A hallmark of the Trump administration is its tolerance of overt racists, so it seems fitting that they would now be prosecuting the Southern Poverty Law Center—the legal bane of Klansmen and neo-Nazis—for infiltrating and exposing hate groups. But Donald Trump sees these groups as his allies, and he sees the SPLC as his enemy.
The Associated Press reports:
The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted Tuesday on federal fraud charges alleging it improperly raised millions of dollars to secretly pay leaders of the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups for inside information, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said.
The Justice Department alleges the civil rights group defrauded donors by using their money to fund the very extremism it claimed to be fighting, with more than $3 million paid to informants through a now-defunct program to infiltrate white supremacist and other extremist groups. …
The indictment came shortly after the SPLC revealed the existence of a criminal investigation into its disbanded informant program to gather intelligence on extremist group activities. The group said the program was used to monitor threats of violence and the information was often shared with local and federal law enforcement. …
The SPLC, which is based in Montgomery, Alabama, was founded in 1971 and used civil litigation to fight white supremacist groups. The nonprofit has become a popular target among Republicans who see it as overly leftist and partisan.
The investigation could add to concerns that Trump’s Republican administration is using the Justice Department to go after conservative opponents and his critics…. The center regularly condemns Trump’s rhetoric and policies around voting rights, immigration and other issues.
The case here seems to be that the SPLC was committing fraud for keeping its secret informants, well, secret. This is a standard that would prevent anyone from investigating or infiltrating such groups, which we can assume is the whole point.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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