The case against the anti-hate organization will reassure white nationalists that an organization that successfully tracks, exposes and bankrupts them is now in the government’s crosshairs.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche (left) and FBI Director Kash Patel appear at a press conference following the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center for money laundering at the Department of Justice in Washington, DC, on April 21, 2026.(Nathan Posner / Anadolu via Getty Images)
To understand the Trump Department of Justice indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center, start with the fact that the claims DOJ officials promoted at last Tuesday’s press conference aren’t in the indictment. Announcing the charges, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche framed the case as centering on the SPLC paying right-wing extremists to commit acts of violence — “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred…not dismantling extremism but funding it.” The DOJ press release doubles down, with Blanche stating the “SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence. Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked.” Calling it a “fraud operation,” FBI Director Kash Patel claims the SPLC “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.”
It would indeed be illegal to pay people to commit hate crimes, but that’s not what the indictment charges the SPLC with doing. And while Patel states that these charges arise from an investigation of “all individuals involved,” it must have turned up little, since not a single individual is being charged. If it seems unbelievable that a civil rights organization with over half a century fighting white supremacy was funding it — or that a case purportedly filed on behalf of defrauded donors cannot name a single one of them — that’s because it is.
“This is, above all, a deeply dishonest indictment — politically motivated, intellectually bankrupt, and designed to leave a lasting false impression in the minds of people who will never look past the headline,” Harry Litman, former U.S. Attorney and Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ, writes on his Substack. “It is a narrative that is not just false but Orwellian, turned exactly on its head by people who purposely intend to deceive.”
The indictment’s charges are actually far narrower than Trump’s DOJ mouthpieces would have you believe, amounting to one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, four counts of making false statements to a federally insured bank, and six counts of wire fraud. The DOJ’s claim is that the money the SPLC paid to the informants who secretly gather intel on the criminal activities of hate groups — including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance — came from “bank accounts connected to a series of fictitious entities,” thereby allowing the SPLC to “to disguise the true nature, source, ownership, and control of the…money the SPLC paid the field sources.” In practice, the SPLC put fake company names such as “Rare Books Photography” and “North West Tech” on the accounts it used to pay high-placed informants — instead of openly admitting it was paying undercover sources whose lives were genuinely at risk. And this, the DOJ argues, amounts to duping the banks that held those accounts and the donors who funded them.
Blanche gave up the game when pressed to explain the fraud charges at Tuesday’s press conference, stating that, “in no fundraising efforts that the investigation found, did they say, ‘Oh, and by the way, we’re going to give a million bucks to the Ku Klux Klan.’ So, that’s fraud…And then the bank fraud part of it is you have an obligation to tell your financial institution what the corporation or the entity that you’re opening an account for does.”
It’s absurd to suggest the SPLC should have left a paper trail of checks stamped with “From the Account of the SPLC” in payments to informants embedded within murderous groups such as the KKK. In fact, the SPLC’s record of success is partly related to its high-placed — implicitly secret — informants and the information they are privy to and able to pass on.
But Litman, who spent his career trying wire fraud cases, also notes that a conviction under federal statute 18 U.S.C. § 1343 requires proof of an explicit lie that was told in order to defraud a victim. “Stunningly, the indictment has no allegation, let alone evidence, of the supposed lie or material omission,” Litman writes. The DOJ’s entire case rests on the charge that the SPLC’s website says the group works to “dismantle” white supremacy — and that donors weren’t told that this involved paying informants who were embedded in hate groups. But, as Litman notes, there’s no specific promise, not a single defrauded donor is named, and there is no quote from the SPLC to demonstrate a falsehood it told to donors. “What the government offers instead is a flight of fancy: that because the SPLC solicited donations to ‘dismantle’ extremism while simultaneously paying informants inside extremist groups, donors must have been deceived,” Litman writes. “That is not a genuine theory of fraud.”
Then there is the fact that the FBI itself admits, perhaps unwittingly, that the intel provided by informants was used to harm the groups with which they were embedded. The indictment includes reference to an informant who “entered the headquarters of a violent extremist group and stole 25 boxes of their documents.” The SPLC then took those documents, secretly copied them, and had the informant return them — then used the information gained to publicly defame the group in “a story published on the SPLC’s Hatewatch website.” In what world is that doing anything other than what the SPLC promised?
Unlike the DOJ, The Intercept identified, by name, 20 verified donors to the SPLC — as well as taking comments from dozens of other self-identified SPLC supporters — in the days after the indictment dropped. Maya Lenox, a Texas-based SPLC donor, and the other donors the outlet spoke with described the DOJ’s indictment as “farcical,” and expressed satisfaction at how their dollars are being spent. “This is an organization that has been providing very detailed information about how these hate groups have been moving, and of course, in order to have that information, you essentially are going to need spies,” Lenox told The Intercept. “In order to obtain this information, you’re going to have to make it worth their time.”
