The Trump Regime’s Heinous Attack on a Legendary Civil Rights Organization

The Trump administration’s move to indict the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) stands as the latest in a string of preposterous abuses of power and the continued weaponization of our justice system. 

I know many of us were alarmed into action by prior controversial investigations involving high-profile figures (e.g., Leticia James, James Comey). This week’s indictment is perhaps an even more brazen smear — one that raises the stakes for the deployment of government authority against civil society organizations.

I spent time this week on other injustices that you, Contrarians, are enabling me to contest — including David Ellison’s Paramount-Warner merger and my forthcoming court appearance arguing for summary judgment on the renaming of the Kennedy Center. But this publisher’s note spotlights the SPLC battle. 

It’s a stark example of the erosion of institutional norms and the chilling effect such actions could have on free press and expression. 

These concerns underpin a Contrarian special report I co-wrote with my colleague Tom Joscelyn, a senior adviser for Democracy Defenders. We’ll be posting that at noon ET here at The Contrarian. In it, we scrutinize the details of the indictment to share a definitive takedown. You won’t want to miss it!

Here’s a sneak peek, followed by our usual weekly roundup:

During a press conference on Tuesday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced that the SPLC had been criminally indicted by a grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama. “There is nothing political about this indictment,” Blanche insisted. Anyone paying attention knows that is a lie. 

This DOJ attack on the esteemed SPLC is a travesty. This sham regime has unethically abused its power in this ridiculous attack on a legendary civil rights organization. 

As my fellow former presidential ethics counselors Richard Painter (George W. Bush), Virginia Canter (Barack Obama and Bill Clinton), and I (Barack Obama) wrote in a statement issued shortly after the indictment, we will not stay silent while the administration weaponizes the tools of law enforcement to attack groups it disagrees with.

This grievance is not a new one. MAGA Republicans have been gunning for the SPLC for years. 

During a congressional hearing late last year, for instance, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) portrayed the legendary civil rights organization as a bogeyman out to get conservatives and demanded a full investigation into how the DOJ, FBI, and other federal agencies had long relied on the center’s work. Other leading MAGA Republicans have loudly complained when the organization called out their hate.

Donald Trump’s corrupted DOJ and FBI have found a way to use the court system to act out MAGA’s revenge fantasy. 

Absurdly, the Trump regime alleges that instead of seeking to “dismantle” white supremacist groups — the center’s mission for the past 55 years, during which time it helped take down the Ku Klux Klan — it was surreptitiously paying extremists as part of some convoluted conspiracy. Blanche accuses the group of “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.” Patel claims the SPLC “allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public.”

These allegations are a smear. None of them withstands scrutiny. 

The indictment centers on the SPLC’s use of paid informants to infiltrate white supremacist groups. That is not unusual. It is often difficult to get inside groups seeking to overthrow the U.S. government or impose their racist vision on the country. The FBI itself regularly uses informants, and the “courts have recognized” that it “is lawful and often essential to the effectiveness of properly authorized law enforcement investigations.”

Indeed, the SPLC provided intelligence from its informant network to law enforcement agencies, including the FBI — a fact not included in the indictment. 

The exclusion of any mention of the longstanding working relationship between the SPLC and the FBI is outrageous and undermines the entire premise of the case. “We frequently shared what we learned from informants with local and federal law enforcement, including the FBI,” Bryan Fair, the SPLC’s interim president, said in a video defending his organization.

Patel knows Fair’s statement is true. Patel severed “all ties” between the FBI and SPLC in October 2025, as he wrote on X. Patel’s statement is an admission that the SPLC had those ties and was providing intelligence to the bureau. In fact, before Patel ended the relationship, Republican congressmen and conservative activists frequently complained that the FBI was cooperating too closely with the SPLC.

Nevertheless, the DOJ alleges that the SPLC’s use of informants was part of a “scheme and artifice” to deceive donors. Acting U.S. Attorney Kevin Davidson alleges in the indictment that though SPLC’s “stated mission included the dismantling of white supremacy and confronting hate across the country” it was “unbeknownst to donors,” secretly using “donated money … to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance.”

However, the indictment utterly fails to explain how these payments to extremist leaders undercut the SPLC’s stated mission. Nor does it say how anyone working for the center intentionally deceived donors. Nor could it; if you surveyed donors to the organization, they have already stated or would almost undoubtedly say that investigating hate is exactly what they wanted to support and that these claims are reprehensible.

The DOJ’s entire case centers on the SPLC’s alleged payments to ten informants inside extremist groups. Our special report, which will be posted here at The Contrarian at noon today, details the facts regarding these informants. The report makes evident that not a one justifies the criminal charges brought against the SPLC.

Please check it out! As you’ll read, this is hardly a conspiracy to secretly fund extremism or defraud donors. It is simply intelligence work. In fact, it is the type of information-gathering on white supremacist groups the FBI routinely engages in — or at least used to.

The hollow, desperate accusations underscore the extent to which the Trump regime wants Americans to believe that the SPLC, which has fought white supremacy since its founding in 1971, was secretly sponsoring white supremacy. That is utter nonsense.

-Norman Eisen and Tom Joscelyn. We stand with SPLC and will support the organization however we can. The ability to do so in the court of law and of public opinion through our nonstop journalism is all thanks to you, Contrarians. Your paid subscriptions help fund our legal battles and scintillating coverage. See for yourself in our rundown of The Contrarian’s other work this week, put together as always by my wonderful colleagues.