The SPLC indictment, the Klan history behind it, and the ignominy of Todd Blanche

Another dark day for DOJ.

Forty-five years ago, a nonprofit organization’s program aimed at “placing sympathizers into Klan groups for the purpose of gathering information” was decried as “extremely dangerous to American freedom.“

On Tuesday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that a later iteration of that program was the source of an 11-count indictment secured by the Department of Justice against the Southern Poverty Law Center — which he accused of “paying sources to stoke racial hatred” within white supremacist organizations, including the Ku Klux Klan.

FBI Director Kash Patel, under whose direction the FBI cut ties with the SPLC last year, was at Blanche’s side on Tuesday.

Bryan Fair, the interim president and chief executive officer of SPLC, said in a video statement released before the indictment was out, “We are … unsurprised to be the latest organization targeted by this administration. They have made no secret of who they want to protect and who they want to destroy.”

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The indictment

The indictment alleged that through its prior use of paid informants within extremist organizations — called field sources (or “Fs”) by the SPLC — the organization committed wire fraud (six counts) because donors weren’t aware of a program that the indictment itself acknowledges “[s]tart[ed] in the 1980s.”

It’s important to understand how ridiculous a claim that is — and how absurd it is in context. First of all, this is a discontinued program, as Fair noted in the video.

Additionally, the indictment stated: “Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in SPLC funds to Fs who were associated with various violent extremist groups.” In 2023, SPLC’s total revenue was $123 million — and that’s one year. The idea that donors were defrauded by the existence of one program that’s been known about for 45 years and that had cost the organization just a minuscule portion of its budget in any given year is an unbelievable stretch.

Notably, these counts include a forfeiture allegation later in the indictment that could be an extreme attempt — given the charge — to seek forfeiture of all donations to the organization if a conviction is secured on these counts.

The second charge alleged in the indictment is that the organization, in carrying out the field program, made false statements to a federally insured bank (four counts) when SPLC set up bank accounts with dummy company names for use in paying the informants.

When Patel announced the ending of the FBI’s relationship with the SPLC, the Associated Press characterized it as “a dramatic rethinking of longstanding FBI partnerships with prominent civil rights groups.“ As Fair noted in the video, SPLC at times shared information gathered through its field sources program with law enforcement, including the FBI.

Tuesday went around the bend, as Blanche tried to claim that SPLC, through this informant program, was helping white supremacist organizations. DOJ’s own indictment belies the claim. Here is the indictment’s description of one of the informants (two, really):

DOJ, a dozen years after that document episode, obtained an indictment that — on its face — explained exactly why F-9 couldn’t be getting a paycheck from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Instead, F-9 was apparently paid from an account like “Fox Photography,” “North West Tech,” or “Tech Writers.”

DOJ was investigating the SPLC over those sorts of actions — and two lawyers in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama, including Acting U.S. Attorney Kevin Davidson, took the case to a grand jury.

Ignoring the facts laid out in the indictment, Blanche nonetheless said on Tuesday that while SPLC “purports to fight white supremacy and racial hatred by reporting on extremist groups … with the goal of dismantling these groups,” it “was not dismantling these groups, it was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose.”

The final charge in the indictment built off of the second set of charges, alleging that the organization was engaged in a conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering because of its efforts to protect its field sources from discovery. This count also includes a forfeiture allegation.

“It was the objective of this conspiracy to conduct financial transactions designed to conceal the true nature, source, ownership, and control of fraudulently obtained donated money the SPLC paid to Fs,“ the indictment states — again linking it to the alleged “fraudulently obtained” money from donors.

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A look back

Forty-five years ago, the program to track the Klan started by Morris Dees, the founder of SPLC, was called Klanwatch.

The quotes decrying that program that led tonight’s newsletter came from Fiery Cross, the “Official Publication of the United Klans of America,” a copy of which was provided to Law Dork.

It was published in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 1981.

As SPLC itself has explained, the United Klans was “the same group that had beaten the Freedom Riders in 1961, murdered civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo in 1965 and bombed Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963.“

In that 1981 issue of Fiery Cross, “The Legal Staff of the UKA“ described the new Klanwatch effort in the extremely racist terms one would expect of a Klan publication:

There was no lack of understanding of Klanwatch’s purpose 45 years ago. The Legal Staff of the United Klans of America understood it perfectly:

Forty-five years later, the question isn’t why Blanche doesn’t understand. Of course he does. The question is what it says about Blanche and the Department of Justice that he is pretending not to know the purpose of the SPLC’s prior use of field sources — and is using the criminal law to advance his contorted purpose.

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A final thought

Nearly 40 years ago, the United Klans of America was bankrupted by the judgment in a lawsuit brought by Beulah Mae Donald, the mother of Michael Donald, a 19-year-old lynched by two members of the United Klans.

On Tuesday, Blanche was left attacking the people looking to find out “everything there is to know about every single Klan group” and related white supremacist groups.

SPLC is not done, though.

“We stood in the vanguard then, and we stand in the vanguard today,” Fair said in the video statement. “We will not be intimidated into silence or contrition, and we will not abandon our mission.”

DOJ and the employees of that agency, however, would do well to remember its mission.