SPLC seeks dismissal of charges, citing Trump admin's "vindictive motive to punish the SPLC"

The motion highlights other cases either dismissed by courts or by the Trump administration itself in the wake of other vindictive prosecution claims.

The Justice Department’s failure to seek — let alone do — justice in the second Trump administration was on full display Tuesday in a key legal filing submitted in the days following two high-profile prosecutions being ended following allegations of inappropriate DOJ actions.

Lawyers for the Southern Poverty Law Center — facing an indictment unsealed a month ago — filed a motion Tuesday to have the case against the nonprofit civil rights organization dismissed because, they argued, the indictment represents an impermissible, unconstitutional vindictive prosecution.

“The Administration’s sustained campaign against civil rights organizations generally and against the SPLC specifically, particularly when considered in combination with the irregularities of this prosecution, are sufficient to establish a violation of due process,” the lawyers — including high-profile criminal defense lawyer Abbe Lowell — argued in an accompanying memorandum of law.

Alternatively, they argued that “should the Court conclude that the SPLC has not yet met its burden to prove either actual or presumptive vindictive prosecution, it has met the burden to require discovery, and the Court should order that and an evidentiary hearing into the government’s motive and procedures in bringing this case.”

In advancing that alternative argument, the lawyers pointed, in part, to another court’s approach in DOJ’s criminal case brought against Kilmar Abrego Garcia in Tennessee, noting, “That was the process used by the court in the Abrego Garcia case.“

After seeing that evidence, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw dismissed the criminal case against Abrego Garcia on May 22, finding an improper vindictive prosecution there — “an abuse of prosecuting power,” he wrote.

Crenshaw noted in his opinion that “[t]he objective evidence here shows that, absent Abrego’s successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the Government would not have brought this prosecution.” Specifically, he added, “The Executive Branch closed its investigation on the November 2022 traffic stop. Only after Abrego succeeded in vindicating his rights did the Executive Branch reopen that investigation.“

SPLC reiterated that 86-year-old warning from then-Attorney General Robert Jackson in Tuesday’s motion:

In a now famous 1940 speech by Attorney General Robert Jackson to federal prosecutors, he cautioned that because a prosecutor “can choose his defendants, therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.” That is exactly what happened here.

It wasn’t only Abrego Garcia’s case in the past week that highlighted DOJ’s current failings — or that was highlighted by the SPLC legal team on Tuesday.

On May 21, as the Chicago Sun-Times’s Jon Seidel wrote, “Chicago’s top federal prosecutor announced the permanent dismissal Thursday of charges against the remaining members of the ‘Broadview Six’ [ICE protestors] in a stunning hearing that revealed apparent misconduct by his staff before a grand jury during Operation Midway Blitz.“

The alarming developments — detailed more clearly after the later release of the transcript from a closed hearing held the morning of the dismissal decision that day — shone a bright light on how removed the DOJ of today is from the “presumption of regularity” usually afforded to government lawyers.

On Tuesday, The New York Times’s Alan Feuer published an in-depth report on how, as he put it, DOJ in the second Trump administration “has had serious difficulties presenting cases to grand juries, running into problems that would have seemed unthinkable a year ago” — with the “Broadview Six” grand jury questions front and center.

In their Tuesday motion, SPLC’s lawyers noted that, like in the since-dismissed “Broadview Six” case, SPLC is seeking disclosure of the grand jury proceeding transcript.

The SPLC motion to dismiss the case detailed already-known comments from President Donald Trump; Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche; FBI Director Kash Patel; and Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the Civil Rights Division to make the case that the indictment “had nothing to do with the SPLC breaking the law; it had everything to do with the SPLC’s perceived political leaning.“

And yes, there is a tweet (Truth social post):

In short, and along with other evidence, SPLC argued, “The Court need not look far to see the direct evidence of the government’s vindictive motive to punish the SPLC for engaging in constitutionally protected speech, expression, and political activity.“

There are other cases from the Trump administration that SPLC’s lawyers point to as legal support for their argument — but also as a subtle reminder of all of the ways in which people have argued the Trump administration has engaged in vindictive prosecutions.

They pointed to the prosecution of Jan Carey for burning a flag in Lafayette Park after Trump directed DOJ to, as U.S. District Judge James Boasberg put it in January, “prosecute anyone who engages in the protected speech of burning the American flag.“ After Boasberg allowed Carey’s vindictive prosecution argument to proceed to discovery, DOJ dismissed the case.

They also pointed to an April decision in Harvard Medical School researcher Kseniia Petrova’s case over the Trump administration’s detention of her and effort to deport her to Russia after she did not declare the frog embryos she brought with her on a flight from Paris, France. In the April decision, and relevant to the SPLC case, U.S. Magistrate Judge Judith Gail Dein allowed discovery “in connection with the defendant’s contemplated claims of vindictive and selective criminal prosecution.“ (DOJ has appealed that decision to U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin.)

In concluding the arguments filed Tuesday, however, the lawyers brought it back to the simple reality of this case.

“At its heart, this indictment seeks to punish the SPLC for engaging in constitutionally protected speech with which the Administration disagrees,” SPLC’s lawyers wrote in closing. “The proper remedy here is dismissal of the indictment with prejudice.“