Southern Poverty Law Center
“Another example of the dangerous, overreaching abuse of executive power so endemic in this authoritarian administration.”
FBI Director Kash Patel speaks alongside Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche during a news conference on April 21, 2026 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Jake Johnson
Apr 22, 2026
COMMON DREAMS
The civil rights and progressive advocacy community is rallying to the defense of the Southern Poverty Law Center after President Donald Trump’s Justice Department indicted the organization on Tuesday on multiple counts of wire fraud and other charges, which the group has condemned as false and politically motivated.
The Justice Department, led by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche—who previously served as Trump’s personal attorney—said Tuesday that a grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama returned an indictment charging SPLC with “11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.” The Justice Department accused SPLC, which specializes in monitoring extremist groups and movements, of “funding” far-right white supremacist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan by paying people to infiltrate them and gather information.
Bryan Fair, SPLC’s interim chief executive, said the Trump DOJ’s “false allegations” won’t “shake our resolve to fight for justice and ensure the promise of the civil rights movement becomes a reality for all.” Fair noted that SPLC no longer works with paid informants but emphasized that they “risked their lives to infiltrate and inform on the activities of our nation’s most radical and violent extremist groups.”
Allied civil rights organizations spoke out in defense of the SPLC and warned that the Trump administration’s legal assault on the group is part of a broader attack on those who oppose the far-right and work to protect democracy.
“What is happening to civil rights organizations right now is the most coordinated assault on our sector since COINTELPRO,” Maya Wiley, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “We are the people who train poll workers, run food banks, fight discrimination, protect the right to protest, and staff domestic violence hotlines. We are the ones who make sure that everyone can live, love, vote, work, study, travel and simply be themselves, free from discrimination. This administration views that as a threat to its power.”
“In order to have absolute power, it must dismantle our rights,” Wiley added. “And that’s why they’re coming after us.”
“We condemn this appalling move from a captured, weak-willed DOJ that is devoid of integrity and has lost sight of its mission under this administration.”
Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen, called the SPLC indictment “another example of the dangerous, overreaching abuse of executive power so endemic in this authoritarian administration.”
“This is a craven attempt to silence dissent by attacking a core civil rights organization focused on combating violent extremism,” said Gilbert. “We condemn this appalling move from a captured, weak-willed DOJ that is devoid of integrity and has lost sight of its mission under this administration. We stand in solidarity with SPLC.”
SPLC has repeatedly criticized Trump, members of his two administrations, people in his orbit, and extremist groups—such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers—that have supported the president’s efforts to subvert American democracy, including with violence on January 6, 2021.
“To be clear: Trump’s FBI is going after the Southern Poverty Law Center because they infiltrated and exposed the same dangerous right-wing extremist groups that many Trump allies are associated with,” activist Melanie D’Arrigo said in response to the indictment.
Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, said in a statement that the Trump administration’s “continued weaponization of the Justice Department to target organizations speaking out against its agenda is anti-American behavior harkening back to the McCarthy era.”
“The Trump administration’s attack against the Southern Poverty Law Center is a direct threat to the values that make America great,” said Romero. “In this time of unprecedented peril for our democracy, we urge all Americans of good conscience to join us as we stand in support of the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
Even the right-wing underworld claims new DOJ indictment is nonsensical
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche speaks next to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel and U.S. President Donald Trump, at a press briefing at the White House, following a shooting incident during the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 25, 2026 REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche speaks next to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel and U.S. President Donald Trump, at a press briefing at the White House, following a shooting incident during the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 25, 2026 REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
April 26, 2026
ALTERNET
More than friendly to fascists both abroad and at home, the Trump administration is now seeking to destroy the Southern Poverty Law Center -- historically one of the nation's most powerful and effective opponents of the Ku Klux Klan, American neo-Nazis and other white supremacist movements.
This was the latest in a long series of signals from the White House to the president's swastika-flying fans. It means that such groups need no longer fear a resolute federal response to their criminality.
On April 22, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced -- at a blatantly political press event -- that the Justice Department has indicted the SPLC for "wire fraud, false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering." The indictment, described by Patel as "massive" and "sweeping," relies on the notion that the SPLC 's use of paid informants in violent white supremacist outfits such as the Klan and the neo-Nazi National Alliance and Atomwaffen somehow defrauded its donors.
