Indictment of Southern Poverty Law Center for Funding Neo-Nazis Is a Test for Todd Blanche in His Bid for Attorney General

The indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center for financial crimes is a stunning turn for an organization that presents itself as the frontline of the fight against extremism — and the first court room test for Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Mr. Blanche, declared at a news conference Tuesday that the SPLC was “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.” The 11-count indictment alleges that the organization has been funding the “leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance.”The government argues that the SPLC “secretly funneled more than $3 million” to “field sources” affiliated with those radical groups, and then camouflaged those payments behind shell groups — that is, what the indictment calls “a series of fictitious entities.” Mr. Blanche said that the investigation had been going on for “a long time,” but was “shut down” by the Biden Administration.The interim chief executive of the SPLC, Bryan Fair, says in a statement that he is “outraged by the false allegations” and that the “actions by the DOJ will not shake our resolve to fight for justice and ensure the promise of the Civil Rights movement becomes a reality for all.”The SPLC defines itself as a “catalyst for racial justice in the South and beyond, working in partnership with communities to dismantle white supremacy, strengthen intersectional movements, and advance the human rights of all people.” In its early years in the 1970s and 80s, the SPLC made a name for itself going after the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups in court and deploying shrewd legal tactics to bankrupt or otherwise cripple the organizations. In recent years, though, the group has become more overtly partisan and classified several Christian and social conservative groups as “hate groups” if they had taken public positions against gay marriage. The group’s “hate map,” still widely cited as an authoritative source by mainstream media outlets, includes a number of these groups.In May 2025, a few months before the murder of Charlie Kirk, the SPLC published a more than 3,000 word report on Kirk’s political action group, Turning Point, calling it “a case study on the hard right” that was a “white-dominated, male supremacist, Christian social order … at the forefront of the movement to promote Christian nationalism.” Kirk responded by calling the SPLC a “washed-up org that’s been fleecing scared grandmas for decades.” After Mr. Kirk’s death, FBI Director Kash Patel called the SPLC a “partisan smear machine” and severed ties between it and the FBI. The group’s legendary co-founder, Morris Dees, was fired in 2019 amid allegations of sexual misconduct and financial improprieties.The prosecution of the SPLC was brought in federal court in the Middle District of Alabama, the court whence a towering figure in the struggle for liberty, Frank Johnson, once sat as a United States district judge. The prosecution in the current case encompasses the SPLC’s Montgomery headquarters, which also houses a civil rights museum. The case was randomly assigned to Judge Emily Marks, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Trump in 2018. One possible worry for the government is that the prosecution is being led by an acting federal prosecutor, Kevin Davidson, who assumed the position in 2024. Interim appointments have been an Achilles Heel for the Trump Administration before — the cases against the former FBI director James Comey and New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, were dismissed when the acting prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, was disqualified.The SPLC began using informants to infiltrate extremist groups in the 1980s. The source that helped plan the “Unite the Right” rally known as “F-37,” was paid more than $270,000.00 between 2015 and 2023.The “Unite the Right Rally,” which featured marchers carrying tiki torches aloft and chanting “Jews will not replace us,” was a major flashpoint of Mr. Trump’s first term. One counter protester was killed when a self-described white supremacist, James Alex Field Jr., rammed his car into a crowd. He was convicted of first degree murder but reached a plea agreement to avoid the death penalty. Two state troopers died in an accidental helicopter accident some distance from the march.Mr. Trump released an initial statement following the mayhem of the rally that condemned the “display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.” He also noted that there were “very fine people on both sides,” making clear that he was referring to debates over Confederate iconography and statues, not neo-Nazis. Nevertheless many critics of the president accused him of lending support to the hard right factions. Another field source, known as F-9, was paid more than a million dollars during a two-decade affiliation with a neo-Nazi organization, the National Alliance. One field source, the indictment alleges, served as the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America. Another field source, who was paid more than $300,000, was affiliated with a group affiliated with the Aryan Nations called the “Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club.”The government alleges that the SPLC disguised these payments behind fictitious entities that “were never incorporated, had no bona fide employees, and conducted no actual business.” They were known by names like “Tech Writers Group,” “Rare Books Warehouse,” and “Fox Photography.”The government argues that the SPLC committed fraud by telling donors that their contributions would be used to “dismantle” extremist groups. In reality, the funds were deployed “to pay high-level leaders of violent extremist groups and others, nor were donors ever told that some of the donated funds were used for the benefit of the violent extremist groups.” Some of the money, the DOJ alleges, was even used in the “commission of state and federal crimes.” The SPLC also is accused of lying to banks.Those tactics of paying someone in a criminal organization to be a source is a practice employed by the FBI but it is highly unusual — and potentially illegal — for a private organization to do so. Investigative journalism outlets, even ones that pay sources, expressly forbid the practice.The case, though, could be difficult to prove in court. The law does not require non-profits to provide line item accounts of how they use donations. One defense attorney, Todd Spodek, tells the Associated Press that “this isn’t a fraud case. It is a political attack on standard investigative tradecraft. We are talking about high stakes intelligence work where discretion isn’t a form of deception, it is a matter of survival.”The Sun spoke to a longtime defense attorney, Harvey Silverglate, who ventured that he stopped donating to the SPLC “years ago” because of their political bias. He reckoned, though, that while the group’s methods might be of “dubious ethicality,” that does not necessarily make them illegal.

Indictment of Southern Poverty Law Center for Funding Neo-Nazis Is a Test for Todd Blanche in His Bid for Attorney General

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