Josh Christenson writes for the New York Post about a significant charge against a leading left-wing group.
The Department of Justice announced Tuesday that a grand jury indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center for making fraudulent payments of millions of dollars to members of the Ku Klux Klan and other neo-Nazi organizations.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a news conference that the 11-count indictment filed in an Alabama federal court alleged the left-wing nonprofit had in the past decade paid at least $3 million to eight members of the far-right groups.
One leader of the 2017 Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville, Va., received roughly $270,000 over an eight-year period. Neither that person nor others were identified in the 14-page indictment.
Another embedded in a neo-Nazi organization was paid $1 million to steal 25 boxes of the hate group’s documents.
Others had affiliations with the Ku Klux Klan, United Klans of America, Aryan Nations, the Nationalist Socialist Party of American Nazis and the Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club.
Earlier Tuesday, SPLC CEO Bryan Fair said in a statement that his group was being targeted for “prior use of paid confidential informants to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups.”
Starting in the 1980s, the SPLC began using informants who had infiltrated various groups.
But Blanche said in the press conference that the nonprofit never informed law enforcement that it was “paying off the Klu Klux Klan” or other extremist groups.
Several of the informants were also being paid while simultaneously being featured in SPLC publications — including on its public-facing “Extremist File” webpage — as members of the hate groups. …
… “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,” Blanche told reporters.
“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,” he said.
