Southern Poverty Law Center indicted over alleged use of paid informants in extremist groups

By Hannah Rabinowitz, CNN

(CNN) — The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted Tuesday over a discontinued program that used paid confidential informants to penetrate white supremacist and other organizations, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced.

The indictment, which was handed up by a federal grand jury in Alabama, charges the organization with 11 counts, including bank fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Blanche told reporters Tuesday that between 2014 and 2023 SPLC paid at least $3 million to eight people, including affiliates of the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi parties in the US.

“As the indictment describes, the SPLC was not dismantling these groups, it was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred,” Blanche said at a news conference Tuesday.

Part of the SPLC’s work included a now-defunct program that employed informants to “infiltrate” extremist groups and learn about their activities and guard against violent threats, SPLC CEO Bryan Fair said in a statement Tuesday morning. He denied any wrongdoing on behalf of the group. Fair said the SPLC often shared insight with law enforcement, but did not share the intel widely to protect the informants’ identities.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has for decades tracked white supremacy and extremist groups. Republicans and allies of the president have long criticized the nonprofit for what some say is acting as a far-left entity that targets conservative organizations and individuals.

“We stood in the vanguard then, and we stand in the vanguard today,” Fair said. “We will not be intimidated into silence or contrition, and we will not abandon our mission or the communities we serve.”

The criminal case proceeds as the Justice Department increases its scrutiny of organizations it alleges are linked to a coordinated left-wing effort to incite violence or are funding “domestic terrorism.”

Correction: An early version of this story was updated to correct the spelling of Bryan Fair’s name.

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