A Farcical Hearing

The DOJ and FBI relied on the SPLC’s informant program during Trump’s first term. Now they—and the House Judiciary Committee—are prosecuting and vilifying the SPLC for the same critical program.

This morning, the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee (HJC) is holding a hearing titled, “The Southern Poverty Law Center: Manufacturing Hate.” Its premise is a farce — an opportunity for HJC Republicans to amplify the Trump regime’s outrageous smear of a legendary civil rights organization.

In April, President Donald Trump’s corrupt Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that a grand jury had returned an indictment against the SPLC. The DOJ claims that the Center defrauded donors by using their funds to support white supremacist groups, as opposed to dismantling them. HJC Republicans have gleefully repeated this claim. “The SPLC said they raised money to fight hate, instead they funded it,” Jim Jordan, the committee’s chair, wrote the day after the indictment was released.

As we wrote at the time, that allegation is nonsense. And we’ve learned more in the weeks since, including that the SPLC shared intelligence from its informants with the FBI and the DOJ during the first Trump administration on at least three occasions. That intelligence led to two arrests and helped law enforcement officials thwart a white supremacist terror plot in Las Vegas in 2019.

Simply put: the DOJ and FBI went from relying on the SPLC’s informant program during Trump’s first term to prosecuting the SPLC for the same program during Trump’s second term. That is a perversion of justice and an affront to all of those people who have worked to prevent white supremacist violence.

The indictment centers on the SPLC’s use of 10 informants to infiltrate and report on some of the most dangerous extremist groups in the country. As we noted in our first analysis, it’s clear that the SPLC used evidence supplied by these informants to publicly report on, and warn about, the threats posed by white supremacists. This is consistent with the SPLC’s 55-year mission to dismantle such groups. It’s also a common tactic employed by law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, that have relied on intelligence from the SPLC’s informants.

In late April, the SPLC’s legal team filed two motions containing new intel concerning the organization’s cooperation with the FBI and DOJ during Trump’s first term. These facts completely undermine the indictment’s central allegation. Consider the following examples.

August 2017: The SPLC warned the FBI about the “Unite the Right” rally

The indictment insinuates that the SPLC used one informant to plan the notorious “Unite the Right Rally” in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017. Rightwing media has run wild with this accusation, trying to make the SPLC the scapegoat for an event orchestrated by neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other extremists. During an interview with 60 Minutes in late April, Trump absurdly claimed that “Charlottesville was all funded by the Southern Law [SPLC],” “was done to make me look bad,” and was somehow part of a “rigged election.” Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY), who sits on the judiciary committee, has echoed this nonsensical claim, alleging that the rally “was not a right-wing protest” but instead “an SPLC operation” that the organization “funded,” “organized,” and then “blamed @POTUS for it.”

The facts tell a very different story.

As we noted previously, the SPLC warned the public about the potential for violence at the rally. In a newsletter published on Aug. 7, 2017, just four days prior to the event, the SPLC warned that it was “shaping up to be the largest hate-gathering of its kind in decades in the United States” and presented “the clear possibility of violence.”

The SPLC was not only warning the public. It was warning the FBI.

According to one of the SPLC’s filings, the organization used its “informant program to gather voluminous and detailed information about the risk of violence” at the “Unite the Right” rally. That intelligence was “memorialized and provided to law enforcement, including to the FBI’s Mobile, Alabama office” (the same office leading the current investigation of the SPLC) in a 45-page “Event Alert.” According to the SPLC’s counsel, the alert “warned the FBI of the specific individuals likely to attend the rally and foment violence, providing not only names and pictures, but specific details about associates, backgrounds, and criminal histories.” The SPLC “even provided details about those individuals’ weapons of choice based on intelligence gathered through the information program.”

If the HJC Republicans were really concerned with oversight, they’d want to see the SPLC’s 45-page event alert. They’d also investigate why Trump’s DOJ didn’t mention it in its indictment. The SPLC’s warnings proved to be prescient. James Alex Fields, Jr., a white supremacist who marched with the neo-Nazi group Vanguard America, rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens of others.

