The SPLC’s lawyers, defending an organization that famously used paid informants for years to infiltrate targeted groups, are outraged that the government is using the SPLC’s informant as an informant, because informants are self-interested and deceitful, so using an informant is dirty. It’s like watching a snake eat its own tail. In a statement to the Times (that they repeated to CBS News), lawyers Abbe Lowell and Addy Schmitt said that the informant had “every incentive to tell the government what it wants to hear,” because he benefitted from his relationship with federal law enforcement. The use of informants is sleazy, say the lawyers defending the SPLC over its longtime use of informants.
Take a moment to really savor this: In a case that centers on the SPLC’s longtime use of paid informants, including the well-paid informant discussed in this defense brief, the SPLC’s lawyers just said that informants can’t be trusted. They specifically, explicitly, and repeatedly attack the credibility of a longtime SPLC informant, whose intelligence-gathering work inside a neo-Nazi organization sat at the center of the SPLC’s claims about American hate groups. If the government’s informant isn’t trustworthy, the SPLC itself can’t be trusted, because the government’s deceitful informant was the SPLC’s own major informant. You can’t attack one without hitting the other.
So lawyers hired to defend the SPLC are arguing in a public forum that SPLC informants are shifty and devious liars, and you shouldn’t believe a word they say. What an interesting moment.
The Federalist sent a series of questions to the SPLC’s defense team by email, and this is how that email message ended: “If his requests for payment discredit him, doesn’t that discredit the SPLC’s entire informant program? Did you mean to discredit your client?”
They haven’t responded, which has been the pattern as we’ve sent them questions throughout the life of the case.
But buckle in, because we’re just getting started. This is strange.
