The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a prominent civil rights organization, has been indicted on federal fraud charges related to past payments it made to confidential informants to infiltrate extremist groups including the Ku Klux Klan, the justice department announced on Tuesday.
In a statement, Bryan Fair, SPLC’s CEO, called the allegations “false” and said the justice department’s actions “will not shake our resolve to fight for justice and ensure the promise of the Civil Rights movement becomes a reality for all”.
Speaking to reporters in Washington on Tuesday evening, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, said an Alabama grand jury returned an 11-count indictment against the 55-year-old civil rights group in the case brought by the justice department in Alabama, where the organization is based. The charges include wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
In his remarks, Blanche alleged that the group was “doing the exact opposite of what it’s told its donors it was doing – not dismantling extremism, but funding it”.
Blanche was joined by the FBI Director Kash Patel, who called the paid informant program “a serious and egregious violation of a group that purported to dismantle violent extremist groups, but in turn, actually only fueled the hatred”.
The investigation is being handled by the US attorney district for the middle district of Alabama, which includes Montgomery, the state capital where the SPLC is based.
According to prosecutors, the SPLC covertly funneled more than $3m to confidential sources in extremist groups between 2014 and 2023. The indictment lays out a number of fictitious entities with names such as Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Fox photography, and tech writers groups that prosecutors say were created to conceal the transfer of funds to confidential sources. They accuse officials at the SPLC of lying to donors when they told them their money would be used to “dismantle” violent extremist groups when it was actually being used to pay leaders in the violent groups. Prosecutors say the organization also lied to banks about who owned the entities.
Fair disputed the allegations and argued that the informant program “saved lives”.
“Taking on violent hate and extremist groups is among the most dangerous work there is, and we believe it is also among the most important work we do,” he said.
The indictment was announced shortly after Fair revealed that the justice department had launched a criminal inquiry into the organization over its “prior use of paid confidential informants to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups”.
Fair said the group used to use paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups and monitor them, but no longer does.
“This use of informants was necessary because we are no stranger to threats of violence. In 1983, our offices were firebombed, and in the years since, there have been countless credible threats against our staff,” he said. “For decades, we engaged in unprecedented litigation to dismantle the Klan and other hate groups. In light of that work, we sought to protect the safety of our staff and the public.”
The investigation comes as the Trump administration has pledged to crack down on non-profit groups opposed to its priorities. Conservative groups have long decried the way the SPLC has labelled certain right-leaning groups as “hate groups”.
Last year, the FBI announced it was ending its relationship with the organization, saying the organization had defamed right-leaning groups by labelling them hate groups.
“Today, the federal government has been weaponized to dismantle the rights of our nation’s most vulnerable people and any organization like ours that stands in the breach,” Fair said. “We will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff, and our work; we will continue to fight hate; and we will continue to seek a safer and more just world.”
