Tag: splc

Big Finance Might Be Dooming the SPLC — Even Before Its Day in Court

The Southern Poverty Law Center is preparing for the legal fight of its life with the U.S. government — but its most immediate threat is coming from the financial system, rather than the courts.

Fidelity Charitable, Charles Schwab affiliate DAFgiving360, and Vanguard Charitable have begun blocking donor-advised fund, or DAF, donations to the SPLC — effectively cutting off one of the organization’s most important funding pipelines at a critical moment. The decision arrives alongside a politicized and bogus indictment announced late last month by the Trump Department of Justice, which is attempting to paint one of the country’s most prominent watchdogs against hate and racial violence as a promoter of it.

A letter from Democratic Reps. Jamie Raskin and Mary Gay Scanlon notes the House Judiciary Committee has received whistleblower reports that the DOJ “ordered the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama to rush through the indictment of the SPLC despite serious concerns about the strength of the case.” As Alabama Reflector editor Brian Lyman wrote, “DOJ has no evidence of SPLC committing a crime. The organization’s real offense, in the eyes of Trump’s toadies, is its lack of obedience.”

But before any courts can assess the merits of the case, the SPLC is already suffering severe financial consequences.

Donor-advised funds have become a key part of American philanthropy. Managed by firms like Fidelity and Vanguard, DAFs allow donors to receive immediate tax benefits while recommending grants to IRS-recognized nonprofits over time. They are one of the primary channels many nonprofits use to connect with donors.

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SPLC Leader Pleads NOT GUILTY To Charges Of Funnelling Millions To Neo-Nazis

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s leader entered a not guilty plea Thursday in federal court, desperately fighting charges that the organization defrauded its donors by secretly funneling more than $3 million to the very white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups it claimed to oppose.

The SPLC was forced to respond to an 11-count indictment from the Trump DOJ, including six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud and false statements, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. 

Commentators are labelling the case one of the biggest scams ever to be exposed.

The SPLC is accused of making payments amounting to over $1 million to a National Alliance affiliate, more than $300,000 to an Aryan Nations affiliate, $270,000 to a “Unite the Right” member, $140,000 to a former National Alliance chairman, $73,000 to former KKK members, and $19,000 to an American Front president and felon.

The court appearance comes just weeks after the Trump DOJ’s indictment exposed the scheme. 

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Jon Ossoff silent on SPLC indictment after taking more than $700K from affiliate of indicted group

Federal prosecutors’ stunning indictment of a left-wing activist group for alleged financial crimes is reverberating in Georgia’s 2026 Senate race, with Republicans targeting Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., for his past ties to the organization. 

The Department of Justice brought criminal charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center in April for allegedly defrauding its donors by secretly transferring money to extremist groups with the goal of infiltrating and monitoring their activities. 

Ossoff, the most vulnerable Senate Democrat running for re-election in 2026, is endorsed by the law center’s 501(c)(4) arm. The group contributed more than $700,000 to his campaign account in 2020, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings.

The Georgia Democrat has also praised the group’s purported efforts to combat racism.

“Thank you for decades of work defending civil rights in the United States,” Ossoff said in a video celebrating the nonprofit group’s 50th anniversary in November 2021.

“I’m deeply concerned, like many of you, by the rising level of polarization, hatred and mistrust in our society,” he added. “We must recommit to the path of love, tolerance and peaceful coexistence if we are to flourish as a nation and as a world.”

During that time, federal prosecutors allege that instead of combating extremism, the SPLC was providing financial support to organizations that spread it.

Between 2014 and 2023, the Alabama-based organization paid more than $3 million to informants belonging to the United Klans of America, the Aryan Nation and other neo-Nazi groups, according to the 11-count indictment, which included charges of bank fraud, wire fraud and money laundering. The group allegedly concealed the payments by setting up bank accounts under fictitious names and did not inform federal law enforcement about their activities.

