Funding Extremism? Please.
The DOJ's fraud indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center is disgracefully dishonest.
You may have heard that the Justice Department indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center (”SPLC”) on Tuesday and done a double-take. Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, stood at a podium and announced that the SPLC, the organization that famously bankrupted the Ku Klux Klan, was, in fact, doing the opposite of what it claimed. The SPLC was, in Blanche’s words, “not dismantling extremism, but funding it.” He added, for good measure, that the SPLC had been “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.”
The SPLC a clandestine supporter of the very groups it is famous for fighting? It really didn’t seem to add up at the most basic level. And the reason it didn’t is that it isn’t true.
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: My gosh, the good guys are the bad guys. The SPLC is a shill for the very groups it claims to fight. It is a narrative that is not just false but Orwellian, turned exactly on its head by people who purposely intend to deceive.
The conduct that the administration has alleged is criminal is the use of paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups. As the indictment puts it, “unbeknownst to donors, some of their donated money was being used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, and the National Alliance.”
That sounds strange and puzzling. Read on a bit longer, and it becomes clear that the administration is charging the SPLC with what law enforcement does every day: recruiting and paying confidential informants inside extremist organizations to gather intelligence, expose their operations, and ultimately dismantle them.
The FBI does this. So does the DEA. So does every major federal law enforcement agency, case after case after case. When the United States pays a mob informant, we do not say the government is funding organized crime. When the DEA pays a cartel source, we do not say the government is running drugs. The logic here is identical—and the DOJ knows it, because the SPLC was sharing the intelligence it gathered with the FBI for years. Kash Patel severed that relationship last October, calling the SPLC “a partisan smear machine.” Six months later, his Justice Department indicted it. Draw your own conclusions.
The Trump administration hopes that this ridiculous narrative can somehow sustain particular criminal charges. But it stumbles right out of the gate.
The core set of charges against the SPLC is the DOJ all-purpose standby: wire fraud under 18 U.S.C. § 1343.
In my prosecutorial career, I tried or oversaw many dozens, if not hundreds, of wire fraud cases. In my legal practice since then, my main area of specialization is cases of fraud against the government. The cornerstone of any fraud case, civil or criminal, is a lie. When you put together a fraud case, that’s where you begin: what was the lie?
A conviction under §1343 requires a false or fraudulent representation. Not a vague false impression. The jury instruction is unambiguous: the government must prove the defendant knowingly devised a scheme to defraud by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, and that the defendant acted with the intent to deceive and cheat. And all of this, of course, beyond a reasonable doubt.
In some instances—and you will likely see the administration try to argue this is one of them—the charge can be based on an omission, but only if the defendant had a duty to disclose arising out of a relationship of trust. It doesn’t help them here in any event.
Stunningly, the indictment has no allegation, let alone evidence, of the supposed lie or material omission. Rather, in the section about the “purpose of the scheme,” the government alleges only that the SPLC sought donations “under the auspices that donor money would be used to help ‘dismantle’ violent extremist groups,” (emphasis in original). The source of that quote is a statement on the SPLC website that the organization works to dismantle white supremacy and advance the human rights of all people.
That’s it. A website that tells the world, accurately, that the SPLC works with communities to dismantle white supremacy.
The rest of the introductory section consists of other quotes from the website. They would have taken less than five minutes of investigative work to gather. The one statement directed at donors says nothing whatsoever about the organization’s methodology for opposing extremist groups.
So: what was the lie? Who at the SPLC told it? To which donor? On what date? What specific promise was made that no donated funds would ever be used to pay anyone affiliated with an extremist group? When did the SPLC tell donors that it would combat hate groups only through litigation and never through infiltration?
The indictment doesn’t say. There is not a hint or whisper of that lie anywhere in fourteen pages. No donor is identified. No promise is quoted. No specific representation is alleged to have been false. 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. That is not a genuine theory of fraud. It’s a biased conclusion dressed up as an indictment.
Moreover, the organization cannot be held criminally liable without proof that some specific individual within it committed the fraud. The indictment names no individual. Nobody from the SPLC is alleged to have looked a donor in the eye and made a promise the SPLC knew it was breaking.
