Policy / April 28, 2026
The lawsuit against the anti-hate organization will reassure racists that an organization that successfully tracks them, denounces them, and puts them out of business is now in the government’s crosshairs.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche (left) and FBI Director Kash Patel appear during a press conference following the Southern Poverty Law Center’s indictment on money laundering charges at the Department of Justice in Washington, DC, April 21, 2026.
(Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images) To understand the Trump Justice Department’s indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, let’s start with the fact that DOJ officials’ claims have finally been promoted. Tuesday press conference are not in the indictment. Announcing charges, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche presented the case as being centered on the SPLC paying right-wing extremists to commit acts of violence…”create extremism he claims to oppose it by paying sources to stir up racial hatred… not by dismantling extremism but by financing it. THE DOJ press release doubles downBlanche stating that “the SPLC manufactures racism to justify its existence. Using donor money to allegedly take advantage of Klan members cannot go unchecked.” Calling it a “fraudulent operation,” FBI Director Kash Patel says the SPLC “lied to its donors, promising to dismantle violent extremist groups, and actually turned around and paid off the leaders of these highly extremist groups – even using the funds for these groups to facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes. This is illegal – and this is an ongoing investigation into everyone involved.”
It would indeed be illegal to pay people to commit hate crimes, but that is not what the indictment accuses the SPLC of doing. And although Patel says these charges stem from an investigation of “all individuals involved,” that must have yielded little result, since no individuals are charged. If it seems incredible that a civil rights organization with more than half a century of fighting white supremacy funded this project — or that a lawsuit purportedly filed on behalf of defrauded donors can’t name a single one of them — that’s because it did.
“Above all, this is a deeply dishonest indictment – politically motivated, intellectually bankrupt and designed to leave a lasting false impression in the minds of people who will never look beyond the headline,” Harry Litman, former U.S. Attorney and Deputy Attorney General of the DOJ, writing on his Substack. “This is a narrative that is not only false but Orwellian, completely subverted by people who deliberately intend to deceive.”
The charges in the indictment are actually much narrower than Trump’s DOJ spokespeople would have you believe, amounting to one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, four counts of making false statements to a federally insured bank, and six counts of wire fraud. The DOJ complaint is that the money the SPLC paid to informants who were secretly gathering information about the criminal activities of hate groups—including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance—came from “bank accounts connected to a series of fictitious entities,” thereby allowing the SPLC to “conceal the true nature, source, ownership, and control of…the money the SPLC paid to sources on the ground.” In practice, the SPLC placed fake company names like “Rare Books Photography” and “North West Tech” on the accounts it used to pay high-ranking informants – instead of openly admitting that it was paying undercover sources whose lives were truly in danger. And this, the DOJ argues, amounts to duping the banks that held these accounts and the donors who funded them.
Blanche backed out of the game when asked to explain the cheating accusations at Tuesday’s press conference, stating that “in any fundraising efforts that the investigation foundthey said, “Oh, and by the way, we’re going to give a million dollars to the Ku Klux Klan.” So, it’s fraud… And then the bank fraud aspect is that you have an obligation to tell your financial institution what the company or entity that you’re opening an account for is doing.
Related articles It is absurd to suggest that the SPLC should have left a paper trail of checks stamped “From SPLC Account” as payments to informants embedded in murderous groups such as the KKK. In fact, the SPLC’s success is partly linked to its highly placed – implicitly secret – informants and the information they have access to and are able to pass on.
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But Litman, who has spent his career trying wire fraud cases, also notes that a conviction under a federal law 18 USC § 1343 requires proof of an explicit lie that was told in an attempt to defraud a victim. “Surprisingly, the indictment contains no allegation, much less evidence, of an alleged lie or material omission,” Litman wrote. The entire DOJ case hinges on the accusation that the SPLC website claims the group works to “dismantle” white supremacy — and that donors were not informed that this involved paying informants embedded in hate groups. But, as Litman notes, there are no specific promises, not a single defrauded donor is named, and there is no citation from the SPLC to demonstrate a lie he told donors. “What the government is proposing instead is a flight of fancy: Because the SPLC solicited donations to ‘dismantle’ extremism while simultaneously paying informants within extremist groups, the donors must have been misled,” Litman writes. “This is not a true theory of fraud.”
Then there is the fact that the FBI itself admits, perhaps unintentionally, that the information provided by the informants was used to harm the groups in which they were embedded. The indictment refers to an informant who “entered the headquarters of a violent extremist group and stole 25 boxes containing their documents.” The SPLC then took these documents, secretly copied them and asked the informant to return them, then used the information obtained to publicly defame the group in “an article published on the SPLC’s Hatewatch website.” In what world does this do anything other than what the SPLC promised?
