The theory behind the Southern Poverty Law Center prosecution is flawed

Last month, the U.S. government indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center — a venerable civil rights organization known for relentlessly fighting against White supremacist groups — on multiple federal charges. The center was almost certainly targeted because it called out hate speech by right-wing groups, not due to any legitimate law enforcement priority. 

The flawed legal theory at the heart of this attack didn’t come from nowhere: It was attempted against my organization, Greenpeace USA, a decade ago in abusive lawsuits filed by Resolute Forest Products and Energy Transfer.

The indictment’s core allegations revolve around Southern Poverty Law Center’s practice of paying informants from hate groups to provide intelligence — essentially to leak documents about extremist activity. Far from keeping this a secret, the center cooperated with law enforcement, including the FBI, sharing what was discovered. 

They had good reason to gather this intelligence: Their offices were destroyed in a firebombing in 1983. Their leadership was the target of assassination plots, and in 1995 and 1998, extremists were arrested for plots to bomb the center.

The indictment argues that because the organization was paying informants from extremist groups, it was really “funding” the extremism that it was claiming to fight against and therefore defrauding its donors. To use a technical legal term, this is hogwash.

Southern Poverty Law Center allegedly paid “more than $3 million” to informants over a decade, spread across eight or nine extremist groups. That’s less than $50,000 per group per year, and there is no allegation that the money went to the organizations themselves rather than to the individuals working as confidential informants. These are violent........

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