Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche speaks during a press conference with FBI Director Kash Patel next to him, at the Department of Justice in Washington, DC, on April 21, 2026.
Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty Images
The Department of Justice on Tuesday announced a bombshell 11-count fraud indictment accusing the Southern Poverty Law Center of secretly funding white supremacist and other hate groups that it claimed to be battling.
Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC paid at least $3 million to eight individuals, some of whom were associated with the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, the National Socialist Party of America, the Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, and the America Front, said Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche at a press conference.
“The SPLC was not dismantling the groups,” Blanche said. “It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”
“One troubling example, is the SPLC was paying a member of the leadership group that planned the Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, that resulted in the death of one person, and injured dozens more,” the acting attorney general said, noting that the indictment alleged that the group paid the person about $270,000 over the course of eight years.
The indictment was returned Tuesday by a grand jury in U.S. District Court in the Middle District of Alabama, Blanche said.
The SPLC, which is a non-profit civil rights group, is charged with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud, and one count of money laundering, he said.
“The indictment alleges a very long period of time, up to 2023,” Blanche said.
The SPLC, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment, earlier Tuesday said it was the subject of a criminal probe by the DOJ.
“Although we don’t know all the details, the focus appears to be on the SPLC’s prior use of paid confidential informants to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups,” CEO Bryan Fair said in a statement reported by The Associated Press.