by Kevin Killough
A federal grand jury in Alabama on Tuesday indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on 11 counts of wire and bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering, as the Justice Department accused the group that rose to fame during the 1960s Civil Rights movement of paying members of 21st century extremist groups to stoke hatred.
“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,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told a news conference attended by CBS News. “The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”
Blanche said the group was charged with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. He said that the SPLC had paid at least $3 million to eight members of these extremist groups.
Among the groups whose members received funds were the Ku Klux Klan, United Klans of America, Aryan Nations, and the Nationalist Socialist Party of American Nazis.
The SPLC is a nonprofit that tracks white supremacist and other hate groups across the U.S., and has been a frequent target of President Donald Trump’s allies. It is best known for its work investigating the Ku Klux Klan.
The group has acknowledged using such informants to infiltrate extremist groups and gather intelligence on their operations, which it shared with local and federal law enforcement, according to the Associated Press.
The Justice Department had no immediate comment, the wire service also said.
Bryan Fair, CEO of the SPLC, said that the organization doesn’t know all the details, but the Trump administration has launched an investigation, which may lead to charges. Fair said the SPLC worked with informants during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, when violence against activists was running high.
“In light of that work, we sought to protect the safety of our staff and the public. We frequently shared what we learned from informants with local and federal law enforcement, including the FBI. We did not, however, share our use of informants broadly with anyone, to protect the identity and safety of the informants and their families,” Fair said.
He said the SPLC “will not be intimidated into silence or contrition and we will not abandon our mission or the communities [it] serves.”
“This moment in history finds Americans in a critical struggle between those who continue to pull and bend the arc of history toward justice and those who resist progress,” Fair noted.
He said the SPLC will “vigorously defend” themselves.
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Kevin Killough is a reporter for Just the News. Zachery Schmidt is the digital editor of The Star News Network and contributed to this story.
Photo “Todd Blanche and Kash Patel” by DOJ.
Thank you Alabama for someone FINALLY doing something to expose the hate-spewing SPLC. The democrat-controlled media has long protected these evil-doers.