SPLC Spent Years Smearing Conservatives As Nazis - DOJ Says It Was Funding the Real Thing

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has spent decades putting conservatives, Christians, and mainstream right-of-center organizations on its hate group list. A federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, alleges the SPLC secretly funneled millions of donor dollars to individuals associated with white supremacist and extremist organizations while publicly raising money to fight those same groups.

A superseding indictment returned Tuesday expands on charges first filed April 21. The SPLC faces 11 counts: wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. No new charges were added, but prosecutors laid out a much more detailed account of how $4.1 million in donor funds was spent between 2014 and 2023.

The money paid for travel to extremist rallies, recruitment of new members, new chapter creation, materials for cross burnings, and Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said when the original charges were announced April 21:

"The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence. Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked."

Start with F-9 (Field Source 9). F-9 spent more than 20 years inside the neo-Nazi National Alliance on the SPLC's payroll and collected over $1.2 million in donor funds. An SPLC employee was in a romantic relationship with F-9. They shared bank accounts. About $140,000 in donor funds moved through those accounts and was used for the couple's personal living expenses.

Then there's F-30, a Klan member, former director of an Aryan Nations faction with chapters across roughly 17 states, and head of the National Socialist Party of America. Around 2010, F-30 reached out to the SPLC because he wanted to leave the white nationalist movement. An SPLC employee offered him $2,500 per month, plus expenses, to stay in it and continue leading his organization. He took the deal.

Biden DOJ Protected the SPLC Grift Because the Hate Group Was Literally Training Its Prosecutors: Report

Between 2010 and 2016, more than $70,000 went to F-30 through a shell company called Rare Books Warehouse. He used it to travel to rallies, recruit new members, fund other extremist leaders, and publish racist material to attract more followers. SPLC employees knew how the money was being spent.

The SPLC listed F-30 on its own "Extremist File" donation page during this same period.

F-31 and F-32 were both Klan members who wanted out. They contacted the SPLC after seeing news coverage about the organization helping someone leave an extremist group. An SPLC employee offered each of them $1,200 a month to stay in the movement instead. The indictment quotes the arrangement directly:

Despite their requests for help getting out of the movement, an SPLC employee encouraged F-31 and F-32 to stay in the movement and offered to pay them a $1,200.00 monthly salary as well as pay for expenses as incurred. Once they were financially backed by the SPLC to do so, F-31 and F-32 agreed to remain in the movement.

The SPLC employee told them to say the payments were for helping college students write essays. F-31 climbed to a leadership role in an extremist group and recruited new members. F-32 made Klan garments for others and got reimbursed for cross-burning expenses.

All of this money moved through five shell companies: Center Investigative Agency, Fox Photography, North West Technologies, Tech Writers Group, and Rare Books Warehouse. None were incorporated. None had employees. None conducted any actual business. They existed to hide the payments. When a bank opened an internal investigation in 2020, the SPLC shut down the accounts. On September 9, 2021, the SPLC's President and CEO and its Board Chair confirmed in writing that the accounts "were opened for the benefit of Southern Poverty Law Center operations and operated under the Center's authority.”

The superseding indictment also corrects a drafting error from April. The original filing described bank statements as "false or misleading," language that ran into a Supreme Court ruling last year holding that the relevant bank fraud statute covers only outright false statements, not misleading ones. The new version removes "or misleading."

The SPLC's attorney, Abbe Lowell, said Tuesday that the filing "attempts to shore up the flaws in the initial charges, but it changes nothing." Lowell also accused the Justice Department of distributing the indictment to the media before it was unsealed by the court, calling it "another example of the government's troubling and unusual handling of this case," and said the SPLC's legal team would raise it with the court.

The organization that spent years branding Christians, conservatives, and mainstream groups as extremists paid an actual Nazi Party leader $2,500 a month not to quit the movement it was publicly raising money to destroy.

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