Republicans have accused the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is best known for investigating hate groups, of unfairly targeting conservative and Christian organizations.
The Justice Department charged the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group that has long tracked hate groups, on Tuesday with financial crimes, accusing it of defrauding donors by using their money to secretly pay informants inside extremist organizations.
At a news conference announcing the charges, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, said that from 2014 to 2023, the group made payments totaling more than $3 million to people who were affiliated with extremist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the National Socialist Party of America. The law center, he added, was “doing the exact opposite of what it told its donors it was doing — not dismantling extremism, but funding it.”
The indictment, however, offers little to support the notion that the group’s payments to informants was meant to aid the extremist groups they had infiltrated.
Prosecutors describe how one informant, which the law center refers to as a field source, “was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ event in Charlottesville, Virginia, and attended the event at the direction of the S.P.L.C.”
That rally included torch-wielding marchers chanting antisemitic slogans, and violent clashes that culminated with one participant ramming his car into a group of counterprotesters, killing a woman and leaving at least 19 others injured.
The informant “made racist postings under the supervision of the S.P.L.C. and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees,” the charging document said. Between 2015 and 2023, the informant received more than $270,000 from the group, the indictment said.