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.
