The Trump Regime’s Corrupt Indictment of SPLC Is a New Low

*Special report on DOJ's latest sham indictment*

During a press conference on Tuesday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) had been criminally indicted by a grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama. “There is nothing political about this indictment,” Blanche insisted. Anyone paying attention knows that is a lie.

MAGA Republicans have been gunning for the SPLC for years. During a congressional hearing late last year, for instance, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) portrayed the legendary civil rights organization as a bogeyman out to get conservatives and demanded a full investigation into how the DOJ, FBI, and other federal agencies had long relied on the center’s work. Other leading MAGA Republicans have loudly complained when the organization called out their hate.

President Donald Trump’s corrupted DOJ and FBI have found a way to use the court system to act out MAGA’s revenge fantasy. Absurdly, the Trump regime alleges that instead of seeking to “dismantle” white supremacist groups — the center’s mission for the past 55 years, during which time it helped take down the Ku Klux Klan — it was surreptitiously paying extremists as part of some convoluted conspiracy. Blanche accuses the group of “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.” Patel claims the SPLC “allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public.”

These allegations are a smear. None of them withstand scrutiny.

The indictment centers on the SPLC’s use of paid informants to infiltrate white supremacist groups. That is not unusual. It is often difficult to get inside groups seeking to overthrow the U.S. government or impose their racist vision on the country. The FBI itself regularly uses informants, as the “courts have recognized” that it “is lawful and often essential to the effectiveness of properly authorized law enforcement investigations.”

Indeed, the SPLC provided intelligence from its informant network to law enforcement agencies, including the FBI — a fact that is not included in the indictment. The exclusion of any mention of the longstanding working relationship between the SPLC and the FBI is outrageous, and undermines the entire premise of the case. “We frequently shared what we learned from informants with local and federal law enforcement, including the FBI,” Bryan Fair, the SPLC’s interim president, said in a video defending his organization.

FBI Director Kash Patel knows that Fair’s statement is true. Patel severed “all ties” between the FBI and SPLC in October 2025, as he wrote on X. Patel’s statement is an admission that the SPLC had those ties and was providing intelligence to the Bureau. In fact, prior to Patel’s decision to end the relationship, Republican congressmen and conservative activists frequently complained that the FBI was cooperating too closely with the SPLC.

Nevertheless, the DOJ alleges that the SPLC’s use of informants was part of a “scheme and artifice” to deceive donors. Acting U.S. Attorney Kevin Davidson alleges in the indictment that while SPLC’s “stated mission included the dismantling of white supremacy and confronting hate across the country,” it was, “unbeknownst to donors,” secretly using “donated money…to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance.”

However, the indictment utterly fails to explain how these payments to extremist leaders undercut the SPLC’s stated mission. Nor does it say how anyone working for the Center intentionally deceived donors. Nor could it; if you surveyed donors to the organization, they either already stated or would likely say that investigating hate is exactly what they wanted to support and that these claims are reprehensible.

The DOJ’s entire case centers on the SPLC’s alleged payments to ten informants inside extremist groups. Pages 4 through 6 of the indictment contain all these examples. Some employees of the Center referred to the informants as “Fs,” often assigning a number to them as well, according to the DOJ. The indictment adopts this methodology for referencing them.

Below are all ten examples, showing that none of them support the criminal charges brought against the group.

Informant One, “F-37”

“F-37” is described as “a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ event in Charlottesville, Virginia.” That event brought together hundreds of neo-Nazis and other white nationalists to protest the removal of Confederate statues. The indictment alleges that this informant “attended the event at the direction of the SPLC,” “made racist postings” under the Center’s “supervision,” and “helped coordinate transportation” for other attendees. Right-wing commentators quickly seized on these claims concerning a single informant to portray the “Unite the Right” rally as a SPLC-sponsored event – a ludicrous smear.

In fact, the SPLC led the way in warning of the threat of violence at the “Unite the Right” rally. In a Hatewatch newsletter published on Aug. 7, 2017, 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 newsletter noted that local authorities considered canceling or moving the rally because “many” saw it as “a certain stage for conflict and potential violence.” It’s clear that the SPLC was gathering pre-event intelligence with an eye toward alerting the public and authorities. Indeed, the newsletter was filled with granular details about the extremists who planned the event.

