Federal law enforcement officials were "well aware" that the Southern Poverty Law Center provided information from its confidential informants that "put violent extremists in jail" before the Trump administration sought to indict it last week, attorneys for the civil rights organization said in court papers Tuesday.
A federal grand jury from the Middle District of Alabama indicted the SPLC on 11-counts last week, alleging that it engaged in wire fraud, bank fraud and money laundering in connection with its use of paid confidential sources who provided information on right-wing extremist organizations.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, in public remarks after the indictment, accused the organization of "manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred."
But attorneys for the SPLC said in court papers that the "unprecedented" and "irregular" prosecution seeks to criminalize the tools and programs that the 55-year-old civil rights group used for decades to provide intelligence later shared with law enforcement, including the FBI. They said it appeared that the federal grand jury — the group of American citizens in Alabama that voted to return the indictment — was "not merely misled" by the government but may also have been "actively weaponized" to facilitate the case.
The 55-year-old organization has used civil lawsuits to combat white supremacist groups for years.
Attorneys for the SPLC filed two separate motions: one asking for the disclosure of grand jury proceedings and another asking the court to address what they called false and prejudicial statements from Trump administration officials about the case. U.S. Magistrate Judge Kelly Fitzgerald Pate on Tuesday ordered the Justice Department to respond to the SPLC's motions by May 5.
The SPLC's attorneys wrote that "repeated, false, and prejudicial remarks" from senior administration officials not only violate Justice Department norms, but also illustrate "the stunning and blatant irregularity, politicization, and manifest risk of prosecutorial misconduct in this case."
They wrote that the veil of secrecy that normally protects grand jury proceedings "cannot be used as a shield for a prosecution that is so clearly untethered from the facts, the law, and the historic relationship between this organization and the very law enforcement agencies now seeking its destruction."
The SPLC's lawyers also filed a letter sent to the acting U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Alabama, Kevin Davidson, demanding the government "correct a false and unfairly prejudicial public statement" they say Blanche made on Fox News, in which he claimed that "there's no information that we have" that suggested the organization provided information obtained from paid informants to law enforcement.
SPLC attorneys provided specifics to prosecutors about how the organization alerted law enforcement about illegal conduct by a member of an extremist group who was then federally prosecuted, they wrote in the letter.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the SPLC's arguments.
The organization has long been criticized by the political right. President Donald Trump has seized on the case, called SPLC one of the “greatest political scams in American History” and connected it to his false claims that he won the 2020 election.
The case against the civil rights group comes shortly after Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi in early April, in part because he was unhappy that she had not secured enough indictments against his perceived political foes.
Blanche told NBC News this month that Americans should be "happy" that Trump is deeply involved in the Justice Department's operations.