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Biden DOJ Was In Cahoots With SPLC As It Funded Extremist Groups, Former Official Admits

The Biden administration’s Department of Justice and FBI were aware that the Southern Poverty Law Center was paying “informants” in the KKK — and according to former Obama official Norm Eisen, that apparently means donors have nothing to be upset about.

The SPLC (which has spent years demonizing conservatives, including The Federalist) was indicted by a federal grand jury last month for wire fraud and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. The SPLC allegedly funneled millions of dollars it received via donations to pay “a covert network of informants” who were part of “violent extremist groups” such as groups like the KKK. The press release for the indictment alleges that SPLC did not disclose to its donors that “some of their donated money was being used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups at the same time that the SPLC was denouncing the same groups on its website.” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement that SPLC was “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.”

But during a virtual press conference Wednesday held by Democracy Defenders Fund, Eisen suggested the SPLC defrauding donors by funding the KKK could not have been wrong because Biden’s justice agencies were aware of it.

Associate Attorney General in the Biden administration Vanita Gupta noted that the indictment describes “the SPLC’s paid informant program inside extremist organizations” which “[as] acting AG Blanche has confirmed, regularly shared information with federal law enforcement, which I can attest to, having been the beneficiary and having our federal prosecutors been the beneficiary of this type of intel.”

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SPLC Indictment Shows Partisan Activists Were Running The FBI Domestic Terror Program

The real Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) scandal isn’t just the indictment. The deeper scandal is that the FBI used a highly partisan activist group as an unelected, unvetted intelligence wing of the federal bureaucracy. For years, the bureau didn’t just consult the SPLC. It folded the group’s ideology into its threat assessments and other work products, then used those products to brand Americans as hateful or flag them as potential domestic violent extremists. 

I warned in June 2021 that the Biden administration’s “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism” provided the blueprint for this institutional capture. Specifically, Pillar 1 of the strategy formalized public-private partnerships and relied on “non-governmental analysis” to identify threats. That framework greenlit a backdoor around the Constitution. By treating the SPLC’s partisan analysis as a substitute for sworn evidence, the government laundered ideological narratives into official federal threat assessments. This shadow intelligence partnership was not an accident. 

The FBI’s Richmond memo, better known as the anti-Catholic memo, showed exactly what that pipeline looked like in practice. The FBI used the SPLC’s analysis to define so-called “radical-traditionalist Catholics” by their opposition to abortion, LGBT ideology, and adherence to traditional family values. Sen Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, revealed that one Richmond analyst produced a slide presentation that equated Catholic beliefs in “[c]onservative family values/roles” with ideas “[c]omparable to Islamist ideology.” 

Despite former FBI Director Christopher Wray’s claim that the anti-Catholic memo was the work of “a single field office” with limited distribution, the records tell a different story. Multiple field offices were involved, the memo was distributed to more than 1,000 agents and employees, and congressional investigators uncovered at least 13 more documents using similar SPLC-driven “anti-Catholic terminology.” Ideological narrative laundering became the FBI’s standard practice.

FBI officials themselves recognized the problem. In an internal FBI email exchange, one official asked, “Is anyone really asking for a product like this?” and complained that “[a]pparently we are at the behest of the SPLC.” Another FBI official admitted the FBI’s “overreliance on the SPLC hate designations is … problematic.”

The declassified Strategic Implementation Plan (SIP) confirms that the Biden administration didn’t just tolerate outside ideological input from partisan organizations. It established a formal mechanism to solicit “non-governmental” analysis. Under Action 1.1.1c, the plan directs DHS to: “Develop and implement a mechanism for receiving relevant [domestic terrorism]-related analysis and information from non-governmental experts and share that information appropriately and consistently across the U.S. Government.”

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It Looks Like the Southern Poverty Law Center Wasn’t Only Funding White Supremacists

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) is already in a precarious position when it comes to keeping his seat in the upcoming midterm elections. His relationship with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) might make things even worse.

Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings revealed that the SPLC contributed over $700,000 to his campaign during the 2020 race, according to Fox News. Oddly enough, this places Ossoff in the same category as the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups whose leaders have received oodles of cash from the organization.

Ossoff and the SPLC have a longstanding relationship. The organization was so zealous in their advocacy for the center that it even dedicated a page on its website to him.

The Justice Department brought an 11-count indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center in April, alleging that it secretly used donor money to pay informants inside potentially violent extremist organizations. The DOJ claims the organization concealed those payments and lied to financial institutions.

The organization faces charges of wire fraud, making false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. Investigators claim the group opened bank accounts in the names of “fictitious entities” so it could pay the informants without anyone knowing where the money was really coming from.

The SPLC then allegedly used the accounts to route more than $3 million in contributions to informants between 2014 and 2023 who occupied leadership roles in groups that the SPLC publicly labeled as dangerous hate groups.

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USC historian defends Southern Poverty Law Center funneling payments to KKK leaders 

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s payments to the handful of remaining white supremacist groups in the country are just like how Jewish groups took down extremists, according to a University of Southern California historian.

Professor Steven Ross made the comments during an interview last week with National Public Radio. He has a book coming out about “racist” and “antisemitic groups” in the 20th century. 

Last week, the Trump administration announced federal charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center, accusing it of defrauding donors. The 14-page complaint says the SPLC paid informants within the Ku Klux Klan and other white hate groups. At the same time, the group was fundraising off the alleged resurgence and influence of those same organizations.

But Professor Ross rushed to defend the payments to white supremacist groups, linking that activity back to the work of Jewish groups in the 1940s and onward to infiltrate hate groups.

He told NPR:

I’m not sure if the indictment is true or not, but the idea that there are paid informants is not illegal. These people are simply monitoring what was going on. And when they’re accused of being – stealing records, those records were sent, I’m sure, to government forces like the FBI, the Justice Department, because they weren’t doing their job.

To be clear, the informants were not simply accused of “stealing records,” like the surely dwindling check register of a random “Klan” group.

In one horrifying example, the Southern Poverty Law Center paid an organizer of the deadly 2017 Charlottesville rally. 

The unidentified perpetrator “attended the event at the direction of the SPLC,” according to the indictment. The person “made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.”

Furthermore, the group continued to pay the organizer after the deadly violence, making payments throughout 2023. In total, the left-wing group paid $270,000 to the perpetrator.

NPR host Terry Gross interjected to clarify the accusations about inciting violence, before pivoting and suggesting FBI agents do the same thing. (I mean, likely true).

“I’m [sure] the SPLC is doing the same thing because they know their informants would get in trouble, otherwise,” Ross said. “That they could be prosecuted by the government.”

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KKK informants to the SPLC de-hooded: One-legged Imperial Wizard ‘true believer’ and cleaning lady, who show no signs of reform

Two of the eight ‘informants’ paid millions by the Southern Poverty Law Center can be un-hooded by The Post as a suburban mom from Georgia and a one-legged “true believer” from Alabama.

One of the SPLC’s so-called informants was an Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America, a Ku Klux Klan organization, who remained a committed racist until his death in 2023 aged 50.

Bradley Scott Jenkins was high-up enough in the organization to call himself the leader of the “true Klan” and never displayed any signs of reform or subverting the KKK’s message — the stated aim of the SPLC’s ‘informant’ program — according to his son, Noah Jenkins.

“When I went to the rallies with him as a kid, I never saw anything that made me think he wasn’t a true believer,” Noah, 24, told The Post of his father, who lost his left leg due to medical complications.

Jenkins, who died an unemployed father-of-three at 50, was one of the ‘informants’ referred to as “F-unknown” in the indictment against the SPLC. The UKA is believed to continue with a new leader.

He was seemingly happy to take the nonprofit’s money while revitalizing the UKA, a once-defunct Alabama-based KKK splinter group, described on the SPLC’s website as a “millennial reboot of what was once a serious domestic threat.” In the 60s UKA had been responsible for many racist attacks and “the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Ala., which resulted in the deaths of four little girls in 1963.”

