A federal grand jury in Alabama has charged the Southern Poverty Law Center with 11 counts of fraud and money laundering, and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams responded by praising the organization as a force for good.
The indictment alleges the SPLC secretly routed more than $3 million in donor funds to individuals tied to the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi organizations, and other white supremacist groups between 2014 and 2023. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the group was "manufacturing racism to justify its existence." Abrams, speaking with Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt, offered a full-throated defense of the SPLC's mission and legacy.
The contrast tells you everything about where the Democratic establishment's loyalties lie, not with the donors who were allegedly deceived, but with the institution that spent decades branding mainstream conservative groups as hate organizations.
The charges, returned by a grand jury in the Middle District of Alabama, include six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering, as first reported by Breitbart. The Department of Justice's Office of Public Affairs released a press statement laying out the core allegations.
The indictment states that starting in the 1980s, the SPLC "began operating a covert network of individuals who were either associated with violent and extremist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, or who had infiltrated violent extremist groups at the SPLC's direction." The DOJ press release continued:
"Unbeknownst to donors, some of their donated money was being used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups at the same time that the SPLC was denouncing the same groups on its website."
Prosecutors allege the SPLC paid at least $3 million to eight individuals affiliated with extremist organizations, including the KKK, the National Socialist Movement, the United Klans of America, and the Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club. The Washington Examiner reported that Blanche said the group used "shell entities, fictitious organizations, layered bank accounts, and prepaid cards to conceal the source and movement of funds."
Blanche did not mince words about the alleged scheme's purpose. As the New York Post reported, the acting attorney general said the SPLC "was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred."
That is the government's theory: an organization that built its brand, and its fundraising machine, on identifying hate groups was allegedly bankrolling the very extremists it claimed to fight. Donors gave money believing it would combat racism. The indictment says it went to Klansmen.
Against that backdrop, Abrams chose to defend the SPLC publicly. In a conversation with Schmidt, she cast the organization as a necessary force against Southern authoritarianism, with no apparent acknowledgment of the federal charges.
Abrams told Schmidt that the South has long been the incubator for national threats:
"Often what you see on the national stage got incubated in the south, and so we know, in the south, we've always needed, for example, litigation as one of the tools to fight back against authoritarianism. Whether that was Jim Crow, the KKK, the antisemitic behaviors that were manifest in the deep south."
She went further, crediting the SPLC with broad community investment. "It recognizes what hate groups are and says we're not going to let you get away with it, we're gonna tell people about you," Abrams said. "It invests in communities and says we're not just going to say this is wrong, we're going to help invest in what makes it right."
The DOJ indictment, of course, alleges the opposite, that the SPLC was investing in what made hate groups operational, not what made communities safer. Abrams did not address the specific fraud charges or the allegation that donor money went to extremist-linked individuals. She framed the SPLC's work as fighting "the anti-Asian, anti-Latino" hatred that "probably had some genesis in the South."
For a former candidate who built her political brand on accountability and justice, the selective silence on the substance of the charges is notable. The DOJ's 11-count indictment is not a policy disagreement or a political talking point. It is a federal criminal case alleging that donors were systematically deceived.
While Abrams was praising the SPLC, organizations that have spent years on the receiving end of the group's "hate map" designations offered a very different reaction. Fox News reported that groups including the Family Research Council, Moms for Liberty, PragerU, ACT for America, Awake Illinois, and the Center for Immigration Studies all responded to the indictment by calling it vindication.
Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich said the SPLC's designations had real-world consequences far beyond reputation. "The SPLC's hate map has been weaponized against us countless times, including by law enforcement where training manuals labeled us as an extremist group by citing the SPLC," Descovich said.
The Family Research Council pointed to the 2012 attack on its Washington, D.C. headquarters, arguing that the SPLC's designation helped legitimize the targeting of its organization. That attack, in which a gunman entered the building and shot a security guard, was carried out by a man who later told the FBI he had used the SPLC's hate map to select his target.
These are not abstract policy grievances. Parents' groups, immigration-policy organizations, and faith-based nonprofits have argued for years that the SPLC's labeling system functions less as a public-interest tool and more as a political weapon, one that treats mainstream conservative positions on immigration, family, and religious liberty as equivalent to white supremacy. The indictment now raises the question of whether the organization's entire model was built on a fraud.
The pattern of criminal referrals and DOJ investigations targeting politically connected institutions has accelerated in recent months, and the SPLC case may prove to be among the most consequential.
Just The News reported that the SPLC has acknowledged using paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups and share intelligence with local and federal law enforcement. SPLC CEO Bryan Fair said the organization "will vigorously defend themselves." The organization has denied wrongdoing.
The Washington Examiner noted that the investigation was long-running, had been paused during the Biden administration, and could expand to include individual defendants. That detail raises its own questions. If federal prosecutors had enough evidence to pursue the case years ago, why did the prior administration let it sit?
The SPLC's defense, that it was running legitimate intelligence-gathering operations against hate groups, will be tested in court. But the indictment's core allegation is not about whether informants were used. It is about whether donors were told the truth about where their money was going. Blanche put it bluntly: "At no point did they tell donors they were giving money to these organizations or their leadership. That's the fraud."
Georgia's political landscape has seen its share of scrutiny over questionable funding arrangements tied to political figures and institutions. The SPLC case now adds a federal dimension to the broader question of how left-leaning nonprofits handle donor money and public trust.
Abrams's choice to defend the SPLC at this moment is not accidental. The SPLC has been a cornerstone of the progressive infrastructure for decades. Its hate-group designations have been cited by media outlets, tech platforms, government agencies, and corporate diversity programs as authoritative. If the indictment's allegations hold up, that entire ecosystem of credibility collapses.
That is what makes Abrams's defense so revealing. She did not say the charges were false. She did not address the $3 million allegedly funneled to extremists. She did not mention the wire fraud, the bank fraud, or the money laundering conspiracy. She talked about Jim Crow and the KKK, the very groups the SPLC is now accused of funding.
The federal grand jury's decision to return an 11-count indictment means a panel of citizens found probable cause that crimes were committed. That is not a political opinion. It is a legal finding.
Abrams is free to admire the SPLC's stated mission. But when a federal indictment alleges that the mission was a cover for fraud, that donors were deceived, that extremists were paid, and that the organization profited from the very hatred it claimed to oppose, defending the brand without addressing the charges is not courage. It is evasion.
The donors who gave money to fight hate deserve better than a politician who won't even acknowledge the possibility they were cheated. But then, accountability has never been the progressive establishment's strong suit, especially when one of its own institutions is the one in the dock.