Unlike the DOJ, The interception identifiedby name, 20 verified donors to the SPLC — along with comments from dozens of other self-identified SPLC supporters — in the days after the indictment was dropped. Maya Lenox, a Texas-based SPLC donor, and other donors the outlet spoke with called the DOJ indictment “ridiculous” and expressed satisfaction with how their dollars are being spent. “This is an organization that provides very detailed information about how these hate groups are moving, and of course, to get that information you’re basically going to need spies,” Lenox said. The interception. “To get that information, you’re going to have to make it worth your while.”
“We knew they were paying informants,” said longtime SPLC contributor Mary Wynne Kling. The interception. “It is both infuriating and laughable that they are accusing the SPLC of funding hate groups.”
This feeling extended beyond The interception» responded to the survey on social networks. Professional poker player Andy Bloch tweeted”I have donated in the past to the SPLC, and I probably would have donated MORE if I had known they had infiltrated extremist organizations, and I might have directed my contributions directly to those programs after learning they only made up 0.3 percent of their spending.”
The FBI has long known about the SPLC’s use of informants — a practice it borrowed from the FBI itself — in part because the organization shared collected information with the Bureau. A 2007 FBI Press Release boasts of the agency’s partnerships with the SPLC, NAACP and National Urban League; at the request of local, state and federal police departmentsthe SPLC has a long history of conducting training on hate groups for law enforcement.
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Of course, this happened before the government itself aligned itself with ideologically aligned supporters of hate groups. In recent years, far-right groups, including Moms for FreedomTHE Family Research CouncilTHE Proud BoysAnd Charlie Kirk’s turning point United States all landed on the SPLC’s Hatewatch list, putting the organization in conflict with the most visible and vocal elements of Trump’s base. In October, Patel summarily announced that the FBI was severing ties with the SPLC, denouncing it as a “machine to defame supporters.” The following December, House Republicans held performance hearings accusing the organization of being “partisan and profitable.” It turns out that both of these efforts mark the beginning of an attempt by this administration to delegitimize the work of an organization that targets its most trusted constituents.
If there remained any doubts about the fallacious nature of the DOJ indictment, Trump himself dispelled them during a 60 minutes broadcast on Sunday. In the middle of a long and winding tiradethe president accused the SPLC of everything from funding the No Kings protests (they didn’t) to manipulating the 2020 presidential election against him (they obviously didn’t). Above all, the president has proven that the DOJ affair is entirely political – motivated by his desire for revenge against dissidents and perceived enemies; his efforts to sanitize history, both personal and broader; and his debts to a white supremacist movement that has long been a crucial part of his base.
“I see these No Kings, who are funded just like Southern Law, have you seen all that? he told interviewer Norah O’Donnellwho was attempting to conduct an interview about the alleged shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “Southern Law funds the KKK and a lot of other radical, terrible groups. And then they come out and say, ‘Oh, we have to stop the KKK.’ And yet they give, you know, hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars. This is a total scam run by the Democrats. This shows you that like Charlottesville[[the site of the 2017 “Unite the Right” white nationalist rally where the counter -protester Heather Heyer was killed]– Charlottesville was entirely funded by Southern law. This was also a deal with Southern Law. And it was done to make me look bad, and it turned out to be a total fake. It was essentially a rigged election. This is part of election rigging.
Although founded in 1971, the SPLC’s roots go back further, to pro bono lawsuits brought by white Alabama-based civil rights lawyers Morris Dees and Joe Levin. Dees and Levin won a 1970 lawsuit that led to desegregation from a YMCA in Montgomery; another case filed that year led to redistricting that ultimately gave black voters representation in the Alabama legislature. The SPLC gained national attention when it helped secure a $7 million verdict in 1987 for Beulah Mae Donald, the mother of a black teenager lynched in Mobile by the KKK six years earlier. The decision bankrupted the United Klan of America but, perhaps more humiliatingly, gave ownership of Klan National Headquarters to Donald. The 1981 SPLC “Klanwatch” Pilot renamed Hatewatch in 1998focused on monitoring the activities of hate groups, often through informants, and sharing that intelligence with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security.
The FBI is well aware of the value of using well-placed informants, not only because it does the same, but also because the federal agency created the initiative. the plan. “Since the FBI’s founding in 1908, informants have played a major role in the investigation and prosecution of a wide variety of federal crimes,” the report said. The DOJ’s own online story of the agency, which cites 1970s FBI chief William Webster’s assertion that “the informant is THE most effective tool in law enforcement today, whether state, local or federal.”
And if paying informants who commit crimes makes you automatically guilty of financing these crimes, then the FBI’s century-old history of funding sources who commit illegal violent acts — “not to dismantle extremism but to finance it,” as Blanche put it — is unmatched.
