Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said a federal indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was not politically motivated during an appearance Tuesday on “The Ingraham Angle.”
The Alabama-based civil rights group was federally indicted Tuesday on fraud charges and is accused of funneling millions of dollars to pay informants to infiltrate extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
“That indictment is free for everybody to read, and if the takeaway is that that’s political, I mean, I think the opposite is true,” Blanche told Fox News host Laura Ingraham.
Blanche described the SPLC’s alleged conduct as “extraordinarily egregious,” saying the group paid $3 million to people associated with the United Klans of America and other extremist organizations from 2014 to 2023.
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The group faces charges including wire fraud, false statements to a bank and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The SPLC, which uses litigation to fight White supremacy and dismantle extremist groups, performed counter to its mission, Blanche said.
“The very entities that this group was raising money to go against are the very entities that they were taking the money in and paying to these entities and these individuals associated with those groups,” the attorney general told Ingraham.
Blanche claimed SPLC-funded informants helped initiate the deadly Ku Klux Klan rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
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“What we allege in the indictment and what the grand jury found is that one of the individuals that they paid was one of the folks who helped organize that terrible event,” the acting attorney general said.
“They were part of it.”
Blanche also said the SPLC did not alert law enforcement about its funding of informants in the extremist organizations.
The SPLC pushed back on the indictment, defending what its interim CEO Bryan Fair described as “prior use of paid confidential informants to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups.”
“There’s no information that we have that suggests that the money that they were paying to these informants and these members of these organizations, they then turned around and shared what they learned with law enforcement,” Blanche said.
In a video responding to the indictment, Fair said his civil rights group was “targeted” by the Trump administration and expressed outrage over the “false allegations” from the Justice Department.
“The actions by the DOJ will not shake our resolve to fight for justice and ensure the promise of the Civil Rights movement becomes a reality for all,” Fair said.
Fair also said the organization “will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff and our work,” according to The Associated Press.
Blanche said the investigation remains ongoing and said if allegations are proven to be true, the case is “very troubling.”
“It shakes the heart of our democracy to understand what happened,” he said.
