Law enforcement veterans blasted the Department of Justice case against a civil rights group that helped take down the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups.
FBI Director Kash Patel and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced criminal charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center on Tuesday, accusing the organization of defrauding donors by using their contributions to pay informants infiltrating extremist groups without disclosure, but experts say the FBI has long done the same thing, reported USA Today.
"There are, I would have to imagine, every day those kinds of operations, [in law enforcement],” said Javed Ali, associate professor at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and a former FBI counterterrorism official.
The federal indictment alleges that the SPLC solicited donations under the premise that money would be used to "dismantle" violent extremist organizations, but failed to inform donors that some funds would pay leaders and members of hate groups including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation and the National Alliance.
"They used the fraudulently raised money, by lying to their donor network − thousands of Americans − to go ahead and actually pay the leadership of these supposed violent extremist groups," Patel said at a news conference. Blanche characterized the SPLC's tactics as "manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred."
The indictment further alleges that SPLC informants did not merely observe and report on hate groups but actively participated in extremist activities. One informant allegedly helped organize and provide transportation for the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, while another is accused of stealing documents from a white supremacist group that the SPLC later published.
However, legal experts and former law enforcement officials have challenged the prosecution's characterization, and former prosecutor Pat Cotter told USA Today the indictment is "ludicrous and idiotic."
“If you want to know what’s going on in the sewer, you have to walk through a lot of s---,” said Cotter, who investigated organized crime in the 1990s. “If you want to know what the Nazis are doing, you have to talk to a Nazi.”
Using fictitious business entities to pay informants was perfectly reasonable because that ensures the payments couldn't be traced back to the SPLC, Cotter said, adding that the DOJ's fraud charges are “a unique if not perversely inventive theory of fraud."
“The idea that people who contribute to the Southern Poverty Law Center would have objected that some of their funding was going to pay people who infiltrated extremist far-right groups like the Ku-Klux Klan is ridiculous on its face,” Cotter said. “It’s stupid. It doesn’t pass the laugh test.”
The SPLC denied the allegations in a statement, asserting that the organization has spent 55 years combating white supremacy and other injustices. "Taking on violent hate and extremist groups is among the most dangerous work there is," CEO Bryan Fair said. "To be clear, this program saved lives."
The charges come after the FBI severed its relationship with the SPLC in 2025, ending decades of cooperation during which the civil rights organization provided intelligence to law enforcement.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.