Washington — A federal grand jury in Alabama indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on 11 counts of wire and bank fraud-related charges on Tuesday, the Justice Department announced, accusing the group of paying members of extremist groups as part of its efforts to investigate them without disclosing the practice to donors or banks.
The SPLC has denied the allegations.
“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,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a news conference announcing the charges. “The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”
Blanche said the group was charged with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The SPLC is a nonprofit that tracks white supremacist and other hate groups across the U.S., and has been a frequent target of President Trump’s allies. It is best known for its work investigating the Ku Klux Klan.
The charges came hours after the center’s interim president and CEO Bryan Fair said in a video that the organization was being investigated by the Justice Department in connection with a now-defunct program that used paid confidential informants to infiltrate far-right groups.
Blanche said the paid informant program at the Southern Poverty Law Center went through at least 2023. He also claimed that the investigation into the group started years ago, but was shuttered during President Joe Biden’s term, until the Trump administration revived it.
He alleged that in one case, the group paid the leader of the group that planned the far-right Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. During that protest, anti-racism activist Heather Heyer was killed after a white supremacist drove his car into the crowd.
In a statement, Bryan Fair said the group is “outraged by the false accusations.”
“Taking on violent hate and extremist groups is among the most dangerous work there is, and we believe it is also among the most important work we do. To be clear, this program saved lives,” Fair said. “The actions by the DOJ will not shake our resolve to fight for justice and ensure the promise of the Civil Rights movement becomes a reality for all. SPLC will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff and our work; we will continue to fight hate; and we will continue to envision and create a safer and more just world.”
The indictment, returned in the Middle District of Alabama, alleges that more than $3 million in donations was “secretly funneled” to individuals associated with far-right hate groups associated with neo-Nazi organizations, the Aryan Nation and Ku Klux Klan-associated groups.
“The SPLC’s paid informants…engaged in the active promotion of racist groups at the same time that the SPLC was denouncing the same groups on its website,” said the indictment, which was returned in the Middle District of Alabama.
To pay the informants, the indictment alleges the group opened bank accounts connected to fictitious entities, which allegedly let the group “disguise the true nature, source, ownership and control of the fraudulently obtained donated money.”
The entities included names such as Center Investigative Agency, Fox Photography and Rare Books Warehouse, according to the indictment.
The program ran between 2014 and 2023, according to the indictment. The indictment does not allege that the funds went directly to the hate groups themselves.
SPLC’s conflicts with Trump administration
The SPLC has had a rocky relationship with the Trump administration for reasons other than the conduct alleged by the Justice Department on Tuesday.
In October, FBI Director Kash Patel ended all ties between the bureau and the center, accusing the group of being a “partisan smear machine.” Allies of the Trump administration have accused the organization of being “anti-Christian” and unfairly targeting Republican-aligned groups like Turning Point USA, the Family Research Council and Moms for Liberty. They have also criticized the SPLC for singling out members of the Trump administration in its online reports.
The group was the subject of a Republican-led congressional hearing in December, where a senior TPUSA executive accused the group of “weaponiz[ing] the ‘hate’ label against ideological opponents.”
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.
President Trump’s allies have pointed to that memo as evidence that the FBI under President Joe Biden was weaponized against Christians. The Justice Department’s Weaponization Working Group is planning to release a report analyzing how the memo came to be, according to sources familiar with the matter.
An internal FBI review later concluded that there was no malicious intent in the memo’s creation. But its drafters failed to adhere to proper standards and lacked enough evidence to support a relationship between the two groups, according to a summary of the internal findings that was released to Congress in April 2024.
In his video about the federal probe, Fair accused the Justice Department of targeting the nonprofit, and vowed to defend it from criminal prosecution.
“Today, the federal government has been weaponized to dismantle the rights of our nation’s most vulnerable people and any organization like ours that stands in the breach. We stood in the vanguard then, and we stand in the vanguard today. We will not be intimidated into silence or contrition, and we will not abandon our mission,” he said.
“We will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff, and our work; we will continue to fight hate; and we will continue to seek a safer and more just world.”
