Southern Poverty Law Center seeks grand jury transcripts in federal prosecution

The Southern Poverty Law Center Tuesday demanded a transcript of grand jury proceedings that led to its indictment on fraud charges and called on Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche to retract statements made about the civil rights organization.

The SPLC filed the two motions in the case in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, in which the U.S. Department of Justice alleges that the SPLC’s use of paid informants to disrupt the operations of extremist groups functioned as financial support for those groups and fraud on SPLC donors.

“At one moment, they are appreciating our work in destroying the Klan and now, they are saying the SPLC funded and promoted the Klan,” SPLC interim CEO Bryan Fair said in a statement on Tuesday. “The informant program was successful in accomplishing its purposes: Threats and attacks were prevented, criminal activity was stopped, and information was gathered to dismantle the efforts of hate and extremist groups. There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives.”

The U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement Tuesday that the issues “will all be litigated in court and the government remains confident in its case.”

“A grand jury heard only a portion of the evidence against SPLC and chose to indict on 11 counts,” the statement said.

Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel last week announced an 11-count indictment against the SPLC, charging the organization with wire fraud, making false statements to financial institutions and money laundering.

SPLC paid informants within extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan to gather information about potentially violent activities by the organizations. The program, which dates to at least the 1980s, has been discontinued, according to SPLC.

Blanche and Patel accused the organization of supporting the extremist groups by paying the informants as part of the program it operated to collect the information, and of deceiving its donors in doing so.

Legal experts have expressed doubts about the validity of the indictment.

In its motion seeking the grand jury transcript, attorneys representing the SPLC wrote that federal prosecutors may have made false statements to members of the grand jury. Attorneys for the organization said the government did not present evidence that SPLC tried to mislead donors regarding the charges of wire fraud and making false statements to a financial institution. The motion said the indictment “has fundamental flaws that raise concerns about the prosecutors’ instructions to the grand jury.”

“These concerns about misstatements to the grand jury are not abstract or speculative,” the motion said. “Indeed, they are consistent with a small but growing body of caselaw involving the precise situation we see here—the government engaging in highly unusual conduct simultaneous with political pressure to bring charges, and misstatements of law at the highest levels of government.”

SPLC also requested that Blanche retract comments he made on Fox News’ “The Laura Ingraham Show” after the April 21 news conference announcing SPLC’s charges.

According to the motion, Blanche said the SPLC did not provide information that it received from its confidential informants about potentially violent acts to law enforcement.

“There’s no information that we have that suggests that the money they were paying to these informants and these members of these organizations, they then turned around and shared what they learned with law enforcement,” the group quoted Blanche saying.

According to the SPLC motion, the organization provided the government with information about a member of Vanguard America, an extremist group, who sought national security clearance as part of a job working at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in 2018.

“In addition, counsel provided copies of federal court pleadings in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania relating to Individual A’s criminal prosecution based on the conduct the SPLC reported,” the motion said. Those pleadings revealed that after Individual A was indicted based on the information the SPLC provided, the government repeatedly requested that Individual A be detained because of the serious risk of violence he presented.”

According to the second motion that attorneys representing the SPLC filed in the case, the organization had learned by February that the U.S. DOJ was investigating its program for paying confidential informants.

During a meeting with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama on April 6, the motion said, the SPLC provided information about the program that included “specific information gathered from informants and provided to law enforcement to prevent and assist in the investigation and prosecution of criminal activity.”

Portions of the interview then circulated on social media, some of which belonged to the U.S. DOJ.

“When we began working with informants, we were living in the shadow of the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system,” Fair said in the news release on Tuesday. “When threats and other unlawful activity were revealed, the SPLC immediately passed that information to law enforcement officials, local, state and federal and assisted in efforts to prevent violence and stop criminal activity.”