Southern Poverty Law Center says its informant program was not kept secret from law enforcement

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Southern Poverty Law Center told a federal court on Tuesday that law enforcement agencies have long known that the nonprofit paid informants to report on the movements of hate groups, rejecting assertions by the Trump administration that the nonprofit steered money to the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups without the knowledge of authorities.

The Alabama-based nonprofit was indicted last week on charges of fraud and money laundering. Prosecutors said the group misled donors by using their money to pay informants who served as leaders in the very hate groups the organization was founded to fight.

In its first legal defense against the charges, the group filed motions in federal court in Alabama asking the court to order acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to retract statements saying the government had “no information” about the informant program, and to block him from making further similar statements. Blanche made the comment in a press conference last week and later on Fox News as he announced charges against the nonprofit.

The filings detail three instances in which the SPLC says information from its informant program was shared with law enforcement to help stop the activities of racist groups. Attorneys for the SPLC presented information from at least one of those cases during an April meeting with prosecutors, attorneys said. The group asked Blanche for a retraction after he said authorities had been kept in the dark, but the government declined, according to the group.

“The Department of Justice is well aware that the SPLC provided helpful information, through the use of its confidential informants, to law enforcement,” the group said in its filing. “The Department of Justice also knows that these confidential informants helped law enforcement put violent extremists in jail.”

Lawyers for the group said Blanche’s comments could taint the jury pool and compromise the group’s right to a fair trial.

President Donald Trump has seized on the case, calling SPLC one of the “greatest political scams in American History” and connecting it to his false claims that he won the 2020 election. Critics have called it a politically motivated prosecution that weaponizes the Justice Department to punish opponents of conservatives.

The SPLC lays out examples of how it shared informant information

The indictment accuses the group of secretly promoting racist groups while publicly saying it was fighting them. For example, prosecutors said an SPLC-paid informant helped plan the 2017 white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and attended the rally at the direction of the SPLC.

But in its filings, the SPLC said it sent a 45-page “event alert” to the FBI in advance of the rally with information gathered from the informant program, including information about some attendees’ weapons.

In one 2019 case, the SPLC said a tip from its informant program helped thwart a planned attack in Las Vegas. The group said it shared information with law enforcement that led to the FBI’s arrest of a man associated with Atomwaffen Division, a white supremacist group. A Justice Department news release from 2020 said the man discussed attacking a synagogue and a bar catering to LGBTQ customers. He was sentenced to two years in prison.

In another case, the SPLC said intel from the informant program was passed to law enforcement and led to the conviction of a man who lied about his ties to a white supremacist group while requesting national security clearance. The man, who was not identified in court documents, had been working at Philadelphia’s Navy Yard in 2018 and was convicted and sentenced to prison following the tip, the group said.

Attorneys for the SPLC said they presented evidence to prosecutors at an April 6 meeting showing how information from the informant program was shared with law enforcement in that case.

Alongside its request for a retraction, the SPLC filed a motion asking for grand jury transcripts to make sure false statements weren’t used to secure the indictment. It said mischaracterizations by the Justice Department “suggest that the grand jury was not merely misled by the government’s presentation of the law, but likely that it was actively weaponized to facilitate such charges.”

The government says the group was ‘manufacturing’ extremism

Prosecutors say the SPLC funneled more than $3 million in donated money to informants who were leaders in the KKK, the neo-Nazi National Alliance and other hate groups. The center is charged with defrauding donors and making false statements to create bank accounts that were used to relay money to informants.

Blanche said at a press conference that the group was “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.” Justice Department officials have said these are the first charges in an ongoing investigation.

The center came under fresh scrutiny after the assassination last year of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who founded and led Turning Point USA. The SPLC had characterized Kirk’s group as “A Case Study of the Hard Right in 2024” in a report titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2024.”

In a statement on Tuesday, Bryan Fair, interim president and CEO of SPLC, said information shared with the FBI has saved lives.

“When threats and other unlawful activity were revealed, the SPLC immediately passed that information to law enforcement officials, local, state and federal and assisted in efforts to prevent violence and stop criminal activity,” Fair said.