The Department of Justice announced Tuesday that a grand jury indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center for fraud and money laundering for alleged payments to American neo-Nazi groups and the Ku Klux Klan, among others.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a news conference that the 11-count indictment filed in an Alabama federal court alleged the left-wing nonprofit had in the past decade paid at least $3 million to eight members of the far-right groups.
One was a leader for the 2017 Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville, Va., who received roughly $270,000 over an eight-year period.
Others had affiliations with the Ku Klux Klan, United Klans of America, Aryan Nations, the Nationalist Socialist Party of American Nazis and the Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club.
“The SPLC is a nonprofit entity that purports to fight white supremacy and racial hatred by reporting on extremist groups and conducting research to inform law enforcement groups, with the goal of dismantling these groups,” Blanche told reporters.
“As the indictment describes, the SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”
FBI Director Kash Patel called it a “widespread, decade-long multi-million dollar fraud” that was concealed through a “banking network.”
The SPLC “fraudulently raised money by lying to their donor network, thousands of Americans, to go ahead and actually pay the leadership of these supposed violent extremist groups,” Patel noted.
