WASHINGTON — A former Southern Poverty Law Center chief finance officer declined to face charges in person that she fraudulently funneled $1.2 million in donor money to white supremacist groups.
Heidi Beirich waived her right to appear at a virtual court arraignment in the Middle District of Alabama on 14 felony charges involving alleged wire fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering.
Instead, her defense team appeared for the Zoom arraignment and entered a not-guilty plea before US Magistrate Judge Kelly Pate on all counts.
Pate set a trial date of Oct. 5, which both prosecutors and Beirich’s defense attorneys indicated would likely be pushed back given the “voluminous” evidence to review in the case.
“Dr. Beirich is innocent, and this case is without merit,” one of her defense attorneys, Michael Proctor, previously said in a statement.
“We believe the charges against her and the SPLC are politically motivated, and Dr. Beirich has been targeted in this case because of the important work she has done to combat hate groups and extremists.”
Beirich is the only named defendant in the US government’s sweeping prosecution of a group billed as a defender of civil rights. Instead, prosecutors allege Beirich paid informants to keep hate groups afloat and even become lovers with a member of a white supremacist group SPLC was officially trying to take down.
SPLC itself has already pleaded not guilty to using $4.1 million in donor funds to bankroll informants in extremist groups.
Beirich joined the SPLC in 1999 and went on to serve as the director of its Intelligence Project from 2012 to 2019, which was dedicated to tracking and monitoring hate groups.
In that role, she also allegedly paid off informants in white nationalist groups, including one named “F-9” in the National Alliance.
F-9 was paid in particular to break into National Alliance headquarters and steal 25 boxes of documents in 2015.
Another informant from the hate group, “F-39,” was paid a smaller sum of $6,000 “to falsely take responsibility for the burglary,” per the federal indictment.
Some of those materials were later used to author an article for SPLC’s blog “Hatewatch,” which was part of the Intelligence Project. Beirich’s article, “Chaos at the Compound,” is still available online.
As an SPLC employee, Beirich also allegedly was “in a romantic relationship with F-9,” where the couple shared joint bank accounts and a house, according to the indictment.
Between 1999 and 2019, Beirich allegedly facilitated more than $1.2 million in payments from SPLC donors to National Alliance’s F-9.
In the initial June 2 court filing, Beirich had just been listed as the “person who would become Director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project” and “Employee-2,” before being unmasked in a Post report from June.
When announcing the case earlier this year, then-Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed SPLC’s work was instead “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”
FBI Director Kash Patel previously said Beirich “was at the center of our ongoing investigation into SPLC.”
The far-left nonprofit “knowingly misled donors, who believed their money was being used to dismantle violent extremist organizations – when in fact, part of those donations were instead being used to pay senior leadership within those extremist groups,” according to the FBI boss.
Beirich lives in Palm Springs, Calif., and had made her initial appearance in federal court in Riverside earlier this month, Proctor said. Patel and other media reports indicated she had initially been arrested.
