Let’s be honest, if this story is true, it is one of the most astonishing political scandals you will ever read.
On Tuesday, the Department of Justice announced that a federal grand jury had indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center for allegedly making millions of dollars in fraudulent payments to members of the Ku Klux Klan and other neo-Nazi groups.
Yes, that Southern Poverty Law Center, the organization that has acted as America’s moral umpire for decades.
The same group that built its reputation by claiming to fight extremism is now accused of quietly financing it behind the scenes.
According to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the 11-count indictment filed in federal court in Alabama claims that over the last ten years, the left-wing nonprofit paid at least $3 million to eight people connected to far-right extremist organizations.
Take a moment and think about that.
VISIT OUR YOUTUBE CHANNELThey were not just tracking these people. They were not simply gathering information. They were paying them!
It sounds like they were paying racist groups to do racist things so that they could report on their activities so that they would get more donors so they could make more money.
The DOJ Office of Public Affairs posted:
Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals who were associated with various violent extremist groups including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and National Socialist Party of America
A Grand Jury in Montgomery, Alabama, today returned an indictment charging the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) with 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. The United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama Northern Division filed two forfeiture actions to recover alleged proceeds of the organization’s fraud scheme. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigated this case with assistance from the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI).
“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked. This Department of Justice will hold the SPLC and every other fraudulent organization operating with the same deceptive playbook accountable. No entity is above the law.”
“The SPLC allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public,” said FBI Director Kash Patel. “They lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups, and actually turned around and paid the leaders of these very extremist groups – even utilizing the funds to have these groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes. That is illegal – and this is an ongoing investigation against all individuals involved.”
One organizer tied to the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, reportedly received around $270,000 over an eight-year span. Neither that person nor the others named in the investigation were identified in the 14-page indictment.
Go ahead and read that again, because the Charlottesville rally was the very event every left-wing network on earth used to push the claim that President Donald Trump called neo-Nazis and white supremacists “very fine people.”
There is just one inconvenient problem with that narrative.
Trump explicitly condemned those hate groups.
He said it clearly.
CNN, MSNBC, and the rest of the usual suspects conveniently edited that part out.
WATCH:
Joe Biden launched his 2020 campaign on the Charlottesville lie.
WATCH:
Here he is arguing with a reporter who told him he was misquoting Trump because the president never said neo-nazis and white nationalists were very fine people:
WATCH:
Here he is once again repeating it.
And now we know that the SPLC paid the guys with tiki torches over a quarter of a million dollars to do the rally.
Biden went on as president, constantly talking about how white supremacy was the biggest domestic terror problem in America. Meanwhile, most Americans wondered where the heck all these white supremacists were hiding out because no one ever saw one.
More from the DOJ Office of Public Affairs post:
Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals who were associated with various violent extremist groups including:
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Ku Klux Klan
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United Klans of America
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Unite the Right
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National Alliance
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National Socialist Movement
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Aryan Nations affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club
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National Socialist Party of America (American Nazi Party)
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American Front
That is not exactly your neighborhood book club.
Another individual working inside a neo-Nazi group was allegedly paid $1 million to steal 25 boxes of internal documents from the organization.
Earlier that same day, SPLC CEO Bryan Fair responded forcefully. He said the organization was being targeted because of its “prior use of paid confidential informants to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups.”
That is their defense.
They say this was intelligence gathering.
Since the 1980s, the SPLC has used informants who entered extremist groups to report back. On paper, that sounds like something law enforcement agencies do all the time.
But this is where the story turns.
Blanche said during the press conference that the nonprofit never told law enforcement it was “paying off the Klu Klux Klan” or other extremist organizations.
That is not a side note.
That is the center of the case.
Several of these informants were also being paid while appearing in SPLC publications, including its public “Extremist File” webpage, as members of the very hate groups the organization claimed it was exposing.
So the same people being publicly condemned were privately cashing checks.
Prosecutors say in the indictment that these informants, called “field sources,” were also “engaged in the active promotion of racist groups.”
That changes everything.
Take Charlottesville as an example.
The unidentified field source connected to the 2017 white supremacist rally allegedly “helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.”
Read that again.
According to prosecutors, this person was not standing on the sidelines watching.
They were helping make the event happen.
Blanche explained it clearly.
“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 told reporters.
Then came the statement that may define this entire case.
“As the indictment describes, the SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred,” he said.
That is not just bad accounting.
That is a complete moral collapse.
Because people instantly assume politics in a case like this, Blanche also said this:
“There is nothing political about this indictment or this investigation,” Blanche added, claiming that the investigation preceded the Trump administration and Biden’s DOJ had made a decision “to not pursue” it. Of course not, because of how Biden exploited the Charlottesville lie over and over.
That matters because the moment people think it is just partisan warfare, they stop paying attention.
FBI Director Kash Patel added even more detail.
He described the case as a “widespread, decade-long multi-million dollar fraud” that lasted from 2014 to 2023 and was hidden through a “banking network,” “shell companies,” and other fake business entities.
According to Patel, this was not careless bookkeeping.
It was organized.
The SPLC then “fraudulently raised money by lying to their donor network, thousands of Americans, to go ahead and actually pay the leadership of these supposed violent extremist groups,” Patel noted.
That means people who thought they were donating to fight hate may have been helping fund it.
The fake entities allegedly used to move the money included a “Center Investigative Agency,” or CIA, “Fox Photography,” “North West Technologies,” “Tech Writers Group,” and “Rare Books Warehouse,” which “conducted no actual business,” according to the indictment.
Honestly, it sounds like someone ran out of fake company names halfway through.
The indictment, filed in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama’s Northern Division, includes four counts related to making “false or misleading statements” about those entities to a federally insured bank on December 10, 2016.
It also includes six counts of wire fraud connected to payments totaling $13,905 on April 25, 2023.
The final charge, count number 11, is conspiracy to commit money laundering.
But the most devastating part may be this.
Donors were never “told that some of the donated funds were used for the benefit of the violent extremist groups or that some of the donated funds would be used in the commission of state and federal crimes,” the indictment noted.
That is the real issue.
Trust.
People donated because they believed they were supporting justice. Prosecutors now say that money may have gone toward the exact opposite.
If convictions happen, the government could seize the “gross receipts obtained, directly or indirectly, from the offenses.”
In simple terms, they could lose everything.
Of course, allegations are not convictions. Everyone deserves due process.
But if even half of this turns out to be true, then this is bigger than a money scandal.
It becomes an institutional scandal.
Because when an organization that claims to protect the public is accused of secretly feeding the very evil it says it exists to stop, one question becomes impossible to ignore:
Were they actually fighting extremism, or just making money from it?
#splcindictment #dojinvestigation #charlottesville
