The case against SPLC is a legally frivolous revenge mission

"I don't think it should be lost on anyone that we have a third assassination attempt on President Trump in the same week we learned that the Southern Poverty Law Center has been paying and generating hate,” Rep. Jim Jordan told Fox News. 

In fact, that correlation should have passed completely unnoticed. The thought should never have crossed anyone’s mind because it's incredibly stupid.

Jordan was riffing on the April 21 indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center on federal wire fraud and money laundering charges in the Middle District of Alabama. The government’s theory of the case is that the storied civil rights organization defrauded its donors by paying Nazis while purporting to fight racism.

“The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred,” acting attorney general Todd Blanche claimed at a press conference announcing the indictment. 

In the history of mediocre men correcting leading experts, Blanche accusing the Southern Poverty Law Center of being secretly pro-Nazi ranks alongside baby Catholic JD Vance trying to school the pope on theology. 

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This is a storied civil rights group that has been fighting violent racists since 1971. They sued the Klan into oblivion in the 1980s. Their headquarters were firebombed. Nazis repeatedly conspired to murder the center’s co-founder, Morris Dees. 

Why would the SPLC want to create racism when the SPLC hates racism? This is where the feds go full galaxy-brain. 

Every maga revenge prosecution is built on a ridiculous conspiracy theory that ties the target’s supposed criminality to longstanding rightwing grievances. For the Trump DOJ, an evocative conspiracy theory is more important than probable cause or sound legal argument.

 The conspiracy theory of this case echoes popular maga narratives about paid protesters and “fedsurrections.” The implication is that racism isn’t real and liberals and minorities only pretend it exists as an excuse to persecute conservatives. 

The SPLC wasn’t paying Nazis to commit hateful acts. It was paying them for intel, which the SPLC then used to dismantle hate groups. 

It’s undisputed that from the 1980s through 2023, the SPLC paid informants to gather information about the inner workings of violent hate groups including the American Nazi Party, the National Alliance, the Ku Klux Klan and the Sadistic Souls biker gang. Who belongs to such organizations? Well, Nazis, typically. As the old saying goes, there are no swans in the sewer. Snitching on violent hate groups is dangerous and Nazis are generally not altruistic. Luckily, many are greedy and petty and therefore willing to spill their movement’s deepest secrets for cash or revenge. 

“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” Blanche said. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked.” 

According to Blanche, our society is so egalitarian that the SPLC has to manufacture a Nazi threat for fundraising purposes. 

The dishonesty of this prosecution is breathtaking. Blanche knows the threat is real, because his Justice Department investigates and convicts members of white supremacist groups regularly. According to the latest statistics, more than 11,000 hate crimes were reported to the FBI in 2024. The SPLC had a formal intel-sharing partnership with the FBI until director Kash Patel severed the relationship in 2025, because he was offended that the SPLC dared to mention his friend Charlie Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, in the same breath as hate groups. 

The government’s fraud theory requires that the SPLC was deliberately stoking hatred. If the center was simply keeping sensitive operational details confidential in order to combat hate more effectively, then donors were not defrauded, even if some of them would have had reservations about paying Nazis. 

As former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissman explains at Just Security, the fact that the center “is known to have provided information about such groups to the FBI so that the government could take action against the groups will be powerful, if not dispositive, proof against the government’s theory [that the SPLC’s motive was to foment hate].” 

Astonishingly, Blanche has repeatedly denied any knowledge that the SPLC shared intelligence from its informants with the feds. In a court filing on Tuesday, the SPLC supplied evidence that it passed intel on to the FBI and that some of these tips resulted in convictions. This torpedoes the conspiracy theory that the SPLC was trying to help Nazis, and with it the basis for the fraud charges. The center also produced an April 17 letter in which it reminded prosecutors of its track record of intelligence-sharing. All this raises serious questions about whether the government withheld exculpatory evidence from the grand jury. 

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If paying informants makes you complicit in their crimes, the FBI is in big trouble. The bureau has actually paid informants linked to the very hate groups that the SPLC has been charged for monitoring. A US Army vet named Joseph Moore infiltrated the Klan for the FBI in the 2010s. His undercover work foiled at least two murder plots and exposed Klansmen working as police officers. More recently, the FBI used a paid informant, aka a “confidential human source,” to catch Skyler Philippi, a former National Alliance member, who pled guilty in 2025 to plotting to use an explosive-laden drone to destroy Nashville’s electrical grid. 

The DOJ claims that paying Nazi informants is fraud because SPLC donors wouldn't like their money going to Nazis. Legally, mere disapproval would not be enough to establish fraud unless donors were deceived. And besides, exposing Nazis is the most famous and popular thing the SPLC does. As far as your average SPLC donor is concerned, making Nazis betray their friends is terrific. For the SPLC, exposing Nazis is like Lynyrd Skynyrd playing “Freebird.” The fans demand it. In fact, many SPLC donors will be disappointed to learn that the organization ended the paid informant program. 

The SPLC didn’t trumpet its paid informants, because that would be crazy. These are violent extremists who are linked to murders, kidnappings, racketeering and terror attacks. Exposure would endanger the informants and their handlers. 

Even so, the SPLC’s intelligence-gathering mission has never been a secret. To this day, the group tells the IRS and the public that it “researches," “monitors" and “exposes" hate groups, anti-democratic forces, and conspiracy theorists. The group even shares its findings in a magazine called The Intelligence Report and on a blog called HateWatch. Based on the titles of these publications and their contents, a reasonable donor would infer that the SPLC has insider sources. 

“What is odd about the alleged charitable solicitation fraud in the indictment is that the relatively vague promises to donors are consistent with paying informants to obtain information to expose hate crimes and other behavior that the SPLC said it opposes,” Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a law professor at Notre Dame and an expert on nonprofits, told me.

Prosecuting a charity for fraud for legal programs that the government thinks are counterproductive to the charity’s mission is basically unheard of. The government gives nonprofits wide leeway to execute their missions as they see fit. It’s not fraud unless you lie in order to steal money. Trump confidant Steve Bannon was successfully prosecuted for his role in a crowdfunding campaign called We Build the Wall because he and his co-conspirators explicitly promised to spend 100 percent of donations on wall-building, but they paid themselves anyway. By contrast, the SPLC never promised not to pay informants. 

Prosecutors pointed to public statements by Bannon and his co-conspirators and fundraising materials they approved. These included such claims as "All money donated to the [campaign] goes directly to wall!!! Not anyone's pocket," and "I'm taking nothing! Zero." The government even had emails from donors saying that they were only giving because of these promises. They were able to cite complaints to regulators from donors who learned the truth. The SPLC indictment contains none of these types of evidence to bolster the government’s case.

Former Las Vegas city councilwoman Michele Fiore raised $70,000 to build a monument to a slain police officer and instead spent the money on plastic surgery and her daughter’s wedding. She was convicted on six counts of wire fraud, plus conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Donald Trump pardoned her. 

In addition to combatting hooded Klansmen and alt right torch-bearers, the SPLC has spoken out against election deniers, January 6th insurrectionists, violent antiabortionists, and hateful administration allies like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. Conservatives have long bristled at the group’s decision to label certain anti-trans and anti-gay organizations as hate groups. Trump’s prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center is a legally frivolous revenge mission. 

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