Calling the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) “one of the greatest political scams in American history,” President Donald Trump on Friday called for the 2020 election to be “permanently wiped from the books” if the purported anti-hate organization is convicted of fraud.
This week the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) charged the SPLC with making some $3 million in payments to white supremacist groups to gin up hate speech it could then claim to be fighting in order to raise money from donors.
The indictment alleges that one of the informants paid by the SPLC helped organize a highly-publicized white extremist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 that candidate Joe Biden exploited as political ammunition to defeat of Trump in the 2020 election.
“The Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the greatest political scams in American History, has been charged with FRAUD,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.
He continued, “This is another Democrat Hoax, along with ActBlue, and many others. If it is true, the 2020 Presidential Election should be permanently wiped from the books and be of no further force or effect!”
ActBlue is a Democratic fundraising platform. Chief Executive Officer Regina Wallace-Jones is being scheduled for questioning by a House committee on allegations it may have allowed illegal foreign donations to flow to candidates.
On Tuesday, the SPLC was indicted as prosecutors claimed $3 million in donated funds were secretly paid between 2014 and 2023 to extremist groups that included the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, the National Socialist Movement, United Klans of America, and Unite the Right.
SPLC chief officer Bryan Fair claimed the organization was being politically targeted for “prior use of paid confidential informants to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups.”
However, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters a different agenda was in play.
“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 said when announcing the charges.
He continued, “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. There is nothing political about this indictment or this investigation.”
Blanch also pointed out that the investigation into the SPLC’s alleged fraudulent payments started in the Biden administration, but Biden’s DOJ opted not to pursue it.
A sampling of the payments reported by the New York Post from the indictment showed that plenty of funds were available to individuals in these groups to generate extremist activity.
They included payment totals ranging from $70,000 to a Klan member it featured in SPLC’s “extremist files” to $1 million to an informant to steal 25 boxes of documents from the neo-Nazi group called the National Alliance.
In the example relevant to the 2020 election, a leader of the 2017 Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville had received more than $270,000 over eight years, the money allegedly funneled through shell organizations by the SPLC.
That highly publicized protest, sparked by the removal of Civil War monuments, resulted in violent clashes between extremist groups and a night march of white supremacists carrying torches in a scene reminiscent of Nazi Germany.
That image became the political calling card of presidential candidate Joe Biden in the 2020 election, saying the torch bearers prompted him to run for the presidency.
He frequently described the Charlottesville neo-Nazis “emerging from the woods” with “their veins bulging from their necks” and then inaccurately accused then President Trump of saying they were “fine people.”
The SPLC’s paid informant for the rally, who was not identified in the indictment, allegedly “helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.”
Last October, FBI Director Kash Patel ended the bureau’s relationship with the SPLC, calling assistance it provided in the past “agenda driven intelligence” from an “outside group.”
“The Southern Poverty Law Center long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine,” he wrote on X at the time.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com
