Southern Poverty Law Center: Informant program was not kept secret

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) refuted the federal government’s allegation that the civil rights organization obscured details about its paid informant program in new court filings on Tuesday, following last week’s grand jury indictment.

In two motions submitted to a federal court on Tuesday, the SPLC pushed back on acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche’s claim that the nonprofit paid leaders of extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and did not share information from these informants with the federal government. 

A federal grand jury indicted the Montgomery, Alabama-based organization on April 21 on six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. 

The SPLC called the indictment a “stunning and unremitting departure from Justice Department policy and established law” in one of its Tuesday motions. The group cited its “decades” of cooperation with the FBI. 

“This prosecution is as unprecedented as it is irregular,” the civil rights organization wrote. “Comments made by Administration officials and flaws in the indictment itself suggest the........

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