Southern Poverty Law Center Indicted

[lustylad]

Originally Posted by txdot-guy

The government isn’t claiming entrapment. They are claiming fraud. They are claiming that the work of the SPLC is nothing more than a non profit ponzi scheme. Using funds from donors to fund extremist groups to then provide proof to donors to then get more donations.

I didn't say the DOJ was claiming entrapment. I only brought up entrapment to explain why the use of informants is risky and often backfires. The government knows it has to tread very carefully. What should come out at trial is - what exactly was the SPLC paying these "informants" for? Your Ponzi scheme analogy doesn't fit. Investors expect to be repaid, but donors don't.


This argument has no basis in fact or reality. It truly sounds like a drunken right wing masturbatory fantasy. It appears to me that the FBI and the Justice department is manufacturing a case against the SPLC...

So which is more kinky fun - right-wing or left-wing drunken masturbatory fantasies?

Curious why you used the term "manufacturing". AG Todd Blanche uses the same word below to characterize what the SPLC is doing. You do know this case was first opened under Biden, right?


Read about it here: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/feder...statements-and

A Grand Jury in Montgomery, Alabama, today returned an indictment charging the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) with 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. The United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama Northern Division filed two forfeiture actions to recover alleged proceeds of the organization’s fraud scheme. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigated this case with assistance from the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI).

“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked. This Department of Justice will hold the SPLC and every other fraudulent organization operating with the same deceptive playbook accountable. No entity is above the law.”

I would say part of the SPLC's playbook is manufacturing extremism by falsely labeling numerous peaceful conservative organizations as "hate groups". If the DOJ charges are proven, they are funding hate to fight hate, which makes no sense.

[lustylad]

Originally Posted by pxmcc

the problem as i see it is that Todd Blanche has no cred.

Hmmm... Did Eric Holder lose any cred with you after he referred to his role as Attorney General to being Obama's "wingman"?

[txdot-guy]

Originally Posted by lustylad

I would say part of the SPLC's playbook is manufacturing extremism by falsely labeling numerous peaceful conservative organizations as "hate groups". If the DOJ charges are proven, they are funding hate to fight hate, which makes no sense.

If they are labeling conservative organizations as “hate groups” isn’t that free speech. And if these organizations aren’t “hate groups” then why is funding informants wrong.

For the justice department to make their case wouldn’t they need to prove that the SPLC was knowingly using informants to provide fraudulent information so that they could claim the organizations they were reporting on were actual “hate groups”.

I think that there is a whole lot of nothing here. This Justice Department investigation and indictment practically screams political retaliation.

I would be very surprised if it goes anywhere.

[lustylad]

Originally Posted by txdot-guy

If they are labeling conservative organizations as “hate groups” isn’t that free speech. And if these organizations aren’t “hate groups” then why is funding informants wrong.

Free speech isn't unlimited. Am I allowed to run around telling everyone you are a hateful racist? When you start losing friends and nobody will hire you as a result, should you not be allowed to sue me for defamation, slander, loss of income?

SPLC is a tax-exempt non-profit. It shouldn't be paying "informants" anywhere. If they have a valid explanation, I want to hear it.

Originally Posted by txdot-guy

I think that there is a whole lot of nothing here. This Justice Department investigation and indictment practically screams political retaliation.

I would be very surprised if it goes anywhere.

Again, the case was originally opened under Biden. That doesn't scream "political retaliation". I'm trying not to pre-judge until I hear some testimony in the case.

The payments totaling $3 million went to 8 people, including a KKK Imperial Wizard and an organizer of the infamous 2017 Charlottesville rally who ended up "posting racist comments at the SPLC's request" while attending the rally, according to the indictment.

https://nypost.com/2026/04/22/us-new...-as-informant/

[txdot-guy]

I guess we’ll just have to let this play out and see what happens. I have an extremely difficult time believing that anything criminal happened here. And if any donor believed that they were being defrauded then let them file a civil lawsuit.

