Shortly after the Southern Poverty Law Center’s indictment, Donald Trump went on a major TV network to declare the civil rights group guilty of the crimes charged, and so did his former personal attorney turned handpicked Attorney General Todd Blanche.
Other senior Justice Department officials joined the pile-on, as did sitting FBI director Kash Patel. A whistleblower alleged that there was a pressure campaign inside the district that ultimately charged the SPLC to rush through an indictment despite “serious concerns” by prosecutors in that district.
On Friday, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Alabama — U.S. District Judge Emily Marks — found that none of that was enough to even investigate whether the SPLC has been targeted for a vindictive prosecution.
“After filtering out the noise, the Court is left to decide only whether the Government’s decision to prosecute the SPLC was constitutionally impermissible,” Judge Marks wrote in a 36-page memorandum opinion. “On this record, the SPLC is not entitled to discovery or dismissal of the indictment.”
‘President Trump’s rhetoric’
During a Substack Live conversation, investigative journalist Phil Williams described how Trump seemed to get a pass for trampling on the presumption of innocence through the “crazy uncle view of the President's rantings.”
“Essentially, [Judge Marks] was saying, ‘Well, he says all sorts of crazy stuff. There's no evidence that the people who worked for him were following those crazy notions,’” said Williams, who investigates extremist groups in his newsletter ConfrontTheHate.com.
In fact, there was evidence that prosecutors within the Middle District of Alabama felt political pressure from Main Justice to indict the SPLC — in the form of a whistleblower report submitted to the House Judiciary Committee earlier this year.
“According to whistleblower information provided to this Committee, Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh ordered your office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama, to rush through the indictment of the SPLC, despite serious concerns about the strength of the case,” the Committee’s top Democratic member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) wrote in a letter then-Acting U.S. Attorney Kevin Davidson in May.
Singh, a Blanche deputy, was one of the senior Justice Department officials whose involvement in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia led to its dismissal for vindictive prosecution.
Judge Marks didn’t cite or discuss the whistleblower report anywhere in her ruling, which set the stage for a trial against the SPLC in October.
“Judge Marks has really not even given much consideration to the arguments being made by the Southern Poverty Law Center in their attempt to get further investigation about whether this is a case of vindictive prosecution,” Williams said.
The judge wrote off Trump’s attacks against the SPLC with a euphemism for the record books.
“President Trump’s rhetoric is (rather famously) wide-ranging, and he has undoubtedly been critical of the SPLC,” she wrote. “However, the SPLC fails to establish that President Trump’s statements evince animus on the part of the United States Attorney for the Middle District of Alabama.”
For the judge, it would “stack speculation upon conjecture” to draw a line on the government-wide media blitz against the SPLC and the group’s prosecution, and the evidence available wasn’t enough to justify any further investigation.
‘Partisan smear machine’
The felony case poses a major threat to the SPLC, a legendary civil rights organization that bankrupted the Ku Klux Klan in a groundbreaking series of civil lawsuits in the 1980s.
Since that time, the SPLC has burnished a reputation as one of the nation’s premiere anti-hate watchdogs, but it’s wound up in the crosshairs of the Trump administration for its criticism of prominent conservative figures. Conservative opposition to the group intensified after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, whom the SPLC previously criticized for his rhetoric.
“The SPLC has faced criticism from more moderate people for being a little too broad in using the word ‘hate,’ and so that has engendered a lot of controversy within the conservative movement,” Williams noted.
Although the SPLC denounced the political violence that ended Kirk’s life, the controversy continued: Patel labeled the civil rights group a “partisan smear machine” and ended the FBI’s historic cooperation with the SPLC in disrupting crimes by extremist groups late last years.
Then, federal prosecutors revived an investigation into the SPLC’s history of hiring paid informants inside the KKK, neo-Nazi groups and other extremist organizations. The SPLC frequently shared information obtained through the program with federal and local law enforcement, but the Trump Justice Department’s case alleges that the SPLC’s money to informants, in Blanche’s words, were a way of “manufacturing” racism to keep the donation dollars flowing.
The indictment charges the SPLC with wire fraud for supposedly misleading donors about how their money was spent and money laundering for obscuring the payments to informants through corporate entities. But litigation has revealed that information obtained through the SPLC’s informant program disrupted crimes and a would-be terrorist attack on a synagogue and LGBTQ bar in Las Vegas.
The SPLC alleges that the government is withholding exculpatory evidence about its historic cooperation with the FBI, which the defense needs for a trial scheduled for Oct. 5.
“Documents showing the SPLC’s coordination with law enforcement exist, and the government could readily collect and produce them,” the SPLC’s attorneys wrote. “That should have happened without the need for a request or this motion. It did not.”
All Rise News will continue to follow the case closely.
Read the judge’s ruling here, and watch the full conversation at the top of this newsletter with deep analysis about the case.