In a 2012 interview, Jenkins claimed he was against violence.

“We are weeding out the people who only joined the Ku Klux Klan to participate in violence. If that’s what they want, they have no place here. We are a family organization,” he told Vice.com

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Democrat Rep. Raskin Uses WHCD Shooting Platform to Defend SPLC as ‘Fighting Right-Wing Extremism,’ Slams DOJ Prosecution

Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin is once again under scrutiny—this time for remarks made during a Face the Nation interview following the shocking shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

Instead of focusing on the immediate facts of the attack, the suspect, or the broader security implications, Raskin quickly pivoted to a familiar political narrative: gun control and systemic “political violence.” 

The response follows a pattern that has become increasingly common in Washington, where major incidents are rapidly folded into broader policy arguments before the full details are even established.

During the interview, Raskin described the chaos inside the ballroom, recounting the moment guests were forced to the ground after hearing multiple loud bangs. 

The scene, by all accounts, was serious and alarming. But rather than staying focused on the event itself, Raskin used the moment to draw comparisons to school shootings and broader gun violence statistics, citing daily shooting figures across the country.

That framing immediately raises questions.

School shootings, while tragic, are statistically extremely rare compared to other forms of violence, particularly gang-related crime and illegal firearm use in major cities. Yet, they are often emphasized in political messaging because of their emotional impact. 

By invoking school violence in response to an incident involving a politically motivated suspect targeting Trump Administration officials, Raskin blurred the distinction between fundamentally different types of crime.

The pivot did not stop there.

In one of the more controversial moments of the interview, Raskin turned his attention to the Department of Justice’s prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). 

As previously reported by The Gateway Pundit, the organization is currently facing a federal indictment alleging serious financial misconduct, including fraud and the alleged diversion of donor funds.

Rather than addressing the substance of those allegations, Raskin suggested that prosecuting the SPLC could actually contribute to political extremism. That argument is difficult to reconcile with the nature of the charges. 

Federal prosecutors have outlined claims that involve years of alleged financial deception and misuse of funds—issues that would typically demand accountability regardless of political affiliation.

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After SPLC Indictment, Democrats Scramble to Defend It as “Politically Motivated” 

MSNOW’s latest segment offered a clear example of how legacy media handles politically inconvenient stories. Instead of engaging with the substance of a federal indictment, the discussion—featuring Democrat Rep. Dan Goldman—shifted toward deflection, narrative framing, and selective omission.

The underlying story is not complicated. 

As previously covered by The Gateway Pundit, a federal grand jury has indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on charges including wire fraud, false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

According to prosecutors, the organization allegedly misled donors for nearly a decade—raising funds under the banner of combating extremism while secretly diverting millions of dollars to individuals connected to extremist groups.

The indictment outlines a detailed pattern. Between 2014 and 2023, more than $3 million in donor funds were allegedly funneled to individuals tied to organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations. 

Donors were not informed. Instead, prosecutors describe the use of fictitious entities and concealed bank accounts to obscure where the money was actually going.

On MSNOW, however, the focus shifted almost immediately. 

Rather than addressing the specifics of the indictment, Rep. Goldman emphasized the SPLC’s historical role as a “civil rights” organization and suggested that the case itself is politically motivated.

That argument sidesteps the central issue. A federal indictment is the result of a grand jury reviewing evidence presented by prosecutors.

The segment relied heavily on reputation as a substitute for analysis. The SPLC’s past work was repeatedly referenced, while the current allegations were treated as secondary or speculative. That approach creates a disconnect.

If an organization built its credibility on identifying and exposing misconduct, then allegations of internal financial misconduct should be treated as a serious institutional issue rather than dismissed as partisan noise.

There was also a noticeable effort to broaden the conversation into unrelated political territory. 

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