Southern Poverty Law Center Charged With Financial Crimes

I'm tired of being targeted by the Southern Poverty lynch mob just because I'm a fascist. I'm sorry. I don't fit neatly into their narrative.

I have feelings too!

Southern Poverty Law Center Charged With Financial Crimes

Justice Department alleges the civil-rights organization, which targets extremist groups, defrauded donors, a charge it denies

By Sadie Gurman, WSJ

April 21, 2026 8:32 pm ET

The Trump administration indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center, alleging it defrauded donors by funneling money to extremist groups.

The Trump administration on Tuesday secured an indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center, alleging the civil rights organization that made its name fighting the Ku Klux Klan defrauded donors by secretly funneling money to extremist groups.

An 11-count indictment alleges the nonprofit committed financial crimes by telling donors their money was being put toward dismantling hate groups when instead it sometimes furthered their interests. Prosecutors said the center paid informants in extremist organizations like the Klan, the Aryan Nation and neonazi groups at least $3 million dollars between 2014 and 2023 through a now-defunct program that aimed to infiltrate and monitor the groups’ activities and threats.

The Southern Poverty Law Center was “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a news conference. The organization that tracks hate groups has become a popular target of Republicans who accuse it of unfairly maligning Christian and conservative groups by labeling them as extremists.

The center’s interim CEO and President Bryan Fair said Tuesday that the group was being targeted for political reasons. He said the group no longer worked with informants but insisted the program saved lives.

“We are outraged by the false allegations,” Fair said, vowing to vigorously defend SPLC’s work.

The investigation started during the Biden administration, but officials opted not to bring criminal charges. Trump officials began revisiting the allegations over the past year, Blanche said. He declined to elaborate on what, if any, new evidence investigators had since found but said, “There is nothing political about this indictment.”

The criminal investigation comes as the Trump administration seeks to target left-leaning groups and correct what it calls the Biden administration’s anticonservative bias. Founded in 1971 in Alabama, the Southern Poverty Law Center has been an outspoken opponent of a number of Trump policies including on immigration, education and social issues. Republican criticism of the group increased after the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in September. The center included a section on Kirk’s group, Turning Point USA, in a 2024 report titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism,” describing it as “a case study of the hard right.”

In October 2025, FBI Director Kash Patel announced he was severing the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s long-held relationship with the center, which had provided law enforcement with research on domestic extremism, saying it had become a “partisan smear machine.”

Prosecutors must prove Blanche’s assertion that the informant program, which began in the 1980s, was used to further extremism rather than fight it.

The Justice Department’s case centers on eight informants who included high-ranking members of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, United Klans of America, American Front and the National Socialist Movement, according to the indictment.

Blanche said the informants were secretly paid from a series of bank accounts in the name of fake organizations and the funds were loaded onto prepaid cards.