A federal grand jury in Alabama has indicted the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center in connection with wire fraud, making false statements, and money laundering for funneling money to the very “hate groups” they claim to fight.
Rather like the arsonist firefighter who sets a building ablaze so he can become a hero fighting the fire, SPLC, the 14-page, 11-count federal indictment alleges, paid money to the American Nazi Party, two Ku Klux Klan groups, and the notorious Unite the Right group that protested in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
The pro-communist outfit funded the groups with more than $3 million.
A conviction will require SPLC to forfeit the funds fraudulently obtained.
Funding What They’re Fighting
Revealed years ago as a money-making scam with offshore investments in the Caribbean, SPLC has long gotten away with manufacturing preposterous claims that Nazis and other white supremacists were on the verge of taking over the United States and ushering in a dark night of racist tyranny.
But, the indictment alleges, part of that scam was funding the very groups the SPLC claimed to be “fighting.”
The introduction summarized the group’s illegal activities this way:
Unbeknownst to donors, some of their donated money was being used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance. The SPLC’s paid informants (“field sources”) engaged in the active promotion of racist groups at the same time that the SPLC was denouncing the same groups on its website. The SPLC also had a field source who was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville, Virginia.… [T]o covertly pay its field sources, the SPLC opened bank accounts connected to a series of fictitious entities.
Noting the SPLC’s brag that it “is a catalyst for racial justice in the South and beyond, working in partnership with communities to dismantle white supremacy, strengthen intersectional movements, and advance the human rights of all people,” the indictment alleges how the SPLC funded “Fs,” meaning field sources.
Their use of “Fs,” who were linked to “violent extremist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, or who had infiltrated violent extremist groups at the SPLC’s direction,” began in the 1980s.
Laundering Payments
The indictment says that from “at least 2014 [to] 2023, the SPLC paid their Fs in a clandestine manner”:
Doing so hid the fact that while the SPLC received donation money under the auspices that the funds would be used to “dismantle” violent extremist groups, this donation money was, instead, being used, in part, by the SPLC to pay leaders and others within these same violent extremist groups. That money was then used for the benefit of the individuals as well as the violent extremist groups.
Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million to eight Fs who were associated with various violent extremist groups.
Of particular interest is the SPLC’s role in the Unite the Right rally at which a person was killed. SPLC money went to F-37, “a member of the online leadership chat group” that planned the event. F-37 “made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees,” the indictment says. As well, SPLC paid that operative more than $270,000 during the eight years between 2015 and 2023.
“F-9,” a member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, worked for SPLC for more than two decades. SPLC paid the source more than $1 million during that time. “In 2014, F-9 entered the headquarters of a violent extremist group and stole 25 boxes of their documents,” notes the indictment:
F-9 coordinated payment for the copying of the materials with a high-level SPLC employee who had knowledge the documents had been stolen. The original stolen materials were returned to the violent extremist group in a second illegal entry by F-9. Thereafter, the high-level SPLC employee utilized the documents, in part, as the basis for a story published on the SPLC’s Hatewatch website and authored by the employee. Another F, F-39, was blamed for the theft and was paid approximately $6,000.00 by the SPLC to falsely take responsibility for the theft.
Another source was the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America, while another, F-27, was an officer in the National Socialist Movement and the “Aryan Nations affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club.” SPLC paid F-27 more than $300,000 between 2014 and 2020, the indictment alleges.
How the Money Was Transferred
Two SPLC employees funneled money to the field sources by opening bank accounts and two federally insured banks in the name of fictitious entities that “were never incorporated, had no bona fide employees, and conducted no actual business.” Those entities included Fox Photography, Tech Writers Group, Center Investigative Agency, North West Technologies, and Rare Books Warehouse.
The indictment’s six counts of wire fraud allege that SPLC “devised and intended to devise a scheme and artifice to defraud donors, and attempted to do so and to obtain money and property belonging to donors by materially false and fraudulent pretenses, representations, promises, and omissions.”
SPLC conducted the scheme by raising money to “dismantle violent extremist groups.”
“Donors were not told that some of the donated funds were to be used by the SPLC to pay high-level leaders of violent extremist groups and others, nor were donors ever told that some of the donated funds were used for the benefit of the violent extremist groups or that some of the donated funds would be used in the commission of state and federal crimes,” the indictment states.
Counts seven through 10 of the indictment allege that SPLC made false statements to the banks at which accounts were opened.
Conspiracy to Commit Concealment Money Laundering is count 11.
Manufacturing Hate to Fight It
“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters at a news conference:
Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked. This Department of Justice will hold the SPLC and every other fraudulent organization operating with the same deceptive playbook accountable. No entity is above the law.
SPLC’s involvement in the Unite the Right rally is something of an irony given that the rally, then-candidate Joe Biden said, was the reason he ran for president. Biden falsely claimed, as so many did, that then-President Donald Trump said neo-Nazis and white supremacists were “very fine people,” when Trump said “there were very fine people on both sides” of the protest. In a lengthy exchange with a reporter, Trump repeatedly denounced neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
“He said there were quote ‘some very fine people on both sides,’” Biden lied in announcing his campaign:
Very fine people on both sides? With those words the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime. I wrote at the time that we’re in the battle for the soul of this nation.
The far-left Snopes debunking website easily disproved the hate-Trump lie. As it is, a federal grand jury alleges that SPLC was funding some of the “very fine people” whom Biden denounced.
