On Tuesday afternoon, the country’s top law enforcement officials, FBI Director Kash Patel and acting United States Attorney General Todd Blanche announced a slew of criminal charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization that has worked for decades to investigate, report on and combat white supremacist, neo-Nazi and other racist hate groups.
The charges focus on the SPLC’s use of paid informants, who, according to prosecutors, were given large sums of money to infiltrate some of the nation’s most infamous and dangerous extremist groups. This tactic, Blanche said at a press conference, “was not dismantling these groups, it was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”
The federal indictment against the SPLC, states: “Unbeknownst to donors, some of their donated money was being used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance.”
Paying informants to infiltrate hate groups, the tactic at the heart of the SPLC indictment has, however, also been used by federal law enforcement agencies “for decades, if not longer” said Javed Ali, associate professor of practice at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan and a former senior counterterrorism official at the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.
