The Department of Justice on Tuesday announced a bombshell 11-count fraud indictment accusing the Southern Poverty Law Center of secretly funding leaders and organizers of white supremacist, racist and other hate groups that the civil rights group claimed to be battling.
“The SPLC’s paid informants (‘field sources’) engaged in the active promotion of racist groups at the same time time that the SPLC was denouncing the same groups on its website,” alleges the indictment returned by a grand jury in the U.S. District Court in Montgomery, Alabama, on Tuesday.
The SPLC, which is a non-profit civil rights group, is charged with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud, and one count of money laundering.
Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC paid at least $3 million to eight individuals, some of whom were associated with the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, the National Socialist Party of America, the Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, and the America Front, said Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche at a press conference.
“The SPLC was not dismantling the groups,” said Blanche, as FBI Director Kash Patel stood at his side. “It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”
