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In April, the Trump administration announced a federal fraud case against the Southern Poverty Law Center, the well-heeled organization known for tracking what it calls hate groups. The group pleaded not guilty in July. Then, this month, the Justice Department announced charges against Heidi Beirich, a former senior SPLC official. Prosecutors allege the SPLC’s long-running program that paid informants inside white supremacist organizations deceived donors and banks about money routed to those informants, including one with whom Beirich allegedly shared a home and bank accounts. Beirich and the SPLC deny wrongdoing, and the organization says the government is criminalizing a legitimate effort to penetrate extremist groups and provide information to law enforcement and the public.

Some critics contend the case nakedly weaponizes the Justice Department to go after an organization the Trump administration doesn’t like for political reasons. But Trump’s broadside against the SPLC isn’t emerging from nowhere. Some of what his administration argues actually echoes blistering criticism from civil rights lawyers who have railed against the SPLC for decades. I wanted help untangling that mess, so I called Stephen Bright, a longtime civil rights lawyer and Yale Law lecturer who was once one of the organization’s most prominent critics, particularly of co-founder Morris Dees’ relentless fundraising and what Bright saw as the SPLC’s failure to use its resources to help the people and causes it invoked to raise that money. I asked him to explain what was actually wrong with the SPLC, and how best not to conflate that with what the Trump administration is alleging now. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Aymann Ismail: Before we get to the current prosecution, I want to understand when you first started seeing problems at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Stephen Bright: I was in Atlanta with an organization called the Southern Center for Human Rights. Southern Poverty was down the road in Montgomery. And I sort of had a falling-out with Morris Dees [the co-founder of the SPLC who was fired in 2019]. After the execution of Henry Hays, who was a guy that lynched a Black kid in Mobile, Alabama, Morris raised money on that case, talking about how the Ku Klux Klan is still running rampant in Alabama, which it was not. But basically what he did in a lot of cases was he would be filing civil actions against the Klan or the skinheads or whoever it was and getting a lot of discovery. And then he would be working with the Department of Justice or the state people or whoever it was. They sort of got to where they were doing a lot of work with law enforcement. They sort of saw themselves as quasi law enforcement.

They never really wanted to do litigation. They sued a lot of people that didn’t have lawyers, like the Klan and the skinheads and people like that, so litigating against them was like shooting ducks in a barrel. They’d win these big judgments. Of course, they weren’t getting any........

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