Jim Jordan

WASHINGTON - U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan wants the Southern Poverty Law Center to send the House Judiciary Committee that he chairs a broad range of internal documents, following a federal grand jury’s indictment of the civil rights organization on charges of wire fraud, money laundering conspiracy, and making false statements to a federally insured bank.

Two days after the Justice Department announced the indictment, the Champaign County Republican sent a letter asking SPLC interim CEO Bryan Fair to send his committee all its documents and communications since 2017 between its employees and any “field source” it paid. It set an April 30 deadline for the information.

Jordan’s April 23 letter noted that his committee has been examining coordination between the SPLC and the Biden administration on federal civil rights matters. Those ties included regularly scheduled meetings, giving the SPLC early access to federal law-enforcement data, and allowing SPLC employees to train federal prosecutors, the letter said.

“The new information about the SPLC alleged in the indictment only raises further questions,” wrote Jordan, a Champaign County Republican.

The SPLC, founded in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1971, built its early reputation fighting the Ku Klux Klan in court and tracking far-right extremism. In more recent years it has faced criticism from conservatives for including right-leaning organizations like Moms for Liberty and Turning Point USA on its list of hate groups, and from some on the left for what critics described as outsized fundraising relative to its programmatic work.

On April 21, the Justice Department announced that a federal grand jury in Alabama had indicted the organization for secretly funneling more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals associated with violent extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, the National Socialist Party of America (also known as the American Nazi Party), Aryan Nations, and others. It said the payments were made between 2014 and 2023.

To conceal the payments, prosecutors allege the SPLC opened bank accounts under the names of fictitious entities — including entities identified in Jordan’s letter as “Center Investigative Agency,” “Fox Photography,” “North West Technologies,” “Tech Writers Group,” and “Rare Books Warehouse.” The indictment says those entities “were never incorporated, had no bona fide employees, and conducted no actual business.”

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the charges alongside FBI Director Kash Patel. “The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” Blanche said in the press release. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked.”

Patel said the SPLC “lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups, and actually turned around and paid the leaders of these very extremist groups.”

The Justice Department also filed two civil forfeiture actions seeking to recover alleged proceeds of the fraud scheme.

The SPLC’s Response

In a video statement released just before the indictment was announced, Fair defended the organization’s use of paid informants as a necessary tool developed “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.”

“There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives,” Fair said. He acknowledged that the SPLC no longer works with paid informants and said the organization had kept its informant network confidential to protect the safety of the individuals and their families.

Fair framed the indictment as part of a broader pattern of government pressure on the organization, citing FBI Director Patel’s October announcement severing the bureau’s ties with the SPLC and a December House subcommittee hearing that he said accused the group of being “partisan and profitable.”

“We will not be intimidated into silence or contrition, and we will not abandon our mission or the communities we serve,” Fair said.

Civil Liberties Groups Rally to SPLC’s Defense

The American Civil Liberties Union issued a statement calling the investigation “yet another example of the Trump administration’s extreme attempts to silence its critics.”