By Hannah Rabinowitz, Devan Cole, CNN
(CNN) — The Justice Department announced charges Tuesday against the Southern Poverty Law Center, alleging the storied civil rights organization defrauded its donors by funding the extremism it claimed to be fighting.
The fraudulent scheme played out over nearly 10 years, prosecutors allege, when the Southern Poverty Law Center used more than $3 million in donor funds to secretly pay leaders of violent extremist groups to act as confidential informants without disclosing where that money was going.
The 14-page indictment, however, offered few details of how donor money that paid the informants was used to further the groups’ violent interests, or if donors felt blindsided by what their money was spent on – a glaring omission that legal experts say could spell trouble for prosecutors as they seek to secure a conviction.
The case comes several months after FBI Director Kash Patel severed the bureau’s ties with the SPLC after conservative criticism of the group intensified in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination last year. SPLC had long provided its research on hate crimes and extremism to the government, but Patel labeled it a “partisan smear machine” for the attention it paid to a political group founded by Kirk.
SPLC this week said in a statement that it “will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff, and our work” against the “false allegations,” and said that their informant program saved lives over the years.
Use of informants
The Southern Poverty Law Center began its practice of using paid informants in the 1980s, the indictment says. The center says its program was kept a secret to protect the informants as they infiltrated dangerous organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation and other neo-Nazi groups.
“When we began working with informants, we were living in the shadow of the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators, and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system,” SPLC interim President and CEO Bryan Fair said in a statement Wednesday.
“There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives,” Fair said, while noting the practice has since been discontinued.
Justice Department prosecutors first started probing the center’s use of paid informants under the Biden administration, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a press conference Tuesday, but decided not to bring charges. The investigation was reopened during Trump’s second term, Blanche said, though he declined to share any reasoning as to why.
The allegations
The indictment accuses the center of making false statements to a bank so that it could create accounts through which it secretly sent donated money to informants. The accounts were created under fake business names, such as “Tech Writers Group” and “Rare Books Warehouse.”
Blanche said Tuesday that the center is “required to – under the laws associated with a nonprofit – to have certain transparency and honesty in what they’re telling donors they’re going to spend money on and what their mission statement is and what they’re raising money doing.”
Prosecutors further allege that some of the money was used by extremists to commit other crimes, but the indictment does not include any specific instances of that occurring.
It does, however, give details about eight unnamed informants whom the center paid through the shell bank accounts. One informant, a member of a neo-Nazi group called the National Alliance, was allegedly paid more than $1 million over 10 years.<