Southern Poverty Law Center Indictment

You can read it here; here’s the opening paragraph plus another paragraph, though the indictment offers considerably more details as well (note that, as always, an indictment is just the government’s allegations):

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s (“SPLC”) stated mission included the dismantling of white supremacy and confronting hate across the country. However, unbeknownst to donors, some of their donated money was being used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance. The SPLC’s paid informants (“field sources”) engaged in the active promotion of racist groups at the same time that the SPLC was denouncing the same groups on its website.

The SPLC also had a field source who was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville, Virginia. That field source made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.

In order to covertly pay its field sources, the SPLC opened bank accounts connected to a series of fictitious entities. The covert nature of the accounts allowed the SPLC to disguise the true nature, source, ownership, and control of the fraudulently obtained donated money the SPLC paid the field sources. In order to keep the scheme going, the SPLC made a series of false statements related to the operation of the accounts….

[T]he SPLC explicitly sought donations under the auspices that donor money would be used to help “dismantle” violent extremist groups. In the SPLC’s solicitations for donations as outlined herein, donors were not told that some of the donated funds were to be used by the SPLC to pay high-level leaders of violent extremist groups and others, nor were donors ever told that some of the donated funds were used for the benefit of the violent extremist groups or that some of the donated funds would be used in the commission of state and federal crimes.

The indictment alleges the payments totaled over $3M, and lists specific items that allegedly amounted to over $1.8M. One of the allegations also describes a conspiracy to take and copy (though later return) documents, though that conspiracy isn’t itself charged as a crime:

F-9 was affiliated with the neo-Nazi organization, the National Alliance and served as an F [the SPLC term for "field source"] for the SPLC for more than 20 years. F-9′s activities included fundraising for the National Alliance. Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly paid F-9 more than $1,000,000.00.

In 2014, F-9 entered the headquarters of a violent extremist group and stole 25 boxes of their F-9 coordinated payment for the copying of the materials with a high-level SPLC employee who had knowledge the documents had been stolen. The original stolen materials were returned to the violent extremist group in a second illegal entry by F-9. Thereafter, the high-level SPLC employee utilized the documents, in part, as the basis for a story published on the SPLC’s Hatewatch website and authored by the employee. Another F, F-39, was blamed for the theft and was paid approximately $6,000.00 by the SPLC to falsely take responsibility for the theft.

(Whether taking tangible items, copying them, and then returning them, is theft is a complicated matter; theft traditionally requires an intent to permanently deprive someone of property, but some statutes define it more broadly, see, e.g., this Washington statutory scheme and in particular its definition of “deprive.” Also, I expect that the statute of limitations on the taking of the documents has run in any event.)

I take it that one defense argument as to the donor fraud claims may be that they were trying to dismantle violent extremist groups, both by paying money to get information about them and by causing the groups to do and say things that would discredit them. That may itself be discreditable, but the question will be whether it’s a fraud on the donors.

I’m not an expert in this area of the law, so I’ve reached out to some law professors I know who are, and I hope to have some more information as I learn it. But for now, I thought I’d pass along the indictment so that people can read it for themselves.

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