“We knew they were paying informants,” Mary Wynne Kling, a longtime SPLC contributor, told The Intercept. “It’s simultaneously infuriating and laughable that they’re charging the SPLC with funding hate groups.”
That sentiment extended beyond The Intercept’s survey respondents to social media. Professional poker player Andy Bloch tweeted, “I’ve donated in the past to the SPLC, and I probably would have donated MORE had I known that they had infiltrated extremist organizations, and I might have directed my contributions directly to those programs after hearing they were only 0.3 percent of their spending.”
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The FBI has long known about the SPLC’s use of informants — a practice it borrowed from the FBI itself — in part because the organization shared the intel gathered with the Bureau. A 2007 FBI press release boasts of the agency’s partnerships with the SPLC, the NAACP, and the National Urban League; at the request of local, state and federal police departments, the SPLC has long held trainings on hate groups for law enforcement.
This was, of course, before the government itself swelled with ideologically aligned supporters of hate groups. In recent years, rightwing extremist groups including Moms For Liberty, the Family Research Council, the Proud Boys, and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA have all landed on the SPLC’s Hatewatch list — putting the organization in conflict with the most visible and vocal parts of Trump’s base. In October, Patel summarily announced the FBI was cutting ties with the SPLC, denouncing it as a “partisan smear machine.” The following December, House Republicans held performative hearings accusing the organization of being “partisan and profitable.” Both of those efforts were, it turns out, the beginning of an effort by this administration to delegitimize the work of an organization that targets its most reliable voters.
If there were any remaining doubts about the bogusness of the DOJ’s indictment, Trump himself removed them during a 60 Minutes that aired Sunday. Amidst a lengthy and meandering tirade, the president accused the SPLC of everything from funding the No Kings protests (they have not) to rigging the 2020 presidential election against him (they obviously did not). Above all, the president proved that the DOJ case is entirely political — motivated by his lust for vengeance against dissenters and perceived enemies; his efforts to sanitize history, both personal and writ large; and his debts to a white supremacist movement that has long formed a crucial part of his base.
“I see these No Kings, which are funded just like the Southern Law, you saw all that?” he said to interviewer Norah O’Donnell, who was trying to conduct an interview about the alleged shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “Southern Law is financing the KKK and lots of other radical, terrible groups. And then they go out and they say, ‘Oh, we’ve gotta stop the KKK.’ And yet they give, you know, hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars. It’s a total scam run by the Democrats. It shows you that, like Charlottesville [the site of the 2017 “Unite the Right” white nationalist rally where counter-protester Heather Heyer was killed]— Charlottesville was all funded by the Southern Law. That was a Southern Law deal too. And it was done to make me look bad, and it turned out to be a total fake. It basically was a rigged election. This was a part of the rigging of the election.”
Though founded in 1971, the SPLC’s roots stretch back further, to pro bono lawsuits filed by white Alabama-based civil rights lawyers Morris Dees and Joe Levin. Dees and Levin won a 1970 court case that led to the desegregation of a Montgomery YMCA; another case filed that year led to redistricting that finally gave Black voters representation in the Alabama legislature. The SPLC gained national attention by helping secure a $7 million 1987 verdict for Beulah Mae Donald, the mother of a black teenager lynched in Mobile by the KKK six years prior. The ruling bankrupted the United Klan of America but, perhaps more humiliatingly, gave ownership of the Klan’s national headquarters to Donald. The SPLC’s 1981 pilot “Klanwatch,” renamed Hatewatch in 1998, focused on monitoring activities of hate groups, often through informants, and sharing that intelligence to the FBI and Department of Homeland Security.
The FBI is well acquainted with the utility of using well-placed informants not solely because it does the same, but the federal agency created the original blueprint. “Since the inception of the FBI in 1908, informants have played major roles in the investigation and prosecution of a wide variety of federal crimes,” reports the DOJ’s own online history of the agency, which quotes 1970s FBI head William Webster’s claim that “the informant is THE with a capital ‘T’ THE most effective tool in law enforcement today — state, local, or federal.”
And if paying informants who commit crimes makes you ipso facto guilty of bankrolling those crimes, then the FBI’s century-long history of paying sources who commit violent illegal acts — “not dismantling extremism but funding it,” as Blanche put it — is unmatched.