Blanche and Patel went on to assert that those payments -- which over the years amounted to millions - had financed the continued existence of those groups, a claim echoed in right-wing media outlets. In the New York Post, for instance, a columnist wrote that by paying its confidential informants, the SPLC "kept relic organizations like the Ku Klux Klan on life support."
The alleged motive was to justify the SPLC's own continued existence and fundraising by maintaining a threat from fascist violence, which Republicans in Washington have persistently minimized or dismissed. Indeed, the Trump administration has hired and promoted any number of far-right extremists, especially since its return to power.
The absurdity of the indictment ought to be obvious to anyone -- including former federal prosecutor Blanche -- who knows how the FBI prosecutes organized crime, terrorism, narcotics smuggling or violent extremism, in nearly every case depending on paid informants. Over the past few decades, in fact, the FBI and the Justice Department have relied on information from SPLC and its informants to jail violent Klansmen and Nazis.
The indictment also charges that the SPLC "concealed" its identity behind false fronts when sending money to informants, following similar practices by the FBI and the Justice Department to avoid exposing their paid agents.
To suggest that the SPLC "supported" the activities of those criminal groups, as the DOJ indictment alleges, is precisely the same as saying that federal prosecutors and FBI agents were responsible for financing the Mafia, narcotics cartels and terrorism networks.
Under questioning from reporters, Blanche essentially admitted that the indictment's fundamental claim is baseless. Asked whether the indictment specifically alleged that the SPLC payments benefited the Klan, Atomwaffen or other extremist groups, Blanche admitted that it offered no such evidence. "To the extent that there's any link between that individual receiving the money and benefits to that organization," he said, "that's not in the indictment."
Not surprisingly, perhaps, former federal prosecutors who have gone after the Klan and other violent extremists were appalled by the government's attack on SPLC.
Doug Jones, who served as U.S. attorney in Alabama, described the indictment as "outrageous" and "pure political retribution" by President Donald Trump. Having taken down white supremacist gangs himself, Jones recalled how the SPLC "helped dismantle the Ku Klux Klan's operations in Alabama and beyond" in 1981, when its attorneys and investigators secured justice in a Mobile, Alabama, lynching incident.
There are dozens of similar cases in the SPLC files, including major victories against the United Klans of America, the Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Imperial Klans of America, and the paramilitary White Patriot Party and the Aryan Nations.
It isn't only liberal lawyers who can see through the flimsy accusations in the DOJ indictment. In The Free Press, Bari Weiss' Trump-friendly online publication, conservative Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld warns that "the Justice Department will have a hard time proving that the (SPLC's) use of informants amounts to fraud."
Many other right-wing commentators and organizations have welcomed the indictment as just desserts for an organization whose views they despise, particularly because the SPLC has defended Muslims, gays and trans people as well as Blacks and Jews. So much for freedom of speech, a value more likely to be upheld on the right when convenient and comforting to their own.
The most telling commentary on this disgraceful frameup comes not from liberals or conservatives but from the fascist underworld. Gleeful as they are, the fascists admit that the indictment is nonsensical and indeed view its legal falsification as evidence that Trump is truly on their side.
Curtis Yarvin, the authoritarian gadfly whose writings have influenced various Big Tech figures and others in the Trump circle, celebrated the indictment on X: "What's cool is that I don't really see a strong legal case that the SPLC shouldn't be able to run these kinds of wacky black ops. That means DOJ is prosecuting the SPLC just because it (kind of) can. If so this would be an unusual sign of 'finally getting it.'"
On the "revolutionary fascist" American Futurist Telegram channel -- whose authors include former members of the Atomwaffen neo-Nazi group, linked to at least five political murders -- the indictment won praise for the same sickening reason. They know that the SPLC, far from secretly propping up violent white nationalists, is their worst enemy.
"The SPLC was not funding racist groups to enable their racism -- they, in fact, were not funding racist groups at all," the American Futurist-linked TAF Private channel posted, according to Raw Story. "What they were doing was funding bad actors within groups, with the intention of destroying those groups from the inside."
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, as the old saying goes -- and for the Trump White House, the enemy of fascism is its enemy too.
More than friendly to fascists both abroad and at home, the Trump administration is now seeking to destroy the Southern Poverty Law Center -- historically one of the nation's most powerful and effective opponents of the Ku Klux Klan, American neo-Nazis and other white supremacist movements.
This was the latest in a long series of signals from the White House to the president's swastika-flying fans. It means that such groups need no longer fear a resolute federal response to their criminality.
