The Justice Department on Tuesday accused the Southern Poverty Law Center of defrauding its donors by paying informants to infiltrate right-wing organizations and stoking “racial hatred,” in a case the organization’s chief denounced as an effort to weaponize the justice system against groups unfriendly to President Donald Trump.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the SPLC, a storied organization founded to promote racial justice in the South, paid more than $3 million to at least eight individuals working inside groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the National Socialist Movement between 2014 and 2023. In some instances, Blanche said, the source of the money was disguised through accounts registered in names other than that of the civil rights organization.
“It was doing the exact opposite of what it told its donors it was doing — not dismantling extremism but funding it,” Blanche said at a news conference in Washington, where he unveiled the 11-count indictment charging the SPLC with bank fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy.
Blanche appeared to be arguing that the SPLC had defrauded its donors because the group did not tell them it was using that money to pay informants. The acting attorney general suggested that the money that SPLC paid to informants helped fund activities by these far-right groups.
A copy of the charging document was not immediately available via public court dockets. Blanche did not name any specific informants during his news conference Tuesday.
Blanche said Tuesday that one of the informants who received payments was an organizer of the 2017 Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville that resulted in the death of a counterprotester.
The civil rights organization had revealed the existence of the Justice Department probe earlier Tuesday in a video message from its CEO, Bryan Fair, who said prosecutors appeared to be preparing legal action against some of its employees.
“Today the federal government has been weaponized to dismantle the rights of our nation’s most vulnerable people and any organization like ours that tries to stand in the breach,” he said, adding later, “We will not be intimidated into silence or contrition.”
In his statement, Fair said the SPLC began paying informants to infiltrate those organizations as a means to protect its staff and gather intelligence on hate groups that posed a threat. In 1983, the organization’s headquarters was firebombed, and it has received multiple credible threats in the years since, he said.
“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,” Fair said.
The SPLC has since abandoned the practice of paying infiltrators, a spokesperson for the organization said.
The SPLC, a 55-year-old nonprofit, was founded in Montgomery with the goal of ensuring that the civil rights law passed by Congress and enshrined by the courts would become a reality on the ground. It is known for its efforts to monitor and take legal action against white-supremacist groups.
Tuesday’s charges, filed in federal court in the Montgomery-based Middle District of Alabama, follow years of Republican-led congressional inquiries into the SPLC.
GOP lawmakers have demanded that the Trump administration investigate funding for the group, which critics on the right have accused of coordinating with Biden administration to unfairly malign Christians and conservatives exercising their First Amendment rights.
More broadly, the Justice Department under Trump has launched probes of several people and organizations viewed as politically unfriendly to the president. That has included groups such as ActBlue, the Democrats’ main fundraising platform, as well as outspoken critics from his first administration and law firms that represented Trump’s political adversaries.
Trump fired Blanche’s predecessor, Pam Bondi, earlier this month in part out of frustration over the slow pace of those investigations. Since taking the Justice Department’s helm, Blanche has worked to show he is moving quickly to meet the president’s expectations.
He has pushed to accelerate ongoing probes of some of some of the president’s critics, including former CIA director John Brennan, who during the Obama administration helped investigate alleged ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Last week, Blanche released the first report from the department’s Weaponization Working Group, detailing what he described as the Biden Justice Department’s improper targeting of antiabortion protesters.
Blanche declined to comment on the origins of the Justice Department’s organization into the SPLC, but said it began during the Biden administration. Conservative criticism of the organization reached its peak following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk last year. The SPLC had identified the organization he led, Turning Point USA, as an epitome of the “hard right” in a 2024 report on hate and extremist groups.
FBI Director Kash Patel announced in October that the bureau was severing ties with the organization, which had long worked with agents to identify and provide tips on domestic extremist groups.