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The DOJ’s Bogus Allegations Against the SPLC Are a Dog Whistle to White Nationalists

The case against the anti-hate organization will reassure racists that an organization that successfully tracks, exposes, and bankrupts them is now in the government’s crosshairs.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche (left) and FBI Director Kash Patel appear at a press conference following the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center for money laundering at the Department of Justice in Washington, DC, on April 21, 2026.

To understand the Trump Department of Justice’s indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center, start with the fact that the claims DOJ officials promoted at last Tuesday’s press conference aren’t in the indictment. Announcing the charges, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche framed the case as centering on the SPLC’S paying right-wing extremists to commit acts of violence—“manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred…not dismantling extremism but funding it.” The DOJ press release doubles down, with Blanche stating that the “SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence. Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked.” Calling it a “fraud operation,” FBI Director Kash Patel claims the SPLC “lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups, and actually turned around and paid the leaders of these very extremist groups—even utilizing the funds to have these groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes. That is illegal—and this is an ongoing investigation against all individuals involved.”

It would indeed be illegal to pay people to commit hate crimes, but that’s not what the indictment charges the SPLC with doing. And while Patel states that these charges arise from an investigation of “all individuals involved,” it must have turned up little, since not a single individual is being charged. If it seems unbelievable that a civil rights organization with over half a century fighting white supremacy was funding it—or that a case purportedly filed on behalf of defrauded donors cannot name a single one of them—that’s because it is.

“This is, above all, a deeply dishonest indictment—politically motivated, intellectually bankrupt, and designed to leave a lasting false impression in the minds of people who will never look past the headline,” Harry Litman, a former US Attorney and deputy assistant attorney general for the DOJ, writes on his Substack. “It is a narrative that is not just false but Orwellian, turned exactly on its head by people who purposely intend to deceive.”

The indictment’s charges are actually far narrower than Trump’s DOJ mouthpieces would have you believe, amounting to one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, four counts of making false statements to a federally insured bank, and six counts of wire fraud. The DOJ’s claim is that the money the SPLC paid to the informants who secretly gather intel on the criminal activities of hate groups—including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance—came from “bank accounts connected to a series of fictitious entities,” thereby allowing the SPLC to “to disguise the true nature, source, ownership, and control of the…money the SPLC paid the field sources.” In practice, the SPLC put fake company names such as “Rare Books Photography” and “North West Tech” on the accounts it used to pay high-placed informants—instead of openly admitting that it was paying undercover sources whose lives were genuinely at risk. And this, the DOJ argues, amounts to duping the banks that held those accounts and the donors who funded them.

Blanche gave up the game when pressed to explain the fraud charges at Tuesday’s press conference, stating that “in no fundraising efforts that the investigation found, did they say, ‘Oh, and by the way, we’re going to give a million bucks to the Ku Klux Klan.’ So, that’s fraud.…And then the bank fraud part of it is you have an obligation to tell your financial institution what the corporation or the entity that you’re opening an account for does.”

We Could Do Worse Than Kash Patel Being a Drunken Buffoon Jeet Heer

We Could Do Worse Than Kash Patel Being a Drunken Buffoon

Kash Patel’s Lawsuit Against “The Atlantic” Is a Giant Self-Own Elie Mystal

Kash Patel’s Lawsuit Against “The Atlantic” Is a Giant Self-Own

It’s absurd to suggest that the SPLC should have left a paper trail of checks stamped with “From the Account of the SPLC” in payments to informants embedded within murderous groups such as the KKK. In fact, the SPLC’s record of success is partly related to its high-placed—implicitly secret—informants and the information they are privy to and able to pass on.

But Litman, who spent his career trying wire fraud cases, also notes that a conviction under federal statute 18 USC § 1343 requires proof of an explicit lie that was told in order to defraud a victim. “Stunningly, the indictment has no allegation, let alone evidence, of the supposed lie or material omission,” Litman writes. The DOJ’s entire case rests on the charge that the SPLC’s website says the group works to “dismantle” white supremacy—and that donors weren’t told that this involved paying informants who were embedded in hate groups. But, as Litman notes, there’s no specific promise, not a single defrauded donor is named, and there is no quote from the SPLC to demonstrate a falsehood it told to donors. “What the government offers........

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