Federal Prosecutors Indict SPLC for Alleged Illegal Funding of Informant Network

Federal prosecutors indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center this week, accusing the organization of illegally funneling funds to hate groups in support of its informant network, the New York Post reported. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche spoke alongside FBI Director Kash Patel in a press conference about the indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The Trump administration claims the Southern Poverty Law Center spent $3 million between 2014 and 2023 on operations involving clandestine agents within hate groups. Civil rights groups held rounds of calls immediately following the indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center. Advocates discussed how to support the Southern Poverty Law Center in calls immediately following the indictment.

The calls following the indictment were part of a coordinated response planned for more than a year. The coordinated response was planned in anticipation of heightened scrutiny by the Trump administration. Vanita Gupta led one of the calls that convened activists following the indictment.

Vanita Gupta is a former associate attorney general of the Justice Department during the Biden administration. A coalition of more than 100 activist groups published a letter. The Southern Poverty Law Center was a signatory to the letter published by the coalition.

The coalition is called the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

'The government’s goal is often to shut down and paralyze an organization, so that their work has to stop while they defend themselves. And the hope here is that with this broad effort to defend the SPLC, that will not happen,' Vanita Gupta said. The Southern Poverty Law Center has sponsored clandestine agents within hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and Unite the Right for decades.