The Southern Poverty Law Center filed two briefs in federal court on April 21, alleging that the Department of Justice lied when it charged the civil rights organization with multiple felony crimes related to its use of undercover informants who reported on the inner workings of right-wing extremist groups.
The Justice Department on April 21 filed criminal charges against the SPLC, a storied civil rights group that has challenged extremist groups from the KKK to the modern-day alt-right since its founding in 1971, alleging that the nonprofit committed fraud and money laundering by paying members of these groups to act as informants. A key allegation in the charging documents, amplified by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and other administration figures, is that the SPLC did not provide any information gained from informants to law enforcement.
“There’s no information that we have that suggests that the money they were paying to these informants and these members of these organizations, they then turned around and shared what they learned with law enforcement,” Blanche said on Fox News after announcing the indictment.
This is false, the Alabama-based advocacy organization claims in two briefs filed in the federal district court on Tuesday. These briefs state that the SPLC provided information, including 15,000 documents, to federal prosecutors at an April 6 meeting showing that its paid informants collected actionable intelligence that the group then passed on to both federal and local law enforcement agencies. The briefs say that the information led to convictions and potentially stopped domestic terrorist attacks.
