The Southern Poverty Law Center, long known for its civil-rights work and its tracking of extremist groups, was hit Tuesday with federal fraud charges alleging the organization improperly funded informants while fundraising without disclosing the payments to donors. The acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche, said the indictment alleges SPLC failed to disclose that money paid informants for infiltration activity inside extremist groups. The case was filed in Alabama, where SPLC is based.
SPLC’s CEO Bryan Fair rejected the accusations, saying the payments went to confidential informants to monitor threats of violence from extremist groups. Fair said the information gathered by the informants was frequently shared with the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies, and he argued that the information the center received helped save lives. “We are outraged by the false allegations levied against SPLC,” Fair said.
According to the indictment described by federal authorities, prosecutors contend the nonprofit defrauded donors by using their money to fund the same extremism that it claimed to be fighting. Prosecutors said the indictment describes payments of at least $3 million to informants affiliated with groups including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations and the National Socialist Party of America, as well as other groups, between 2014 and 2023. The charges include wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The indictment also sets up a key dispute over what SPLC told donors and how it used money for sensitive intelligence work. The Justice Department alleged SPLC told donors the funds would be used to help dismantle violent extremist groups, but did not disclose that some of the funds would actually be used to pay members of those groups. Legal experts cited in the coverage said the approach is unusual, with some focusing on how prosecutors are framing intent and method rather than arguing, as is common in fraud cases, that a charity lined its own pockets.
Phil Hackney, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said in the coverage that he was “somewhat surprised” by the approach. He said nonprofit fraud charges typically come when someone pilfers donated funds, but that federal prosecutors in this case target the “method and intent” of how the nonprofit used its money. Another attorney, Todd Spodek, said the law has not required nonprofits to provide donors with line-item receipts for sensitive operations and argued that prosecutors are treating discretion as deception, despite what he described as the survival necessity of keeping tactical details quiet.
The charges add to a backdrop in which SPLC has faced criticism from conservatives about which groups it labels and tracks. The organization’s “Intelligence Project” expanded over time from monitoring white supremacist organizations to broader tracking. According to SPLC’s own history described in the reporting, the effort began as “Klanwatch” in the 1980s before expanding and later being renamed the “Intelligence Project,” and it broadened to include other extremist groups.
The reporting also described the organization’s history of backlash, including a 1983 arson attack in Montgomery in which KKK members tried to burn down SPLC’s offices after lawsuits filed by the center against Klan groups. The fire damaged the building, office equipment, the center’s law library and files, and more than a year later, three KKK members were arrested, pleaded guilty and were sentenced to prison, according to the account.
Fair said SPLC used informants to monitor threats of violence during a period of heightened danger. He referenced the risks of that era, saying the center began working with informants while it was “living in the shadow of the height of the Civil Rights Movement,” which he said included bombings and murders of activists that he said went unanswered. Fair added that there is “no question that what we learned from informants saved lives.”
The case arrives as SPLC has also faced significant political scrutiny and pressure related to its extremism tracking. The reporting said that after the September 2025 assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a college campus in Utah, attention returned to SPLC’s inclusion of Kirk’s group, Turning Point USA. The FBI director Kash Patel then announced that the bureau would sever its relationship with the center, criticizing SPLC as a “partisan smear machine” and citing its use of a “hate map.”
In the same reporting, conservatives criticized SPLC’s tracking and said adding some groups unfairly maligns them because of their viewpoints. One example cited was Focus on the Family, described as being added in part because of its anti LGBTQ+ rhetoric, and the coverage also described how the FBI severing ties followed that renewed attention. A central question for the fraud case, however, remains narrower: whether SPLC’s donor communications and internal use of money violated federal fraud statutes as prosecutors allege.
The nonprofit’s funding structure is also part of the broader context described in the coverage. SPLC gets most of its funding from donor contributions, and the reporting said its endowment had just under $732 million in hand as of last October, according to the organization.