A federal grand jury on Tuesday indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on 11 counts of wire and bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering,
FBI Director Kash Patel and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the indictment Tuesday from a grand jury in the middle district of Alabama.
“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,” Blanche said at a news conference. “The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center came to prominence during the civil rights movement in the U.S. for reporting on white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, but it’s been criticized in recent years for identifying a number of Christian organizations as hate groups.
The Tuesday indictment alleges SPLC “secretly funneled more than $3 million in funds to members of white supremacist and extremist groups” to fan the flames.
“It was doing the exact opposite of what its told its donors it was doing, not dismantling extremism, but funding it to carry out this scheme,” Blanche said. “SPLC created bank accounts in the name of at least five completely fictitious organizations that had no bona fide employees or legitimate business purpose. The money was passed from SPLC to one sham account, to a second sham account, and then loaded onto prepaid cards to give to the members of the extremist groups. This was designed to shield the source of those funds, and because of this, SPLC is also charged with one count, as I said earlier, of conspiracy to commit money laundering.”