The Southern Poverty Law Center has a money laundering and fraud problem. That’s per the indictment from the Department of Justice yesterday afternoon.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has been indicted on fraud charges for its use of paid informants to monitor and track racist organizations, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced Tuesday.

The indictment was handed down by a federal grand jury in Alabama, where the organization is based. The SPLC faces 11 counts including wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

This is a group that has long touted itself as the premier watchdog as it were for civil rights, and even created a handy dandy map of racist organizations and people to follow. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was started ostensibly to identify and track actual racist groups such as the KKK. And then the SPLC expanded their definition of racist. Which included parents rights groups, Turning Point USA, pro-life groups, Moms for Liberty, and more. Notably, many of their “newer” racist targets over the years have been conservative organizations whose politics and speech were deemed wrong-think by the SPLC.

Well now, in addition to past legal troubles and internal strife, the Southern Poverty Law Center faces very serious charges of fraud and money laundering.

https://twitter.com/TheJusticeDept/status/2046704517119377577

The New York Times helpfully points out that this poor organization is a “prominent civil rights group” that has been targeted by those nasty Republicans. 

The Justice Department charged the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group that has long tracked hate groups, on Tuesday with financial crimes, accusing it of defrauding donors by using their money to secretly pay informants inside extremist organizations.

At a news conference announcing the charges, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, said that from 2014 to 2023, the group made payments totaling more than $3 million to people who were affiliated with extremist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the National Socialist Party of America. The law center, he added, was “doing the exact opposite of what it told its donors it was doing — not dismantling extremism, but funding it.”

The indictment, however, offers little to support the notion that the group’s payments to informants was meant to aid the extremist groups they had infiltrated.

Prosecutors describe how one informant, which the law center refers to as a field source, “was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ event in Charlottesville, Virginia, and attended the event at the direction of the S.P.L.C.”

There’s a lot to unpack with those few paragraphs, but before I do, let me remind our readers that the SPLC has been involved directly in riots, which led to SPLC attorneys facing domestic terrorism charges. Yes, they were rioting WITH Antifa. 

Back to the New York Times spin. According to them, members of the SPLC being paid to lurk around and fuel the flames within chat groups and then “attend” the riots in Charlottesville isn’t credible evidence of guilt. OH REALLY? I’d say funneling $3 million dollars, that we know of, to hate groups so they can fuel MORE hate is pretty credible evidence. 

Who are the groups they funneled money to? 

-Ku Klux Klan
-American Nazi Party
-Aryan Nation
-United Klans of America
-Unite the Right
-National Alliance
-National Socialist Movement
-Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club
-American Front

As the indictment shows, which you can read in full here, SPLC took the time to create false entities and opened bank accounts under those names. Those hidden accounts were funded by money from donors. It is really, and I mean REALLY not a good idea for a so-called civil rights group to be caught funding the most virulent ACTUAL hate groups this country has. Groups that the SPLC’s mission was supposed to fight against. Yet here is the New York Times whining about it. 

Thank you for downplaying the explosive facts revealed yesterday, about how they were financing racism while claiming to fight racism. Your never ending propaganda for the left is truly a sight to behold!

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) April 22, 2026

Yes, indeed it is. They ran with this whine fest while knowing the investigation started in 2014. They ran this while knowing that the Biden Administration SAT on this investigation instead of continuing it. Likely, one of the reasons the Biden DOJ sat on the investigation is that Joe explicitly stated that the “very fine people” lie regarding Charlottesville was a key reason he ran for President from his basement. 

And now we find out that there were indeed paid actors to the tune of $270,000, paid BY the Southern Poverty Law Center, at the Charlottesville riots. Quite a nice payday wouldn’t you say?

Again, the SPLC was funneling donor money into fake bank accounts in order to pay people to engage with and promote the radical leftist hate groups rhetoric and racism. As Sasha Stone points out here, it does seem that the SPLC needed to promote racism and violence from behind the scenes (Patriot Front anyone?) in order to justify their existence and keep the donations flowing.

This one's wild. The SPLC paid a member of the National Alliance over one million dollars (!) in less than a decade.

At one point, the informant entered the headquarters of a presumably different organization and stole 25 boxes of their documents, which he delivered to the… pic.twitter.com/yrvMxJNJBv

— Patrick Casey (@restoreorderusa) April 21, 2026

And now the Democrats are big mad about this. 

The so-called indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center announced by Todd Blanche and Kash Patel is baseless and illegitimate.

These partisan hacks who continue to weaponize the criminal justice system against perceived opponents will never intimidate us.

And all of…

— Hakeem Jeffries (@RepJeffries) April 21, 2026

Cry harder guys. 

The icing on the cake, as pointed out by Cynical Publius on X, is that this case was brought forth in ALABAMA, where the SPLC is headquartered, which means its highly possible for a fair trial to take place compared to say…New York City. 

Feature Photo Credit: Protestors with Nazi flag at Charlottesville, via Wikimedia, cropped and modified