Nevertheless, a criminal conviction could have serious consequences for the organization, in the form of fines, restitution orders, potential court oversight, and more.
Charging wire fraud without alleging what the lie was, who told it, and to whom isn’t just a legal weakness—it’s a violation of the principles that are supposed to govern federal prosecution. You don’t bring a fraud case on the theory that a lie must exist somewhere. You bring it when you can prove what the lie was. The fact that this indictment either cannot or will not identify it is not a gap. It’s a hole you can drive a truck through.
And there’s this: all six wire fraud counts occurred on a single day, April 25, 2023. Some grand “scheme and artifice to defraud.” Six wire transactions on one afternoon. And this: the entire informant program, totaling roughly $3 million over nearly a decade, has since been discontinued. This prosecution targets something that no longer exists.
We’ve known for some time that the administration has dispensed with the requirements of the Principles of Federal Prosecution that previously had canonical status at the Department of Justice. But here they put together an indictment without assembling proof of the key, core element. It’s a bad joke of an indictment.
Compare this to the Build the Wall case, where Steve Bannon was charged with defrauding donors—and ultimately pleaded guilty to state charges after Trump pardoned the federal case. There is a surface similarity: the solicitation of donations under false pretenses. But there the lies were at the core of the indictment and evidence. As recited in the indictment, Bannon promised donors expressly that all funds would go directly to wall construction and that the organizers would not be compensated. When it brought the charge, DOJ had the goods: proof that the promises were false and the defendants knew it. That is what a wire fraud case looks like. Specific lie, told to identified victims, with an intent to defraud. The SPLC case has none of that.
The remaining charges don’t improve the picture. The four false-statement-to-a-bank counts arise from the shell entities the SPLC used to covertly pay its informants, entities with names like “Fox Photography” and “Rare Books Warehouse.” It’s no surprise that payments to informants within extremist groups weren’t written on an SPLC checkbook, which, among other things, would endanger the informant. The FBI, for example, sometimes forms whole shell companies and fake organizations to ensnare criminals.
And the money laundering conspiracy count is, if anything, even more attenuated: money laundering requires proceeds from a specified unlawful activity. If the underlying fraud is itself a legal fiction, the laundering charge is built on vapor.
The deeper failing here is not the technical deficiencies in the various charges, or even the glaring absence of the core element of a fraud case. Even if the administration is able to persuade a jury in the ruby red Middle District of Alabama to convict on some counts, it would not retroactively justify the indictment.
At bottom, the indictment represents an indefensible exercise of prosecutorial discretion. There is a theory driving the case, beyond the faulty particulars of the charges. The theory is that the SPLC, all these years, has been deceiving the public and is actually devoted to helping support extremist groups. That’s manifestly false. Any experienced prosecutor assessing the case would decline to bring it, regardless of whether (which I think unlikely here) there were provable charges.
The Principles of Federal Prosecution require not just that a case be provable but that it advance a substantial federal interest—essentially, that the prosecution serves the interests of justice. The capsule term that prosecutors use is “righteous.” The SPLC case serves not the interests of justice, but the political interests of Trump, and therefore his DOJ, as an inflammatory talking point against an antagonistic organization. Worse, the talking point is flagrantly deceptive.
The case is the opposite of righteous. In words that have been taken as oracular by generations of prosecutors, Attorney General—later Supreme Court Justice—Robert Jackson wrote: “The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America… While he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones.”
The SPLC indictment is a paradigmatic foul blow. The Southern Poverty Law Center is not “funding extremism,” nor “manufacturing racism,” and the administration knows it. That the acting attorney general of the United States stood up and alleged otherwise, in the most inflammatory terms, with no allegation of who lied to whom, tells you everything you need to know about what this Justice Department has become.
Talk to you later.
It's disgraceful, like you said. These people need to be stopped.
Yes it’s so completely absurd. The SPLC should simply stick to the facts, welcome scrutiny as no one is above the law, take the high road - the DoJ’s case will self implode & Patel/Blanche will look like the clowns they are.