transcript

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
[00:23] Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith, I cover politics.

Speaker 3:
[00:27] And I'm Odette Yousef, I cover domestic extremism.

Speaker 4:
[00:30] And I'm Ryan Lucas, I cover the Justice Department.

Speaker 2:
[00:32] Today on the show, the Southern Poverty Law Center is facing federal charges for financial crimes. The prominent civil rights group has been tracking and disrupting hate groups for decades. But now the Justice Department alleges one of the ways it did that was criminal. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanch announced the charges this week.

Speaker 5:
[00:53] The SPLC is a nonprofit entity that purports to fight white supremacy and racial hatred by reporting on extremist groups and conducting research to inform law enforcement groups with the goal of dismantling these groups. As the indictment describes, the SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.

Speaker 2:
[01:24] So, we will get to the details of this 11-count indictment. But first, Odette, tell us about the SPLC's work and its history.

Speaker 3:
[01:32] Right. So, the SPLC has been around since 1971. It was founded by two attorneys and civil rights advocates. It's based in Montgomery, Alabama. And it is just what has been described as a non-profit civil rights group, a legal advocacy group that focuses on fighting extremism. I think it's best known for some of its successful litigation that has taken down extremist groups or figures over the decades. You know, it's taken on clan groups, for example. It effectively eliminated Aryan Nations, which was a neo-Nazi group that was operating in North Idaho. We're talking about the 90s now. It basically bankrupted Tom Metzger, who was kind of the godfather of the neo-Nazi skinhead movement. But it is a fairly large organization with a number of areas of work. So, you know, outside of the legal work, Tam, you know, there's also the Intelligence Project, which is really the focus of what's alleged in this indictment. And, you know, the main output of the Intelligence Project is the publication of the SPLC's annual Year in Hate and Extremism Report. But the Intelligence Project is also home to a team of researchers that monitor and write regularly about, you know, individuals, movements and groups. There's also another group within the Intelligence Project that works to take down Confederate monuments and so on.

Speaker 2:
[03:04] Yeah, and they get a lot of media attention.

Speaker 3:
[03:08] They do. I mean, they are really a repository of a great deal of research and knowledge about extremist figures and movements. Quite a reference resource, I think, for people who are trying to understand how extremist movements have, you know, evolved over time.

Speaker 4:
[03:29] They've also over the years cooperated with law enforcement, local law enforcement, federal law enforcement. Part of that has been passing on information that it's gotten from its own sources, its own paid informants inside extremist groups, which is part of what led to the indictment that we saw this week.

Speaker 2:
[03:45] Yeah, so let's talk about that. The group is charged with financial crimes. Ryan, what is the Justice Department alleging was illegal?

Speaker 4:
[03:55] So look, this indictment, as you said at the top, has 11 counts, it's wire fraud, false statements to a bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. And what the indictment alleges essentially is that the Southern Poverty Law Center was defrauding its donors by raising money, it said, ostensibly, to dismantle extremist groups, but was in fact, the Justice Department says, using donated money to pay the leaders of extremist groups, folks associated with such groups. So as we heard the Acting Attorney General say, funding, he says, extremism. This indictment revolves around payments that the SPLC was making to confidential informants who had infiltrated or were in some way associated with extremist groups, groups like the Ku Klux Klan, most notably. And the Justice Department alleges that between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC paid some $3 million in total. So a lot of money to informants, these informants inside these hate groups. It says the SPLC set up bank accounts in the names of fictitious entities and then used those accounts to pay the informants. The idea being, I think, you know, we can't have these hate groups know that these people are being paid by civil rights groups, so we're going to hide where this money is coming from. But prosecutors say that doing that amounted to making false statements to the banks. I think it is important to point out, though, that while the Justice Department says the SPLC was funding extremism, the indictment doesn't detail how the payments that the SPLC was making to these informants was furthering the extremist groups' actions or violent interests.

Speaker 3:
[05:20] Yeah. You know, some of the claims in this indictment are, I found, quite remarkable. You know, for example, they claimed that one informant was a former chairman of the National Alliance, which was the largest neo-Nazi political organization for some time in this country. You know, they also claimed that another informant was the director of an offshoot of Arian Nations. But you know, it was information that the SPLC published from internal documents about the National Alliance that helped to unravel that organization. And as I mentioned earlier, you know, Arian Nations basically ceased to exist because of SPLC litigation. So it's an interesting argument that is laid out in this, you know, indictment to claim that this paid informant program was actually growing extremism when in fact some of the very organizations that they claim informants were placed with were taken down through work that the SPLC did.

