SPLC Worked With Biden Team To Smear Political Opponents, House GOP Charges
The Southern Poverty Law Center faces a federal indictment over its paid informants.
The Southern Poverty Law Center partnered with the Biden administration to tar political opponents on the right as “hateful,” even as it allegedly paid people in hate groups to commit crimes, lawmakers alleged at a hearing last week.
Republican House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan cited a recent Justice Department indictment stating the Southern Poverty Law Center paid a source $300,000 to put together the August 2017 tiki-torch rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The SPLC and its affiliates used that Unite the Right rally to smear President Trump as responsible for inspiring political violence.
The harm was not just reputational or theoretical. A woman named Heather Heyer was run over at the rally and died. The man responsible is in federal prison on a life sentence.
Tuesday’s hearing, “The Southern Poverty Law Center: Manufacturing Hate: Part II,” was held days after the Justice Department’s superseding indictment shed more light on the allegations it first made in an April indictment. The feds accuse the SPLC of defrauding its donors, who thought they were fighting racism, not funding it.
President Joe Biden’s Justice Department “helped make the Southern Poverty the standard in evaluating who’s a hate group,” Mr. Jordan said. “They consulted with them. They had quarterly meetings. . . . They even used them to train prosecutors.”
“It’s always worse than we thought,” Mr. Jordan said. “We now have the superseding indictment from the Justice Department. It wasn’t $3 million that they were paying these field sources. It was actually $4 million the Southern Poverty Law Center paid to field sources.”
Jordan went on to add that at least one SPLC staffer dated at least one paid informant — strange bedfellows for a group that portrays itself as a descendant of the civil-rights movement.
Bryan K. Fair, SPLC interim president, downplayed allegations of any special relationship with the Biden administration, saying, “The SPLC has met with every administration since its founding” in 1971.
Ryan Bangert, a senior official at Alliance Defending Freedom, testified about the penalties that came from being crossways with the SPLC and accused of hate by it, as his own group was.
“We’ve seen major corporations consistently canceling, debanking, refusing service to organizations that simply have a political disagreement with the SPLC, oftentimes on issues that the vast majority of the American public disagree with the SPLC on,” Mr. Bangert said. “And yet they’re pressuring both the government and large corporations to take adverse action against those corporations simply to grind a political ax.”
Mr. Bangert noted young conservative leader Charlie Kirk was slain in September just one day after the SPLC accused him of “militia and antigovernment movement activity”; his Turning Point USA group appeared on the SPLC’s Hate Map.
Texas Republican Lance Gooden challenged the SPLC’s inconsistency in who made the Hate Map and who was excluded.
“During the Biden-Harris administration, the SPLC included many mainstream conservative groups in their hate map, including Alliance Defending Freedom, Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, and Family Research Council,” Mr. Gooden said, asking Mr. Fair, “To your knowledge, did the SPLC include antifa, which is an actual domestic-terrorist organization, and its hate group?”
Mr. Fair’s rebuttals throughout the four-hour hearing took two forms: Donors support the SPLC’s work, and its work saves lives.
“Our confidential-informant program helped save lives,” Mr. Fair told the committee. “We shared information with law enforcement. It helped protect the public. It helped protect our staff. We were able to gather intelligence and dismantle some of these groups.”
He claimed, in another dig at the Trump team, “We stopped the program because we believe hate and extremism has migrated significantly online and into government agencies.”
But when asked about the allegedly fraudulent bank accounts and informants who allegedly broke into the offices of an adversary, Mr. Fair refused comment, referring to the pending litigation; he said the matter would be decided in court.
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