We now have a Trump Injustice Department

I never thought I’d see the U.S. government side with the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and other violent racist groups against a prominent civil rights organization. But the Justice Department has disgracefully done this, charging the Southern Poverty Law Center with 11 counts of wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

An indictment returned by a grand jury accuses the organization of paying informants at least $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to infiltrate hate groups, without disclosing the payments to its donors.

“The SPLC was not dismantling these groups,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche alleged. “It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s interim president and CEO, Bryan Fair, denied the ridiculous charges. “We are outraged by the false allegations,” he said, noting that for 55 years his organization “has stood as a beacon of hope fighting white supremacy and various forms of injustice to create a multi-racial democracy where we can all live and thrive.”

Fair said his organization formerly paid informants to infiltrate hate groups to gather intelligence about threats of violence and shared information it gathered with local law enforcement and the FBI. However, FBI Director Kash Patel ended his agency’s partnership with the group in October, accusing it of being “a partisan smear machine.”

Many organizations use informants to infiltrate groups suspected of criminal activity. As the Office of Inspector General for the Justice Department wrote in a 2005 report: “Since the inception of the FBI in 1908, informants have played........

© The Hill