One of the FBI’s most notorious informants, KKK leader Gary Thomas Rowe Jr., was not only in the car with the Klansmen who committed the 1965 murder civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo, but she was later identified by others as the real shooter. Rowe even told New York Times that FBI officials looked the other way when he killed another black man, and “purge [the agency’s] files on his undercover work in the Klan’s “action squads” in an effort to protect his own reputation. The FBI ignored the body trails left by notorious Irish gangster Whitey Bulger during his two decades as an FBI informant, even though the government eventually admitted “the arrangement helped [Bulger] covering up 19 murders, knowing the identities of witnesses who were later found dead, and sending an innocent man to prison for a murder committed by Mr. Bulger. Neo-Nazi Joshua Caleb Sutter Denounced after almost 20 years of activity paid by the FBI in 2021, while continuing to write and publish books detailing fantasies of rape, child murder, and other atrocities-content A Wired investigation The findings “inspired violence in Russia, Britain, the United States, Canada and elsewhere.” Sutter’s publishing company was likely kept afloat, in large part, by the $140,000 the FBI paid him.
In fact, so many criminal informants – moles, snitches, rats, etc. – committed such horrific crimes while on the payroll of the FBI that Congress issued a highly critical report in 2004 entitled EVERY SECRET GENERATE: THE FBI’S USE OF MURDERERS AS INFORMANTS. “Federal law enforcement officials made the decision to use murderers as informants beginning in the 1960s,” the study opens. “Known killers were protected from the consequences of their crimes and deliberately kept on the streets. »
As of this writing, the agency has not indicted itself.
In public statements, Blanche and Patel have taken great pains to confuse the SPLC payments with informants who were members of the Klan with the false narrative that the SPLC supported the Klan’s hate crimes and other violence.
This obfuscation works in tandem with what legal analyst Joyce Vance describes as the “talk about an indictment” of the SPLC – meaning that the DOJ document goes beyond listing alleged crimes and charges, adding statements intended to shape, and arguably distort, the public narrative. This is a narrative that seems less focused on winning a conviction than on letting the white supremacists Trump appeals to his base know that this administration has their backs. This entire demonstration, we can deduce, is intended to reassure white nationalists that an organization who has passed 55 years Tracking them down, denouncing them and bankrupting them are now in the government’s sights, and the law is firmly on their side. Rest easy, hatemongers, because the era of the consequences of violent, organized white supremacy is over.
It is also about perpetuating the lie that racism is a false grievance manufactured by “black people” and “the left.” The right has long defended the idea that racism, if it really existed, died between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Act. The Trump administration has taken up this project more than any other administration in modern American history, denying the existence of discrimination while implementing some of the most transparent racist policies many of us have witnessed in our lifetimes — attempting to erase America’s racist history while using every tool at its disposal to reaffirm a white supremacist hierarchy it fears will be defeated.
But white supremacy is real, and this administration’s efforts to pretend it isn’t run into trouble when white supremacists within it chafe at being erased. For example, the indictment states that an SPLC informant was among the organizers of the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right march, and that the informant “posted racist messages under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate the transportation of several participants to the event.” This passage clearly tends to assert, without ever actually saying it, that the SPLC is in one way or another responsible for the carnage of that day. But this idea only works if one believes the easily disproven idea that Unite the Right would not have happened without the SPLC informant. From the right rags and MAGA influencers like Jack “Pizzagate” Posobiec ran with it, as if the story couldn’t be undone with a simple Google search. But Richard Spencer, the most visible member of the alt-right at the time and one of the main organizers of Unite the Right, points out that this is simply not true.
“Conservatives are stupid, and they’re coming to the wrong conclusion – and they’re coming to a very selfish conclusion, which is that anyone who isn’t Daily Wire or Matt Walsh or whatever – anyone who isn’t a conservative movement – is somehow a puppet and the ones pulling the strings are graduates of Yale University, the military-industrial complex, the SPLC, the deep state, etc., and it’s all fake and faked. » Spencer said on a podcast after the announcement of the indictment. “The fact is, this indictment doesn’t even suggest that. And it’s just a very selfish thing for conservatives to now say, ‘Oh, I knew it was a hoax.’…Charlotteville was not a hoax.”
The fact that Spencer and I came to the same conclusion, albeit from very different starting points, of course, speaks to the weakness of this indictment. It is also appropriate that this decision currently comes from a DOJ ask courts to expunge records cleared of the January 6 insurgents accused of “seditious plot”, the the greatest betrayal charges from this day forward. Meanwhile, white supremacist violence continues to pose the greatest threat to national security, a fact recognized by FBI reports. in 2006 And 2015And 2021and the Department of Homeland Security in 2009. The DOJ was created in 1870amid white backlash to black emancipation, to protect African-American voting rights. On Tuesday, he reported that his initial mission was officially complete.
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Kali Holloway Kali Holloway is a columnist for The nation and the former director of Doing Things Right Projecta national campaign to tear down Confederate monuments and tell the truth about history. His writings appeared in Living room, The guardian, The daily beast, Time, AlterNet, Truth, The Huffington Post, The national memo, Jezebel, Raw storyand many other points of sale.