Speaker 2:
[06:25] And how is the Southern Poverty Law Center responding to these charges?

Speaker 4:
[06:29] The SPLC actually, before this case was unsealed, put out a video statement saying that it was under investigation. It appeared to be for this paid informant program. And it said that this informant program was very important. They say that it was started initially because the SPLC was facing violent threats. Its headquarters in Alabama was actually firebombed in 1983. There were three members of the KKK who ultimately went to prison for that. And the acting CEO, Brian Fair, said that this program was set up because of the violent threats that the SPLC and its staff was was facing to get information on what may lie ahead and to try to head them off. He also said that this is information that has been shared with local law enforcement over the years. It's been shared with federal law enforcement, including the FBI. And in fact, the SPLC had a close working relationship with the Justice Department and the FBI for a long time. It was actually stopped by this administration. But the acting CEO of the SPLC also said that they are going to fight this. Here's a bit of what Brian Fair said.

Speaker 6:
[07:31] We will not be intimidated into silence or contrition. And we will not abandon our mission or the communities we serve.

Speaker 2:
[07:40] And that video obviously had a little mood music.

Speaker 4:
[07:43] It did. It did. It was a three plus minute video. But Fair made very clear in that video that they view this as the SPLC being targeted for the work that it does and says that the administration has made clear who its opponents are and who it supports and that the SPLC is standing in the breach here.

Speaker 2:
[08:01] Odette, you have spoken with people at the SPLC. Did they have an explanation for what was going on with the informant program?

Speaker 3:
[08:10] So, yeah, I've been speaking with people who currently or formerly worked in the SPLC's intelligence project. And I think a couple of things have really been interesting about these conversations. First of all, really none of them had any direct knowledge about this informant program. The program no longer exists. This is what interim CEO, Brian Fair, has said. The other thing I just want to point out is that it's been clear that the SPLC has undergone just a huge shift internally in recent years. You know, management turnover, a change in focus, and just generally a different way of conducting business. And these claims and the indictment really relate to sort of this period prior to those changes.

Speaker 2:
[09:00] All right. We are going to take a quick break, and we will be back with more in a moment.

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Speaker 2:
[10:30] And we're back. Even before the Justice Department charged the Southern Poverty Law Center with financial crimes, it had been a real target of Republican IR. That is to say that this development isn't happening in a vacuum. Why was there so much focus on the SPLC?

Speaker 3:
[10:48] It did draw the IR, I think, from the right and left, but for different reasons. So, you know, on the right, we've seen the SPLC in recent years classify Moms for Liberty as an extremist group. It's also written about Turning Point USA. These riled people up on the right, you know, people who felt that this was a clearly partisan sort of approach to identifying extremism. On the left, you had people who were looking at the huge financial endowment that the SPLC had, and wondering, you know, was it spending the money in a way that was strengthening, I guess, the landscape of civil rights organizations and other organizations that might be ideologically aligned with the SPLC? So I think those are part of it. But I also think that the SPLC moved into the administration's crosshairs because it has published work directly about people in the administration. You know, in 2019, it published an investigation showing that Stephen Miller had invoked a novel called Camp of the Saints in an email to a Breitbart editor. Miller, as you know, Tam, is White House Deputy Chief of Staff and largely, you know, seen as the driving force behind the administration's immigration crackdown. And that is a novel that's popular among white nationalists for painting a sort of dystopian vision around immigration. The SPLC has also published an investigation about meetings that Borders R Tom Homan has had with members of the Proud Boys. And so, you know, the SPLC has actually highlighted personalities that are now working directly in the administration.

Speaker 4:
[12:30] I will also say, I think that the way that the SPLC characterized Turning Point USA, the group that was started by the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, really got under the skin of a lot of people in this administration, in part because people like Cash Patel, people like now former Attorney General, Pam Bondi, people at the Justice Department, in the political ranks, are people who are all friends with Charlie Kirk. They all knew him personally. And so when the SPLC in 2024 said that Turning Point USA was kind of like the epitome of the hard right, that really stuck with people. And when Charlie Kirk was assassinated last year, after his killing, FBI Director Cash Patel ended the FBI's long-running cooperation with the SPLC, basically said that the group was a partisan smear machine. And I also point out that Patel was at the press conference and spoke at the press conference this week, announcing these charges against the group.