This seems to be a giant, politically motivated, waste of time, effort and tax payer dollars all to defend the interests of conservative groups who don’t like being called names in the press.

Political retaliation at its finest.

I would much prefer to see the FBI put some bankers and crypto bros behind bars. You can’t tell me that there isn’t plenty of fraud going on in high finance.

[Yssup Rider]

Blanche will get fired if he can’t bring the right indictments quickly enough to accommodate the short attention span piece of dogshit fascist.

[ICU 812]

Wow. This gets "curiouser and curiouser" as Alice said in Through The Looking Glass.

And now down the rabbit hole: I wonder if anything like these allegations occurred prior to and during the events of Jan 20th 2020? Perhaps that was a false flag operation as well?

We will have to see how this plays out. Others here have called for a thorough and deep investigation or the current AG will get some Greyhound therapy.

[pxmcc]

Originally Posted by lustylad

Hmmm... Did Eric Holder lose any cred with you after he referred to his role as Attorney General to being Obama's "wingman"?

there's a difference between a wingman and the president's bitch..

[ICU 812]

Whatever . . .the topic here is that the SPLC is facing serious charges and the scope of investigation may very well widen to include specific individuals. The scope of investigation could easily widen further to take in other people and organizations active during the turmoil of the Biden presidency.

That is the topic.

[Lantern2814]

Originally Posted by txdot-guy

The government isn’t claiming entrapment. They are claiming fraud. They are claiming that the work of the SPLC is nothing more than a non profit ponzi scheme. Using funds from donors to fund extremist groups to then provide proof to donors to then get more donations.

This argument has no basis in fact or reality. It truly sounds like a drunken right wing masturbatory fantasy. It appears to me that the FBI and the Justice department is manufacturing a case against the SPLC to justify their own jobs to the President who wants them to persecute his political enemies.

Read about it here: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/feder...statements-and

A Grand Jury in Montgomery, Alabama, today returned an indictment charging the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) with 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. The United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama Northern Division filed two forfeiture actions to recover alleged proceeds of the organization’s fraud scheme. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigated this case with assistance from the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI).

“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked. This Department of Justice will hold the SPLC and every other fraudulent organization operating with the same deceptive playbook accountable. No entity is above the law.”

No basis in fact or reality? So you don't even read the actual evidence that has already been presented. Just reflexively scream "right wing fantasy". Why don't you try to disprove what has been revealed? That these fraudsters have been funding the very groups they claim to fight in order to justify their own existence. Which has been shown.

[txdot-guy]

Originally Posted by Lantern2814

No basis in fact or reality? So you don't even read the actual evidence that has already been presented. Just reflexively scream "right wing fantasy". Why don't you try to disprove what has been revealed? That these fraudsters have been funding the very groups they claim to fight in order to justify their own existence. Which has been shown.

First of all I don’t have to disprove anything. It’s the job of the prosecutor to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that fraud was committed.

Secondly I read the linked article and another article on Fox that reported on this story. Nothing printed in the news was enough to convince me that the use of informants nor the 3 million spent over a decade was used to promote racist groups. Especially for an organization with total assets of more than $822 million at the end of 2024

Thirdly, The indictment appears to fit within the Trump administration’s pattern of using the Justice Department to punish its political adversaries

This lawsuit certainly seems to just be the latest salvo in the conservative movement’s battle with the SPLC. Except this time it’s the Justice department and the FBI being used for political retribution.

From the Times:

Conservatives took notice. For years they had bristled as the S.P.L.C. put groups that opposed L.G.B.T.Q. rights and immigration on its hate list. The Center for Immigration Studies earned a spot, the S.P.L.C. argued, as a result of its “repeated circulation of white nationalist and antisemitic writers in its weekly newsletter and the commissioning of a policy analyst who had previously been pushed out of the conservative Heritage Foundation for his embrace of racist pseudoscience.”

