Civil rights organization indicted for paying informants in hate groups
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which built a reputation over 60 years for monitoring and suing white supremacist organizations, was indicted Tuesday on 11 fraud-related charges over its past payments to informants in hate groups.
A grand jury from the U.S. District Court in Alabama returned an indictment against the SPLC, which included six counts of wire fraud, four counts of making false statements to a federally insured bank and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said.
The SPLC had announced earlier Tuesday it was under criminal investigation by the Justice Department for paying informants to infiltrate targeted organizations.
The DOJ said between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC spent at least $3 million to pay eight informants associated with the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, the National socialist Party of America, the Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club — an Aryan Nations-affiliated group — and the America Front.
“The SPLC was not dismantling the groups,” Blanche said. “It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”
Before the indictment was announced, the SPLC confirmed it previously paid informants, though it no longer does so. It said its goal was to gather information for civil litigation against violent, racist groups. Information was also shared with law enforcement.
In a video posted on the SPLC’s website, the organization’s chief executive, Bryan Fair, defended the past practice of paying insiders to gather information.
“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. “There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives.”
But conservative critics have accused the SPLC of unfairly targeting right-wing groups as extremist groups only because of their viewpoints. SPLC has also condemned President Donald Trump’s policies and rhetoric.
“While the SPLC does have a history of combatting truly extremist organizations, it has weaponized its reputation to smear mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits by putting them on a ‘hate map’ with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan — a map the SPLC claims reveals the ‘infrastructure of white supremacy,’” Tyler O’Neil, author of “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center” and senior editor at the conservative news site The Daily Signal, told Straight Arrow News.
The criminal investigation comes in the wake of the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The SPLC came under new scrutiny after it included Kirk’s group, Turning Point USA, in a report called, “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2024.” The report listed 1,370 hate and anti-government extremist groups.
“This ‘hate map’ inspired a terrorist attack in 2012, and the SPLC added Turning Point USA to the map just months before the assassination of Charlie Kirk,” O’Neill told SAN.
FBI Director Kash Patel terminated the federal agency’s relationship with the SPLC at the urging of MAGA supporters, including Elon Musk, who called the organization “evil” and said it should be shut down.
Patel claimed the SPLC had “long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine.”
“Their so-called ‘hate map’ has been used to defame mainstream Americans and even inspired violence,” Patel wrote on X last October. “That disgraceful record makes them unfit for any FBI partnership.”
FBI uses paid informants
Paying informants is a longstanding practice of many law enforcement agencies, particularly the FBI. The agency has paid informants to help investigate the Mafia, drug traffickers, gangs and other groups when obtaining information from the outside would be challenging.
According to a 2017 story in The Intercept, the FBI was using 15,000 “confidential human sources,” or 10 times more than in 1975..
The SPLC said it used a similar approach in the past. For instance, the group used paid informants when it launched unprecedented civil litigation against the Ku Klux Klan, ultimately forcing the group to declare bankruptcy.
But the practice has long since been discontinued, a spokesperson for the SPLC told the Alabama Reflector on Tuesday: “Most people who were involved are not even with the organization, because it has been a very long time since it has ended.”
Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