The SPLC’s Hatewatch newsletter proved to be prescient. A white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one woman and wounding dozens of other people at the rally. In the aftermath of this deadly event, the Center produced a training video for law enforcement officials, hoping to help them prevent violence in the future. The SPLC continued to report on the rally’s white nationalist organizers, tracking where the individuals responsible for the hate-filled rally in Charlottesville ended up.

There’s much we do not know about the first informant cited. We do know that it is absurd to blame the SPLC for an event attended by hundreds of white nationalists and their supporters merely because it was collecting intelligence from an informant.

Informants Two and Three, “F-9” and “F-39”

The DOJ alleges that the SPLC published information acquired with the help of two other informants on its website. These examples do not show that the Center misled donors about its work.

One such informant, identified as “F-9,” was “affiliated with the Neo-Nazi organization” National Alliance, and worked for the Center for 20 years. The DOJ alleges that this person “stole 25 boxes” of documents from the “headquarters of a violent extremist group” in 2014. A “high-level SPLC employee,” who has not been charged with any crimes, paid to have them copied. Another informant, identified as “F-39,” allegedly accepted “approximately $6,000” from the Center “to falsely take responsibility for the theft.”

What did the SPLC do with these extremist documents, according to the DOJ? The Center used the files as “part” of the “basis for a story published on the SPLC’s Hatewatch website.” The DOJ does not even attempt to explain how such reporting on Hatewatch, which “monitors and exposes activities of the hard right in the United States,” is at odds with the SPLC’s stated mission to donors. That is because it is not. Such monitoring is the mission.

Informants Four and Five, “F-27” and “F-30”

In the cases of two other informants — “F-27” (the “former chairman” of the neo-Nazi National Alliance) and “F-30” (who “led the National Socialist Party of America” and was formerly associated with both the Aryan Nations and Ku Klux Klan) — the DOJ merely alleges that the SPLC paid them while also featuring them on “Extremist File” webpages. How did publicly reporting on these two extremists, while also paying them for intelligence, contradict the Center’s mission statement or deceive donors? The DOJ doesn’t say — because it cannot.

The remaining five informants

The five remaining informants cited in the indictment all allegedly received money from the SPLC — and that’s it. The indictment does not contain any allegations regarding what they did with the money. Nor does it indicate what the SPLC did with the intelligence it received from these five extremists. Therefore, the DOJ has failed to allege any evidence indicating how the Center’s payments to these individuals furthered its alleged “scheme” to solicit donations from unwitting donors.

These five informants are identified as: “F-unknown” (an “Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America”); “F-27” (“an officer in the National Socialist Movement and the Aryan Nations affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club”); “F-43” (the “National President of American Front,”); “F-unknown” (a “member of the Ku Klux Klan”); and “F-11” (an individual who allegedly “sent funds to various extremist group leaders including the former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan”).

To recap, the DOJ’s indictment references 10 SPLC informants:

• One was providing intelligence to the Center on the “Unite the Right” rally, which the Center was monitoring and correctly warned could become violent.

• Two informants allegedly stole and covered up the theft of documents from the “headquarters of a violent extremist group,” and SPLC used those documents in its public reporting on extremism.

• Two other informants were paid while being featured as extremists on the Center’s website.

• The five remaining informants were allegedly paid by the SPLC, but the DOJ doesn’t say what they did with the money or what the Center did with the intelligence it received from them.

None of this adds up to a conspiracy to secretly fund extremism or defraud donors. It is intelligence work. It is the type of information-gathering on white supremacist groups the FBI routinely engages in — or at least did in the past.

The DOJ does not allege that the payments themselves were criminal. Instead, the DOJ alleges that the SPLC did not inform donors that “some of the donated funds would be used in the commission of state and federal crimes” by “violent extremist groups.” But the only potential crime committed by extremists, according to the indictment, was the theft of documents from the headquarters of one such violent group in 2014. No extremist was charged with that alleged crime — that is, stealing documents from extremists. Nor could they be, as any offense would appear to be well outside applicable statutes of limitations. There are no other potential federal or state crimes listed — making this accusation hollow.

The Trump regime wants Americans to believe that the SPLC, which has combated white supremacy since its founding in 1971, was secretly sponsoring white supremacy. That allegation, like this entire case, is ridiculous.

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Tom Jocelyn is a Senior Advisor for Democracy Defenders Action

Norm Eisen is the publisher of The Contrarian and Executive Chair of Democracy Defenders Action