2018-2019: The SPLC’s informant intelligence led to the arrest and conviction of a white supremacist

The SPLC’s defense team met with Justice Department officials prior to the indictment. During a meeting on April 6 of this year, according to one of the filings, “defense counsel presented documents and information relating to Individual A, a member of Vanguard America (a well-known extremist group) who sought a national security clearance as part of Individual A’s work at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in 2018.” The information “provided to the prosecutors showed how and when the informant program gathered and passed information about Individual A to law enforcement.” This individual was so dangerous that “the government repeatedly requested” he be “detained because of the serious risk of violence he presented.”

The information provided by defense counsel to DOJ prosecutors made it clear that: (1) the SPLC’s “informant program resulted” in the “detection” of this extremist’s “criminal conduct”; (2) this information was provided to law enforcement; and, (3) as a result, this white supremacist was investigated, indicted, detained, and sentenced to prison. The filings do not specifically identify the extremist in question. Other reporting identifies him as a man who attended the “Unite the Rally” in 2017 and pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI in 2019.

The SPLC’s legal team pointed to this case in a motion asking the court to prohibit Trump regime officials from continuing to make additional materially false statements. For instance, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche appeared on Fox News’s The Ingraham Angle hours after the indictment was released, and stated: “There’s no information that we have that suggests that the money they were paying to these informants and these members of these organizations, they then turned around and shared what they learned with law enforcement.” But that is not so — in fact, the SPLC informed prosecutors about its role in the investigation of Individual A during the April 6 meeting.

There is an additional reason why the details of Individual A’s detection are important: Vanguard America was one of the white supremacist groups in attendance at “Unite the Right.” The SPLC’s role used its informants to infiltrate the extremist groups responsible for the rally — not to sponsor them.

If the HJC Republicans were really concerned with oversight, then they’d seek to question Blanche about his false statements. They’d also investigate whether the SPLC’s role in detecting Individual A were shared with the grand jury prior to the indictment.

2019: The SPLC’s information intelligence helped the FBI thwart a white supremacist terrorist plot in Las Vegas

In 2019, the SPLC’s defense counsel writes, the organization “gathered through the informant program and provided to law enforcement information which detailed the risk that Individual B, a member of white supremacist extremist group Atomwaffen Division, intended to engage in a major terrorist attack against Las Vegas citizens.” A link provided in the court document reveals that this extremist is Conor Climo.

In mid-2019, according to the DOJ during Trump’s first term, Climo communicated “with individuals who identified with the white supremacist extremist group Feuerkrieg Division, which is an offshoot of the US-based white supremacist extremist group Atomwaffen Division.” The DOJ explained that “Feuerkrieg Division members share a common goal of challenging laws, social order, and the government via terrorism and other violent acts” and “encourages attacks on the federal government, critical infrastructure, minorities, and members of the LGBTQ community.”

Climo admittedly “discussed setting fire to a Las Vegas synagogue” and “making Molotov cocktails and improvised explosive devices.” He also admittedly “conducted surveillance on a bar that he believed catered to the LGBTQ community, located on Fremont Street in Downtown Las Vegas, in preparation for a potential attack.”

During a search of Climo’s home, an FBI Special Agent Bomb Technician found chemicals and components “consistent with items needed to construct an” improvised explosive device, as well as “hand drawn schematics of IED circuits.”

As with the other examples cited above, the SPLC’s role in detecting this white supremacist plot was not included in the indictment. Any legitimate oversight effort would explore that omission.

A farcical hearing

Of course, the Republican-led HJC is not interested in true oversight. It often serves as an echo chamber for the Trump regime. Two days after the SPLC was indicted, Jim Jordan requested that the organization turn over documents to the committee. “The Committee has been conducting oversight of the Biden-Harris Administration’s close coordination with the SPLC on federal civil rights matters,” Jordan said. He then cited several grievances the American right has against the Center.

But the committee should not only investigate the SPLC’s “coordination” with the Biden administration’s DOJ. It should explore the ways in which the Center’s informant program helped the DOJ and FBI dismantle white supremacy during the first Trump administration.

Real oversight requires as much. Anything short of that is a farce.