The Southern Poverty Law Center, the 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 has announced.
In a statement, Bryan Fair, the SPLC’s chief executive, 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 SPLC is based. The charges include wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
In his remarks, Blanche alleged 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 for the middle district of Alabama, which includes Montgomery, the state capital.
According to prosecutors, the SPLC covertly funneled more than $3m to confidential sources within extremist groups between 2014 and 2023. The indictment lays out a number of fictitious entities with names such as “Center Investigative Agency”, “Fox Photography”, and “Tech Writers Group”, which 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 allegedly being used to pay leaders in the violent groups. Prosecutors say the organization also lied to banks about who owned the entities.
It is “very odd” to charge a corporate entity with these crimes, said Andrew Tessman, a former federal prosecutor who handled financial fraud cases.
“To prove wire fraud, you have to show that the defendant had intent to defraud. That’s hard to do even when you’re talking about an individual person. To establish that an entire corporate entity had intent to defraud seems exceptionally difficult,” he said. “Same goes for bank fraud. Difficult crime to prove because you have to prove what is going on inside someone’s head at the moment they are conducting the financial transactions. Easier to do with an individual because you can get the context from other witnesses and sometimes emails or texts.”
“I don’t think they can prove their case at trial,” he added.
One area where prosecutors might have success is in looking at what representations the SPLC had made to banks. Tessman noted that prosecutors had not technically filed bank fraud charges against the SPLC, but rather charged them with making a false statement to a bank. “It’s an underused but powerful statute. It just requires an intentional false statement to a bank. If it is true that the SPLC set up false entities and the bank was not aware of it, they could succeed on those charges.”
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 fire-bombed, 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 longstanding relationship with the SPLC, saying the organization had defamed right-leaning groups by labelling them hate groups. Asked whether previous leaders at the FBI were aware of the informant program, Blanche said his understanding was that the SPLC “never told anybody in law enforcement that they were paying off the Ku Klux Klan”.
In his earlier video statement, Fair said the organization “frequently shared what we learned from informants with local and federal law enforcement, including the FBI”.
“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.”
In a statement defending the SPLC, Simon Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, assailed the justice department’s investigation as “yet another example of the Trump administration’s extreme attempts to silence its critics”.
“The Trump administration’s attack against the Southern Poverty Law Center is a direct threat to the values that make America great,” Romero said. “In this time of unprecedented peril for our democracy, we urge all Americans of good conscience to join us as we stand in support of the Southern Poverty Law Center.”