Southern Poverty Law Center Allegedly Paid Informant Involved in 2017 Charlottesville Rally

The left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center, which is now facing federal charges related to financial crimes, allegedly paid more than $270,000 to an informant who was a member of the leadership group that planned the 2017 “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville, Va., according to federal prosecutors.

Acting U.S. Attorney Todd Blanche announced charges against the group on Tuesday, alleging it had defrauded donors by using their money to secretly pay informants inside extremist organizations. The group spent more than $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to informants involved with groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the National Socialist Party of America.

One "field source" for the SPLC "was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ event in Charlottesville, Virginia, and attended the event at the direction of the S.P.L.C,” according to prosecutors. The antisemitic rally had hundreds of participants and saw a protester drive his car into a group of counterprotesters, killing one woman and leaving at least 19 others injured. The rally was held amid controversy over the removal of Confederate monuments, which local governments opted to take down in the wake of the Charleston church shooting. In 2015, a white supremacist shot and killed nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

The "Unite the Right" rally led to a national debate over Confederate imagery and white supremacy. President Trump came under fire in the wake of the rally for saying, "you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides." Later in the press conference, Trump added: "I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay?"

Facing backlash over his remarks, Trump said: "If you look at what I said, you will see that that question was answered perfectly. And I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general. Whether you like it or not, he was one of the great generals."

The SPLC informant, whose salary from the group was paid out between 2015 and 2023, “made racist postings under the supervision of the S.P.L.C. and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees,” prosecutors said.

Prosecutors say SPLC paid another informant with a neo-Nazi group more than $1 million over the course of nine years. In 2014, that informant stole 25 boxes of documents from an unidentified violent extremist group — documents that SPLC later used to create a report about the group.

Blanche says the SPLC was “doing the exact opposite of what it told its donors it was doing — not dismantling extremism, but funding it.” He also accused the group of “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.”

The SPLC's revenue increased by roughly $80 million in the wake of the rally, from $51 million in October 2016 to $133 million in October 2017, according to Fox News.

Now, the group faces charges of wire fraud, false statements to a bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Bryan Fair, SPLC's interim chief executive, dismissed the charges as "false allegations." He said the indictment “will not shake our resolve to fight for justice and ensure the promise of the civil rights movement becomes a reality for all.”

He also defended the SPLC's practice of working with paid informants, though he said the group no longer does so. He said informants in the past had “risked their lives to infiltrate and inform on the activities of our nation’s most radical and violent extremist groups” and in doing so had helped save lives.

While the SPLC was founded in 1971 and got its start investigating white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the group has since widened out its focus to conservative and Christian organizations, which it has included on its lists of hate groups and labeled "extremists."

The FBI announced last year that it would end its longstanding relationship with the law center because of its smearing of conservative groups. FBI Director Kash Patel accused the SPLC of inspiring violence against Americans with its “hate map” of conservative organizations across the country. The change came after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk; a 2024 report from the SPLC called Kirk's group, Turning Point USA, a “case study of the hard right.”

Meanwhile, the SPLC's tracking of extremism does not include any leftist organizations.

“The Southern Poverty Law Center long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine. Their so-called ‘hate map’ has been used to defame mainstream Americans and even inspired violence. That disgraceful record makes them unfit for any FBI partnership,” Patel said.

The FBI's Richmond Field Office relied on reports from the SPLC to author its infamous anti-Catholic memo in 2023. The bureau later retracted the memo after it received backlash because it compared traditionalist Catholics to violent extremists.

Blanche said Tuesday that the SPLC did not inform the FBI about its use of informants, or the use of shell companies to disguise that the informants were receiving payments from the group.