The Southern Poverty Law Center spent nearly a decade, prosecutors say, writing checks to the very people it was warning America about.
The Alabama nonprofit was charged Tuesday by the Department of Justice with wire fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering conspiracy. The allegation is simple and startling: between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC quietly routed more than $3 million to at least eight leaders and members of hate groups — including a Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard and a fundraiser for a neo-Nazi outfit — to serve as “field sources” inside violent extremist movements. Donors, the government says, were never told.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced the charges Wednesday. The indictment calls the informants “Fs.” It says they were “secretly paid.”
The reaction was sharp, and it came from people who spend their lives fighting extremism.
Gene Hamilton, president of America First Legal and a former DOJ official, said he could think of no precedent for a tax-exempt nonprofit bankrolling informants inside violent movements. Some on the left, he noted, have shrugged this off as standard intelligence work.
“That’s one thing if it’s the government — the government can prosecute people,” he said. The SPLC is not the government. It is a charity that asks Americans for money.
Hamilton reached for an old image. It was, he said, like paying the arsonist to help put out the fire. Or, closer to home for him: like his own MAGA-aligned group secretly funding DEI officers to expand DEI programs while fundraising to end them.
“It’s mind bogglingly dumb,” he said.
Liora Rez, founder of StopAntisemitism, was blunter. She said the SPLC’s work against antisemitism had visibly faded in recent years. The indictment, if true, explained something.
“It’s unimaginable to us that a civil rights group would gin up fake bigotry in order to solicit donations from concerned Americans,” she said. “If this is what the SPLC did, it is shameful and outrageous.”
The SPLC denies it. CEO Bryan Fair said Tuesday the organization was being politically targeted and accused the Trump administration of weaponizing the Justice Department. The payments, he insisted, went to “confidential informants to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups.”
But the indictment names, without naming, some of those informants. And the roster is stunning.
There is the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America — the same group the SPLC publicly blamed, in a 2013 article, for the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four little girls in Birmingham.
There is an informant who sat in an “online leadership chat group” planning the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. He posted racist comments, the indictment says, at the SPLC’s direction. He also coordinated rides so others could attend. For this, prosecutors say, he was paid $270,000 between 2015 and 2023.
There is a longtime informant from the neo-Nazi National Alliance who took in $1 million over the same stretch. He worked, according to the DOJ, as a fundraiser for the group. At one point, the indictment alleges, he stole 25 boxes of documents from the organization’s headquarters. Those records became the basis for a story on the SPLC’s “Hatewatch” blog. When a second National Alliance member took the fall for the theft, the SPLC allegedly paid him $6,000 for his trouble.
There is another informant — $300,000 between 2014 and 2020 — who held office in the National Socialist Movement and rode with the Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club.
And there is a former chairman of the National Alliance who collected $140,000 from the SPLC between 2016 and 2023 while being featured, during those same years, in the nonprofit’s own “Extremist Files.”
The SPLC built its brand, and its endowment, on a map of American hate. The indictment suggests that some of the pins on that map were people cashing its checks.
That is the charge. It has not been proven. The SPLC will have its day in court, and it should.
But strip away the politics of who brought the case, and the question the donors are left with is the oldest one in charity work: Where did the money go? If the government is right, a piece of it went to the Klan. A piece of it went to the neo-Nazis. A piece of it went to a man helping organize Charlottesville.
You can call that intelligence gathering. You can call it infiltration. You can call it, as the SPLC does, a political hit.
Or you can call it what Gene Hamilton called it. You can call it paying the arsonist.
🚨 OMG. FBI Director Kash Patel just caught leftist NGO Southern Poverty Law Center fraudulently paying Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist groups to STAGE HATE CRIMES
Now they face criminal indictments.
I VOTED FOR THIS! pic.twitter.com/EtxFGqGZNB
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) April 21, 2026