In 2019, the Center for Immigration Studies sued Richard Cohen, then the president of the S.P.L.C., in federal court, saying that the organization had violated civil racketeering statutes in trying to “destroy C.I.S. by ruining it financially.” The lawsuit was rejected by the courts.

That same year, Senator Tom Cotton wrote to the Internal Revenue Service, asking the agency to consider revoking the law center’s nonprofit status.

“Recent news reports have confirmed the long-established fact that the S.P.L.C. regularly engages in defamation of its political opponents,” Mr. Cotton wrote. “In fact, the S.P.L.C’s defining characteristic is to fund-raise off of defamation.”

The effort was unsuccessful, but the pressure from Republicans has only ramped up since Mr. Trump’s return to the White House. In October, Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, announced that the bureau would no longer cooperate with the S.P.L.C., calling it a “partisan smear machine.”

That same month, Elon Musk posted on social media that the group was “guilty of incitement to murder Charlie Kirk,” the co-founder of Turning Point USA who had been killed a month earlier. Mr. Musk cited another post that noted that Mr. Kirk had recently been featured in the S.P.L.C.’s Hatewatch newsletter.

In December, a subcommittee of the Republican-controlled House held a hearing on the group. The chair, Representative Chip Roy, a Texas Republican, opened it by calling the S.P.L.C. “one of the most politically motivated, financially lucrative and ideologically extreme nonprofits in America,” and argued that it had been allowed to “wield extraordinary influence over federal civil rights policy, federal law enforcement training and the private sector mechanisms that increasingly dictate who is permitted to participate in civic life.”

[txdot-guy]

This indictment is as stupid as saying that the government supports organized crime when they give out rewards to get low level criminals to turn on higher level criminals, or that the government supports terrorism when they pay people in terror organizations for information on people like bin laden or other terrorist leaders.

The government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the people running SPLC were purposely paying people to promote racist activities. That they knew about it and that their purpose was to specifically use it for further fundraising.I just don’t see how they are going to be able to do that.

[fd-guy]

Originally Posted by Lantern2814

Sad deflection attempts from the lefties here. Biden's DOJ opened an investigation into these fraudsters at the SPLC, but mysteriously closed it with ZERO explanation. Because the fraud was so obvious. We can only hope this leads to this hate organization getting a long overdue shutdown

Worth getting the facts straight before declaring victory.

The Biden DOJ didn't close the investigation because "the fraud was so obvious." Acting AG Todd Blanche himself confirmed prosecutors reviewed it and decided not to bring charges. That's not a cover-up — that's literally how prosecutorial discretion works. Source: CNN

What the indictment actually alleges is that the SPLC paid confidential informants inside white supremacist groups — the KKK, Aryan Nation, National Alliance — to gather intelligence, and didn't disclose those payments to donors or banks. A tactic that, as Case Western Reserve law professor Cassandra Burke Robertson points out, "federal law enforcement does as a matter of course."

Legal experts are considerably less impressed than you are. Columbia Law professor John C. Coffee Jr. called it "very thin" and said it "does not adequately allege any violation of the mail or wire fraud statutes." Robertson said she'd be "absolutely shocked if it went all the way to a conviction." Source: Alabama Reflector

An indictment is a charge, not a conviction. This one was brought by Kash Patel's FBI and Todd Blanche's DOJ — neither of whom are disinterested parties when it comes to an organisation that spent decades mapping far-right extremism.

But sure — the organisation that spent 50 years tracking the KKK is the real threat.

[ICU 812]

The job of a Grand Jury is to look at potential evidence and determine that there is a good probability that criminal activity occurred and recommend charges.

If charges are brought and prosecuted, the court is where the determination of what is factual happens.

One smells smoke, the other looks for fire.

[pxmcc]

the case is apparently quite weak, with multiple flaws in the indictment, as i suspected..

https://www-cbsnews-com.cdn.ampproje...sa=1#webview=1