If the Southern Poverty Law Center wanted to demonstrate its effectiveness in disrupting hate groups, the storied civil rights organization could proudly point to the allegations of its federal indictment.
Even accepting the allegations at face value, the 14-page indictment shows no evidence of Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s claim that the SPLC was “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.” Prosecutors allege that the SPLC deceived donors by claiming to “dismantle” hate groups that they were actually enriching. The numbers do not add up to that narrative.
During an interview on Substack Live, former federal prosecutor Mitchell Epner explains what the indictment reveals about the SPLC’s work. Here are a few themes to look out for in the video.
Putting the numbers in context
Prosecutors allege that the SPLC spent more than $3 million on informants between 2014 and 2023, over the course of roughly a decade.
If the Justice Department’s numbers are accurate, the SPLC’s payments to informants represented a drop in the bucket of their total expenditures. The SPLC publicly reported roughly $129 million in revenue and expenses in 2024 alone, the most recent year for which their filings are public. A review of public filings show that was a fairly typical year, and the SPLC’s informant network amounted to a fraction of a single percentage point of its revenue and expenditures.
In return, the SPLC obtained information from well-placed and high-ranking informants within the country’s worst hate groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nation, and neo-Nazi affiliates. The indictment provides only a glimpse of the fruits of their investment.
According to the indictment, those informants provided intelligence into some of the most notorious gatherings of extremists in recent memory, including deep access into the planning and coordination of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally that led to the murder of Heather Heyer. One SPLC source allegedly stole dozens of boxes of documents to publicly spill the secrets of a “violent extremist group” on the group’s public website.
The SPLC shared its intelligence with the federal government to disrupt and prosecute extremist networks for decades, until FBI director Kash Patel cut ties with the group last October. Prosecutors don’t disclose how many criminal cases resulted from the information that the SPLC obtained from their informants before that relationship ended.
Why this case would interest Trump
Late last year, Patel called the SPLC a “partisan smear machine.”
That rhetoric against the civil rights group has been par for the course for conservatives in recent years, many of whom were enraged by the group listing Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA as an example of the “Hard Right” featured in a report on hate and extremism.
Beyond becoming a lightning rod for conservative outrage, the SPLC’s prosecution could be politically useful to Trump for other reasons. Prosecutors say that one of the SPLC’s sources participated in the group leadership chat for the “Unite the Right” rally, where tiki-torch wielding extremists protested the removal of a Confederate statue before one murdered an activist.
Trump infamously said that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the protest.
Epner predicted that the Trump administration would use the case to create a false narrative that the SPLC financed it.
“That could not be further from the truth,” Epner said.
“What happened — even just taking this indictment on its face — was that the SPLC was paying off rats within the Nazi party, the Klan, and the other groups that were part of that tiki-torch rally.” He then continued, adding that the SPLC routinely shared the information acquired from the informants with federal and local law enforcement to prepare them for the fallout from these gatherings.
The charges
Prosecutors charged the SPLC with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of false statements to a federally insured bank, and a charge of conspiring to commit money laundering.
Those charges closely mirror allegations against Trump ally Steve Bannon for defrauding donors of We Build the Wall, a crowdfunding initiative for a U.S.-Mexico barrier.
During his first term, Trump pardoned Bannon for his role in the wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy, and Bannon later pleaded guilty to similar state charges in Manhattan.
Epner said that Trump could view the SPLC case as revenge.
“I think that he takes a look at how he or his people, as he thinks about them, have been prosecuted and says, ‘How can we do that to them?’” Epner said.
‘Mortal danger’
The SPLC’s indictment technically shields the names of their informants, known as “field sources,” but those identities are likely thinly veiled to the extremist groups they were infiltrating.
Prosecutors laid out detailed information about the roles that the SPLC’s sources held within extremist groups and the periods in which they held them.
Epner said that several of those sources may already be in “mortal danger.”
“These are groups of people who think of themselves as killers and would want to kill people they think of as being traitors,” he said. “If this case moves forward, it really risks exposure of the specific identities of who the traitors were.”
That’s only one of the ways extremist groups have already benefited from the Trump Justice Department’s indictment immediately after the filing of this case.
“This is literally the Trump DOJ saying, ‘The SPLC are the bad guys, and the people you think are bad guys don’t really exist. They’re figments of your imagination,’” Epner noted.
Read the indictment here, and watch the full interview at the top of this newsletter.
