Donald Trump's acting U.S. attorney general is reversing course on comments he made on a major case that has been plagued with obvious lies from the start, an expert claimed.
"Todd Blanche is already backpedaling significantly," said journalist Adam Klasfeld about Blanche and his case against the Southern Poverty Law Center.
"When he unsealed the indictment and went in a press conference, he had claimed to reporters that the SPLC's informant program was manufacturing racism," Klasfeld explained. "He went even further a little bit later...He told Laura Ingraham that there was no information that the SLPC informants program gathered that the SPLC shared with law enforcement."
However, Blanche and the Department of Justice have since been "forced to concede that wasn't true, that was a lie," Klasfeld said.
"What he's admitting is that when he claimed the SPLC wasn't sharing information with law enforcement, that wasn't true," Klasfeld explained. "They were, and we just learned very recently what some of that information sharing accomplished."
Ahead of the 2017 Charlottesville rally of white supremacists, the SPLC gave the FBI more than forty pages of "names, associations, criminal histories and weapons of choice of the extremists," according to Klasfeld. The SPLC also "helped thwart a terrorist in Las Vegas," Klasfeld said, by handing off information to the FBI about a man named Conor Climo who planned to attack a synagogue and gay bar, which led to his 2020 arrest.
"These are things that the SPLC has disclosed in court filings that the government, by the way, after these disclosures never contradicted," Klasfeld said. "What Todd Blanche said, what he finally admitted five days after his original interview, is that what he said in the first interview was absolutely wrong."
Despite Blanche's backtracking, "he tries to sort of needle and swipe at SPLC as he's admitting the error. He says they're selectively sharing information with law enforcement," Klasfeld said. "Of course, they select the information that is of interest to law enforcement, and now you have Todd Blanche and the Trump Justice Department claiming that is enough" to prosecute the SPLC.
