Trump's wild 'Unite the Right' claim collides with legal fact-check
President Donald Trump claimed during his recent “60 Minutes” interview, based on the federal indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center on fraud and money laundering charges, that the violent 2017 Unite the Right rally was “a total fake” funded by the extremist watchdog group “to make me look bad.”
The actual facts have stood in plain sight for years: An unwieldy coalition of violent neo-Nazis organized online and converged in Charlottesville, Va. in August 2017, first as a torch-wielding mob that kicked and punched student counterprotesters on the campus of the University of Virginia, and then engaged in hours of street brawls the following day, culminating in a car-ramming attack that killed Heather Heyer and injured 30 other peaceful protesters.
Trump’s false narrative about Unite the Right was amplified by his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt in an April 26 X post sharing an article headlined “Charlottesville: The Deceit Underlying the Hoax” that argues, “The Unite the Right rally was organized and financed by the highly partisan, left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center.”
As a measure of the widespread acceptance Trump’s claim got among rank-and-file GOP lawmakers, Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) repeated it on a recent podcast, stating that the SPLC “funded and organized” Unite the Right.
The narrative promoted by Trump rests on a threadbare claim in the indictment alleging that the SPLC secretly made payments of more than $270,000 over the course of eight years to an informant identified as “F-37,” who “was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ event.” The indictment goes on to say that the informant “made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.”
Following the indictment, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told Fox News host Laura Ingraham that “there’s no information we have 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.”
Lawyers for the SPLC filed a motion in federal court last week claiming that Blanche’s statement is false and demanding a retraction. The government responded on Tuesday, saying that no retraction is needed because Blanche said in another Fox News interview: “It is true that over the years they have 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.”
The SPLC also rebuked Trump’s statement to “60 Minutes.”
“These repeated, false, and prejudicial remarks by the administration’s most senior officials not only violate Justice Department norms and long-held principles of federal prosecution, but they illustrate, among other things, the stunning and blatant irregularity, politicization, and manifest risk of prosecutorial misconduct in this case,” the lawyers said in a related motion.
Supporting its claim that Blanche spoke falsely when he said the watchdog group did not share information from its informant program with law enforcement, the SPLC cites a 45-page “Event Alert” that compiled information from its informant program to warn about “the risk of violence at Charlottesville.”
The SPLC said that prior to the indictment, its lawyers met with prosecutors in Montgomery, Alabama, and presented information showing that information gathered through the informant program was shared with law enforcement. The motion says the materials included “copies of federal court pleadings” related to the government’s prosecution of a neo-Nazi who attended Unite the Right “based on the conduct the SPLC reported.” The defendant, Fred C. Arena, ultimately pleaded guilty to lying to FBI when he was confronted about hiding his membership in the white supremacist group Vanguard America in his application for security clearance to work as a contractor at Philadelphia Navy Yard.
According to the government, Arena made a social media post with a photograph of himself brandishing an AR-15 rifle, with the comment, “Coming to a synagogue near you.”
The SPLC also contends that it passed along information from the informant program to law enforcement about Conor Climo, an Atomwaffen member, who discussed his interest in setting fire to a Las Vegas synagogue and admitted to conducting surveillance on an LGBTQ+ bar. Climo wound up admitting to possession of bomb-making components.
The “Event Alert” prepared by the SPLC "warned the FBI of the specific individuals” expected to attend Unite the Right “and foment violence, providing not only names and pictures, but specific details about associates, backgrounds, and criminal histories,” the organization said. The document also included “details about those individuals’ weapons of choice based on intelligence gathered through the informant program.”
SPLC did not respond to a request from Raw Story to review the “Event Alert,” but the reference to individuals’ favored weapons aligns with the content of posts in the planning chats for Unite the Right that were obtained by an anonymous antifascist infiltrator who is not known to have worked with the SPLC.
One Discord post slightly less than a month before Unite the Right by a Discord user later identified as Michael Chesny, an active-duty Marine, featured a photo of a combine harvester labeled as a “multi-lane protester digestor.” Chesny wrote that it “sure would be nice” to use the machine in Charlottesville.
The planning chats for Unite the Right were set up on the gaming platform Discord, with different dedicated servers for the various neo-Nazi groups that mobilized for the rally. Jason Kessler, the lead organizer for Unite the Right, publicly discounted the notion that the SPLC informant was a significant figure in the white supremacist movement.
“The leadership discussion is not full of all these big names that people are throwing around,” he said. “It was just, ‘Hey, who wants to help out with this?’ It was as organized as if you were organizing a keg party at a college fraternity.”
