WASHINGTON — The Southern Poverty Law Center paid reluctant white nationalists and Ku Klux Klan members thousands of dollars in donor money to remain in the notorious hate groups — even making them whole for money spent on cross-burnings, the Justice Department alleged in a shocking superseding indictment filed Tuesday.
The feds initially charged the once-venerable civil rights organization in April with 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a bank, and money laundering conspiracy. Tuesday’s superseding indictment, filed in Montgomery, Ala., federal court, lays out some of the stories of informants who were paid in money the SPLC raised from donors on the pretext of “exposing hate and injustice” and “fighting discrimination.”
Two Klan members, identified only as F-31 and F-32, came to the SPLC in 2010 in fear for their safety and wanting to leave the hate group, the indictment alleges.
Instead of helping them find a way out, prosecutors say, the pair were paid $1,200 per month, plus expenses, via a shell corporation called Rare Books Warehouse to remain in the Klan.
Some of that money, according to the indictment, was used to recruit new members and make the Klan’s notorious white robes.
Among the expenses the two were reimbursed for, per the court documents, were all the costs “incurred for cross-burning events, to include the wood and fuel used.”
The feds say the SPLC used fictitious companies to conceal from its donors that a total of $3 million in payments were made to “field sources” between 2014 and 2023.
Those eight informants included a Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard and a leader of a chat group that organized the infamous 2017 Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., according to the indictment.
The filing noted that the Unite the Right field source took $270,000 from the SPLC from 2015 to 2023.
Another source — who allegedly was in a romantic relationship with a SPLC employee — received $1.2 million for activities that included stealing 25 boxes of documents from the neo-Nazi National Alliance, which their lover used as material for a story on the organizations “Hatewatch” website.
Over the same rough period that the informants were paid with laundered money, SPLC’s revenue spiked 233% — “from $38,712,628.00 in 2010 to $129,069,290.00 in 2023,” prosecutors alleged.
The nonprofit’s net assets also ballooned over the same period to more than $786 million in 2023 from more than $238 million in 2010.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters at an April 21 news conference announcing the indictment that the SPLC was “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”
The SPLC’s attorneys responded in court papers that it got “helpful information” from the confidential informants that was later provided to law enforcement.
“Department of Justice also knows that these confidential informants helped law enforcement put violent extremists in jail,” they wrote, referencing at least two past convictions.
One was a “member of white supremacist extremist group Atomwaffen Division” and “intended to engage in a major terrorist attack against Las Vegas citizens,” according to the SPLC attorneys.
They also asked for an injunction against Blanche over his public disputes of their claim that the confidential sources aided law enforcement.
“There’s no information that we have that suggests that the money they were paying to these informants and these members of these organizations, they then turned around and shared what they learned with law enforcement,” Blanche had said on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” the day of the initial indictment.
The acting AG later said on Fox News’ “Sunday with Shannon Bream”: “It is true that over the years [the SPLC has] selectively shared information with law enforcement. That’s well-documented and there’s no dispute there. They aren’t charged with any of that conduct.”
Attorneys for the SPLC did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the superseding indictment.
Attorneys for the SPLC did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