One of the FBI’s most notorious informants, KKK leader Gary Thomas Rowe Jr., wasn’t just in the car with the Klansmen who committed the 1965 murder of civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo, but was later identified by the others as the actual shooter. Rowe even told the New York Times that FBI officials looked the other way when he killed another black man, and “purged [the agency’s] files about his undercover work in Klan ‘action squads’ in an effort to protect its own reputation.” The FBI ignored the trail of bodies left by notorious Irish mobster Whitey Bulger during this two decades as an FBI informant, although the government would ultimately admit “the arrangement helped [Bulger] conceal 19 murders, learn the identities of witnesses who later turned up dead, and send an innocent man to prison for a killing that Mr. Bulger had committed.” Neo-nazi Joshua Caleb Sutter was outed after nearly 20 years of being paid by the FBI in 2021, yet continued writing and publishing books detailing fantasies of rape, child murder, and other atrocities — content a Wired investigation found has “inspired violence in Russia, Great Britain, the United States, Canada, and elsewhere.” Sutter’s book publishing company was probably kept afloat, in no small part, by the $140,000 the FBI is on record for having paid him.
In fact, so many criminal informants — moles, snitches, rats, and what have you — have committed horrific crimes while on the FBI payroll that Congress released a scathingly critical 2004 report titled Everything Secret Degenerates: The FBI’s Use Of Murderers As Informants. “Federal law enforcement officials made a decision to use murderers as informants beginning in the 1960s,” the study opens. “Known killers were protected from the consequences of their crimes and purposefully kept on the streets.”
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As of this writing, the agency has not indicted itself.
In public statements, Blanche and Patel have taken great pains to conflate SPLC payments to informants who were members of the Klan with the false narrative that the SPLC underwrote the Klan’s hate crimes and other violence.
That obfuscation works in tandem with what legal analyst Joyce Vance describes as the DOJ’s “speaking indictment” of the SPLC — meaning that the DOJ document goes beyond listing purported crimes and charges, throwing in statements designed to shape, and arguably distort, the public narrative. It is a narrative that appears to be less invested in securing a conviction than in letting the white supremacists who Trump calls his base know this administration has their backs. The whole display, we can deduce, is meant to reassure white nationalists that an organization which spent 55 years tracking, exposing and bankrupting them is now in the government’s crosshairs, and the law is firmly on their side. Rest easy, hatemongers, because the era of consequences for violent, organized white supremacy is over.
It’s also about perpetuating the lie that racism is a phony grievance manufactured by “the Blacks” and “the left.” The rightwing has long pushed the idea that racism, if it ever really existed, died sometime between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Act. The Trump administration has taken up that project more than any administration in modern American history, denying discrimination exists while implementing some of the most transparently racist policies many of us have witnessed in our lifetimes — attempting to erase America’s racist history while using every tool at its disposal to reassert a white supremacist hierarchy it fears has come undone.
But white supremacy is real and this administration’s effort to pretend it isn’t runs into problems when the white supremacists within it get annoyed of being erased. For example, the indictment notes an SPLC informant was among planners of the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right march, and that the informant “made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.” That passage clearly leans into, without ever quite stating, that the SPLC is somehow responsible for the carnage of that day. But that idea only works if you believe the easily disproved idea that Unite the Right wouldn’t have happened without the SPLC’s informant. Rightwing rags and MAGA influencers like Jack “Pizzagate” Posobiec ran with it, as if the story couldn’t be undone with a simple Google search. But Richard Spencer, the most visible member of the alt-right back then and a key organizer of Unite the Right, points out that simply isn’t true.
“Conservatives are dumb, and they come to the wrong conclusion — and they come to a very self-serving conclusion, which is that anyone who isn’t Daily Wire or Matt Walsh or what have you — anyone who isn’t a movement conservative — is somehow a puppet and the people pulling the strings are graduates of Yale university, the military industrial complex, the SPLC, the deep state, etc., and it’s all fake and a sham,” Spencer said on a podcast following the indictment announcement. “The fact is this indictment does not even suggest that. And it’s just a very self-serving thing for conservatives to now say, “Oh I knew it was a hoax”…Charlotteville was not a hoax.”
It’s a testament to the weakness of this indictment that Spencer and I arrive at the same conclusion — though from vastly different starting points, of course. It’s also fitting that this move comes out of a DOJ currently asking the courts to wipe the records clear of Jan. 6 insurrectionists charged with “seditious conspiracy,” the greatest treason charges from that day. Meanwhile, white supremacist violence continues to be the greatest threat to national security — a fact acknowledged by reports from the FBI in 2006 and 2015, and 2021, and the Department of Homeland Security in 2009. The DOJ was originally formed in 1870, amidst the white backlash to black enfranchisement, to protect African-American voting rights. As of Tuesday, it signaled that its original mission is officially over.
Kali HollowayKali Holloway is a columnist for The Nation and the former director of the Make It Right Project, a national campaign to take down Confederate monuments and tell the truth about history. Her writing has appeared in Salon, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, Time, AlterNet, Truthdig, The Huffington Post, The National Memo, Jezebel, Raw Story, and numerous other outlets.