The antifascist infiltrator provided screenshots of the Discord chats to Emily Gorcenski, a data scientist and antifascist activist in Charlottesville, according to the 2026 book To Catch a Fascist by Christopher Mathias. Armed with the evidence of the white supremacists’ plans to commit violence, Gorcenski and other local activists pleaded with Charlottesville City Council to revoke the permit for Unite the Right. The city council refused, and Mayor Mike Signer eventually wound up apologizing to Gorcenski, according to Mathias’ book.
Assuming the SPLC informant had access to the same posts on the multiple Discord servers as the antifascist infiltrator and that the FBI received the “Event Alert” as claimed by the SPLC’s lawyers, the agency would have likely had access to much of the same information as the antifascist activists in Charlottesville.
The FBI declined to comment in response to an inquiry from Raw Story seeking confirmation that the agency received the “Event Alert” and seeking an explanation of what, if any, actions the agency took in response to the information.
A database of leaked chats organized and published by the news outlet Unicorn Riot later served as an evidentiary floor for a civil lawsuit that resulted in a jury verdict finding two dozen organizers, promoters and foot soldiers of Unite the Right liable for a conspiracy to commit violence and intimidation with multi-million damages awarded to the victims.
Amy Spitalnick, who led the nonprofit that organized the Charlottesville lawsuit, decried the government’s prosecution of the SPLC in a statement in response to the indictment.
“SPLC is a valued partner whose work has directly made our communities safer,” said Spitalnick, now CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. “I saw this firsthand leading the successful lawsuit against the neo-Nazis responsible for violence in Charlottesville — which built on SPLC’s long legacy. SPLC’s work is even more essential now as this administration severely scales back or abandons the programs we rely on to stop violent white supremacists and other extremists.”
The evidence presented in the trial stands in stark contrast to Trump’s characterization on “60 Minutes” that Unite the Right was “a total fake” engineered by the SPLC in concert with Democrats and other adversaries to make him “look bad.”
Karen Dunn, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, confronted Kessler on Day 16 of the trial with statements he made in the Discord chats that he wanted Unite the Right to replicate a far-right rally in Berkeley, California, in April 2017 that devolved into violent clashes in the streets.
“I think we need to have a Battle of Berkeley situation in Charlottesville,” Kessler wrote. “Bring in the alt-right, Proud Boys, Stickman, Damigo, Spencer, and fight this s--- out.”
Four members of the white supremacist group Rise Above Movement who ultimately pleaded guilty to conspiracy to riot for their actions in Charlottesville had previously clashed with counter-protesters at the Berkeley rally, according to an affidavit filed by an FBI task force officer.
Dunn also pointed out a phone text Kessler sent in June 2017 to Richard Spencer, then one of the most renowned white supremacist celebrities who came to prominence on the coattails of Trump’s 2016 election, to offer him the headline speaker slot at Unite the Right.
“We’re raising an army, my liege, for free speech, but the cracking of skulls if it comes to it,” Kessler told Spencer.
Before that, in late May, following a torch rally at the Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville that served as a kind of dress rehearsal for Unite the Right, Kessler admitted in court that he had reached out to Matthew Heimbach, leader of the Traditionalist Worker Party.
During closing arguments, Roberta Kaplan, another lawyer for the plaintiffs, told the jury that once Heimbach agreed to participate, he brought in three other groups that were part of a hardline neo-Nazi coalition: League of the South, National Socialist Movement and Vanguard America.
The White House responded to questions from Raw Story about how they square Trump and Leavitt's comments with the documented facts about how Unite the Right was organized by doubling down on their assertions.
"The SPLC is a left-wing organization whose entire career is to profit off of smearing their political opponents with lies like [they] did with the infamous 'Charlottesville Hoax' against President Trump," White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said. "It's not surprising that the failing 'Raw Story' would defend the SPLC after they were indicted for fraud related to their efforts to supposedly 'fight extremism,' but instead they were actively funding the very extremism they claim to oppose."
Traditionalist Worker Party, League of the South, National Socialist Movement, Vanguard America, the Spencer-aligned group Identity Evropa, an arm of the Proud Boys, Rise Above Movement and other groups mobilized members to attend Unite the Right.
Vanguard America’s contingent included Fred Arena, the military contractor later convicted for lying to the FBI about his involvement with the group.
Also marching with Vanguard America and carrying one of its shields was James Alex Fields Jr., who plowed his Dodge Challenger into a peaceful protest march, killing a young legal assistant named Heather Heyer and injuring 30 others.
Fields was ultimately convicted of first-degree murder on state charges, and later pleaded guilty to federal hate crime charges.
When Fields was sentenced to life in prison in June 2019, Thomas T. Cullen, then the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia and now a federal judge, called his car attack “a hate-inspired act of domestic terrorism.”