FBI Director Kash Patel announced the bureau would sever ties with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the second time in a week he has ended a partnership with a group that monitors right-wing extremism.

The SPLC works on a variety of issues, from monitoring white supremacists and other extremist groups to working on voting rights and criminal justice reform.

But Patel accused the group of being a “partisan smear machine.”

“The Southern Poverty Law Center long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine. Their so-called ‘hate map’ has been used to defame mainstream Americans and even inspired violence. That disgraceful record makes them unfit for any FBI partnership,” Patel wrote Friday on the social platform X.

“I made it clear that the FBI will never rely on politicized or agenda-driven........

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