On April 22, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced -- at a blatantly political press event -- that the Justice Department has indicted the SPLC for "wire fraud, false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering." The indictment, described by Patel as "massive" and "sweeping," relies on the notion that the SPLC 's use of paid informants in violent white supremacist outfits such as the Klan and the neo-Nazi National Alliance and Atomwaffen somehow defrauded its donors.
Blanche and Patel went on to assert that those payments -- which over the years amounted to millions - had financed the continued existence of those groups, a claim echoed in right-wing media outlets. In the New York Post, for instance, a columnist wrote that by paying its confidential informants, the SPLC "kept relic organizations like the Ku Klux Klan on life support."
The alleged motive was to justify the SPLC's own continued existence and fundraising by maintaining a threat from fascist violence, which Republicans in Washington have persistently minimized or dismissed. Indeed, the Trump administration has hired and promoted any number of far-right extremists, especially since its return to power.
The absurdity of the indictment ought to be obvious to anyone -- including former federal prosecutor Blanche -- who knows how the FBI prosecutes organized crime, terrorism, narcotics smuggling or violent extremism, in nearly every case depending on paid informants. Over the past few decades, in fact, the FBI and the Justice Department have relied on information from SPLC and its informants to jail violent Klansmen and Nazis.
The indictment also charges that the SPLC "concealed" its identity behind false fronts when sending money to informants, following similar practices by the FBI and the Justice Department to avoid exposing their paid agents.
To suggest that the SPLC "supported" the activities of those criminal groups, as the DOJ indictment alleges, is precisely the same as saying that federal prosecutors and FBI agents were responsible for financing the Mafia, narcotics cartels and terrorism networks.
Under questioning from reporters, Blanche essentially admitted that the indictment's fundamental claim is baseless. Asked whether the indictment specifically alleged that the SPLC payments benefited the Klan, Atomwaffen or other extremist groups, Blanche admitted that it offered no such evidence. "To the extent that there's any link between that individual receiving the money and benefits to that organization," he said, "that's not in the indictment."
Not surprisingly, perhaps, former federal prosecutors who have gone after the Klan and other violent extremists were appalled by the government's attack on SPLC.
Doug Jones, who served as U.S. attorney in Alabama, described the indictment as "outrageous" and "pure political retribution" by President Donald Trump. Having taken down white supremacist gangs himself, Jones recalled how the SPLC "helped dismantle the Ku Klux Klan's operations in Alabama and beyond" in 1981, when its attorneys and investigators secured justice in a Mobile, Alabama, lynching incident.
There are dozens of similar cases in the SPLC files, including major victories against the United Klans of America, the Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Imperial Klans of America, and the paramilitary White Patriot Party and the Aryan Nations.
It isn't only liberal lawyers who can see through the flimsy accusations in the DOJ indictment. In The Free Press, Bari Weiss' Trump-friendly online publication, conservative Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld warns that "the Justice Department will have a hard time proving that the (SPLC's) use of informants amounts to fraud."
Many other right-wing commentators and organizations have welcomed the indictment as just desserts for an organization whose views they despise, particularly because the SPLC has defended Muslims, gays and trans people as well as Blacks and Jews. So much for freedom of speech, a value more likely to be upheld on the right when convenient and comforting to their own.
The most telling commentary on this disgraceful frameup comes not from liberals or conservatives but from the fascist underworld. Gleeful as they are, the fascists admit that the indictment is nonsensical and indeed view its legal falsification as evidence that Trump is truly on their side.
Curtis Yarvin, the authoritarian gadfly whose writings have influenced various Big Tech figures and others in the Trump circle, celebrated the indictment on X: "What's cool is that I don't really see a strong legal case that the SPLC shouldn't be able to run these kinds of wacky black ops. That means DOJ is prosecuting the SPLC just because it (kind of) can. If so this would be an unusual sign of 'finally getting it.'"
On the "revolutionary fascist" American Futurist Telegram channel -- whose authors include former members of the Atomwaffen neo-Nazi group, linked to at least five political murders -- the indictment won praise for the same sickening reason. They know that the SPLC, far from secretly propping up violent white nationalists, is their worst enemy.
"The SPLC was not funding racist groups to enable their racism -- they, in fact, were not funding racist groups at all," the American Futurist-linked TAF Private channel posted, according to Raw Story. "What they were doing was funding bad actors within groups, with the intention of destroying those groups from the inside."
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, as the old saying goes -- and for the Trump White House, the enemy of fascism is its enemy too.
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