Speaker 2:
[13:20] Yeah, I think that there is a widely held view in Republican circles that here is this high-profile civil rights organization, very influential, very good at getting headlines, and they labeled what Republicans in the Trump era see as mainstream Republican organizations as extremist hate groups. That was a tough pill to swallow for those groups. But now you also have the SPLC responding to this, saying, look at all these priors, this investigation has to be politically motivated. How is the Justice Department responding to that?

Speaker 4:
[13:59] Well, it's interesting. At the press conference this week, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanch was asked directly about concerns of potential political interference or political motivation in this investigation. Here's how he responded.

Speaker 5:
[14:13] Well, I mean, look, it's free from political. There is nothing political about this indictment or this investigation.

Speaker 4:
[14:20] What I will say is that there is certainly a track record with this administration of the Justice Department going after critics perceived political foes of the president of the administration and its political agenda. You have obviously the cases against former FBI director, James Comey, and New York Attorney General, Letitia James. There have been other investigations that have been ongoing. There's a big one now into an alleged grand conspiracy revolving around the intelligence assessment going back in 2016 in the Russia investigation. The concerns that people are expressing about the Justice Department potentially using its vast powers to go after the president's perceived enemies, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, there's a context for that allegation. I will also add that there are outside groups like ACLU and others that have said that to them, this appears to be very much the political targeting of the SPLC.

Speaker 2:
[15:13] So Ryan, is it surprising that the Department of Justice brought these charges against the SPLC given all of the focus on this organization in recent years?

Speaker 4:
[15:24] It is not surprising to a lot of people who work in this field, in part because you go back and you look at a national security presidential memo that came out of the White House in September about countering violent extremism, domestic extremism. A former Justice Department official who I was speaking with who worked on these sorts of issues sees a direct through line from that memo to the case against the SPLC.

Speaker 2:
[15:47] Okay, explain.

Speaker 4:
[15:49] There is a concern among some that this administration will use the powers of the federal government to try to tamp down on folks on the left who it opposes politically.

Speaker 3:
[16:01] I would not say that the administration has redefined extremism, but it has absolutely made clear that it is shifting its focus on extremism from the far right, which was really, I think we could say, the focus during the Biden years, to what it characterizes as the far left and what it often refers to as ANTIFA. And what NSPM 7, this memo that Ryan is talking about, does is it basically directs the executive branch to focus its efforts and attention on investigating any financial ties or other support that may be behind what this administration considers to be the extreme left ANTIFA extremists?

Speaker 4:
[16:57] Political intimidation is the word that shows up in this memo sometimes. And I think about how some conservatives talk about the SPLC and saying that it used its soapbox to intimidate people with opposing political views.

Speaker 3:
[17:15] I completely agree with Ryan that given that context, this indictment isn't terribly surprising. What is surprising though, which I heard from these current and former SPLC employees that I've been speaking with, is that the administration is taking a criminal approach to the SPLC. I don't think anybody anticipated that. Many were expecting something more like federal scrutiny of tax-exempt status, maybe some added detention from the IRS. And so this has really come out of left field in that way.

Speaker 4:
[17:52] I think it's important to state that this is the very beginning of this process. There are undoubtedly going to be legal challenges that the SPLC will raise to this case before it gets to trial. That may derail it. And if it gets to trial, and again, there's no guarantee that it will, it's going to be really interesting to see how a jury in Alabama responds to a case against a civil rights organization that worked to try to dismantle white supremacist groups.

Speaker 2:
[18:20] All right, we're going to leave it there for today. Tomorrow on the podcast, we will have our weekly news roundup, talking about some of the political news we haven't gotten to yet. And there's a lot of it. So don't miss a thing. Hit the follow button wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover politics.

Speaker 3:
[18:38] I'm Odette Yousef. I cover domestic extremism.

Speaker 4:
[18:41] And I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department.

Speaker 2:
[18:43] And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.

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