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia with 30 years of experience. Prosecutors, Kirschner explained, regularly use informants. “This is the federal government saying do as we say, not as we do.”
SPLC no longer uses paid informants, according to its attorneys, but in the past, these resources were helpful in gleaning meaningful information — for law enforcement and the public alike — about groups that would otherwise function mostly in the shadows. It’s a constitutionally protected right for groups who engage in these sorts of activities to publish reports or provide information about their findings, and the DOJ and FBI themselves have long benefited from the information collected by such groups.
Informants can provide detailed information about a network’s leadership structure, membership, recruiting tactics, and any plans to stage events, both violent and otherwise. That way, law enforcement officials can be flies on the walls of rooms they might otherwise never get into.
“It wasn’t news to me,” Todd Blodgett, a former paid FBI informant, said of the indictment’s disclosures about SPLC paying members of hate groups to be informants. Blodgett once owned the largest neo-Nazi record label, as well as an advertising firm that worked with far-right racist groups like the Liberty Lobby.
Paying informants was both self-serving for SPLC — by ensuring it always had hate groups to investigate, in Blodgett’s words — and advanced the organization’s mission, because it allowed the organization to collect intelligence on extremists and report it to police.
“When you have good informants, competent, knowledgeable informants that blend in with the crowd you’re trying to penetrate, trying to monitor, I would think that would be conducive to serving the purpose of the donations,” Blodgett said.
The indictment of SPLC alleges that informants frequently behaved and spoke in racist ways that went against the nonprofit’s mission, and that this should be considered evidence of fraud. But Blodgett said undercover informants have to engage in that kind of behavior to remain undetected.
“They’ve got to keep up the front if these people are providing information they want,” Blodgett said.
And if they don’t and their cover is blown?
“They probably would have killed them,” Blodgett said. “I’m not exaggerating. That’s the kind of thing that will get you killed.”
The FBI also uses paid informants to infiltrate these same groups, which is allowed as long as the DOJ guidelines on accounting are followed.
While working as an informant for the FBI from 2000 to 2002, Blodgett said he was paid between $6,500 to $7,000 per month. The agency also reimbursed him for expenses, including one conference held in London.
Kirschner explained that informants are crucial for law enforcement and prosecution.
“We use informants, we pay people to get into or remain in criminal organizations all the time because that’s how you break a conspiracy apart, you get an insider with them if they are not already there or you co-opt them including with monetary payments if they are there.”
“That’s how we successfully take down criminal organizations,” he said.
In the SPLC case, the DOJ says informants were paid through bank accounts tied to a “series of fictitious entities” and that these accounts allowed the nonprofit to hide who actually controlled the money they received from donors.
But the SPLC didn’t try to hide ownership of the accounts. After an internal bank investigation, the SPLC admitted that yes, the accounts were opened and closed for the “benefit of the Southern Poverty Law Center operations and under the Center’s authority.”
The government will be expected to flesh out the specifics of its charges at anticipated motion hearings, which have not yet been scheduled. And there will be a lot of fleshing out to do, especially around the conspiracy to commit money laundering charge. To prove a conspiracy, prosecutors must demonstrate evidence of planning, intent and thoughtfulness of a crime. It can be a tedious, arduous process and will require a mountain of discovery produced from both sides.
Kirschner doesn’t expect the indictment to succeed. But that may not even be the DOJ’s endgame.
“It’s the intimidation,” Kirschner said. “That’s the point.”
He points out that doomed prosecution efforts have been a regular tactic used by the administration to go after political enemies. The list includes former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, and six members of Congress who urged troops to disobey illegal orders, to name a few. These prosecutions both fulfilled Donald Trump’s base urge for revenge and power and, even though they failed, functioned as warning shots for anyone else to cross or disobey him in the future.
The indictment of SPLC, a long-hated organization among both the far-right and mainstream Republican right, ties the nonprofit up in litigation, draining it of resources and acting as a shot across the bow to others. Even if the nonprofit can successfully fight back against the administration, irreparable damage will be done.
Praveen Fernandes, vice president of the nonprofit Constitutional Accountability Center, points to Trump’s recent clemency for people convicted for their actions on Jan. 6, 2021 — some of whom belonged to extremist groups monitored by the SPLC.
“It is hard to see that as disconnected from the Trump DOJ now going after a nonprofit that designated the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys as hate groups,” he said.
In this way, said Fernandes, it looks to be a part of the administration’s “multi–prong attack” on “pillars of civil society” like nonprofits, universities and law firms.
“This is an example of the administration weaponizing the law against groups that do meaningful lawful work that has been valued by communities for decades,” Fernandes said. “This attack is also consistent with the Trump administration’s attempt to rewrite both our nation’s history and the text of our laws.”