Tangle - The Southern Poverty Law Center gets indicted.

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

On Tuesday, April 21, the Justice Department announced an 11-count indictment charging the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) with financial crimes, including wire fraud and making false statements to a federally insured bank. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the nonprofit organization secretly sent over $3 million to informants inside extremist groups without telling donors what their money was being used for. The SPLC denies any wrongdoing and plans to fight the charges.Ad-free podcasts are here!To listen to this podcast ad-free, and to enjoy our subscriber only premium content, go to ReadTangle.com to sign up!California’s Republican candidate for governor.As the midterms approach, we’ll interview some candidates from across the political spectrum who are in high-profile, fascinating races. In California, Republican Steve Hilton — a former Fox News host and British politico — is on track to become a general election nominee. Hilton knows he’s an underdog, but he sat down with Tangle Executive Editor Isaac Saul to share why he’s focusing on deregulation, the climate agenda, and housing in his campaign to turn California red: https://youtu.be/pHHADjuyUBQ?si=HWhiOu47hK4srZ0wYou can read today's podcast⁠ ⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠ and today’s “Have a nice day” story ⁠here⁠.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Take the survey: What do you think of the indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center? Let us know.Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast was written by: Ari Weitzman and audio edited and mixed by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Lindsey Knuth, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. Welcome to the Tango podcast, the place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of our take. I'm your host for today. Tango's managing editor, Ari We're going to be covering the recent indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center. It's a really complicated issue with a lot of biases on either side, so it's a good fit for us. you'll probably get annoyed by at least one of the things we have to say.

Even me, I hope you agree with me, but if you don't, we'll keep it civil. Before I send it over to John to get us started, just wanted to give you a heads-up about an interview that we're releasing. Our executive editor, Isaac Saul recently sat down with Republican Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host and British politician, who is running for governor in California. Hilton knows he's an underdog, but he sat down with Isaac to share why he's focusing on deregulation, climate agenda and housing in his campaign to turn California red. You can listen to that in our show notes. And with that said, I'm going to send it over to John for today's topic. Thanks, Ari, and welcome, everybody. Here are your quick hits for today. First up, the suspect in the

shooting at Saturday's White House Correspondence Dinner was formally charged with attempting to assassinate President Donald Trump. Separately, President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump called on ABC to take action against late night host Jimmy Kimmel over a joke he made two-day, before the dinner, referring to the First Lady as having a glow like an expectant widow. Number two, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis shared a redrawn map of the state's congressional districts that aims to net Republicans four additional seats in the U.S. House. The state legislature begins a special session on Tuesday and will consider whether to take up the proposal.

Number three, four Senate Democrats sent a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegeseth about the Iranian strike on a U.S. base in Kuwait, which killed six service members at the start of the Iran war, raising questions about whether the base had adequate defenses for a potential attack. Number four, organizers in California say they have enough signatures to secure a ballot measure on an initiative to pass a one-time 5% wealth tax on state residents with net worths over $1 billion or more. If confirmed, the measure would be on the ballot in November. And number five, Mexican authorities arrested a top leader in the Halisco New Generation Cartel, one of the country's most powerful organized crime groups, the arrestee or the

Flaude was considered a potential successor to Nemiseo El Mention Oseguera, who was killed in an operation in February. Today, a few minutes ago in the Middle District of Alabama, a grand jury returned an 11-count indictment charging the Southern Poverty Law Center with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. According to the charges in the indictment, the SPLC is a non-profit entity that purports to fight white supremacy and racial hatred by reporting on extremist groups and conducting research to inform law enforcement groups with the goal of dismantling these groups. As the indictment describes, the SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred. On Tuesday, April 21st, the Justice Department announced an 11-count indictment charging the Southern Poverty Law Center with financial crimes, including wire fraud and making false statements to a federally insured bank.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said that the nonprofit organization secretly sent over $3 million to informants inside extremist. groups without telling donors what their money was being used for. The SPLC denies any wrongdoing and plans to fight the charges. For some background, the SPLC rose to prominence in the 1970s for its legal work in civil rights cases, as well as encountering extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Over time, it has expanded its work to include education programs and reports on alleged hate groups. However, many on the right have grown skeptical of its judgment in labeling some groups and beliefs as extremist, saying that it unfairly equates traditional conservative or religious views with hate. According to the indictment, between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC maintained a network of informants

who were part of groups like the KKK and the Aryan nations. These informants relayed information that was used in the Center's reports and databases. In one instance, the Center allegedly paid a member of an online group that was part of the planning of the 2017 Unite the Right event in Charlottesville, Virginia. The individual made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees. Acting Attorney General Blanche described the alleged practices as manufacturing racism to justify the SPLC's existence. The Justice Department argues that these informant payments misled donors based on statements on the SPLC's website that described its mission as seeking to dismantle extremist

groups. Separately, it says that the SPLC employees used fictitious entities to open bank accounts to pay informants without revealing the source and nature of the funds, which entailed making illegal false statements to banks. If convicted on some or all of the counts, the center could face a significant financial penalty. SPLC interim president and CEO Brian Faire rejected the charges, suggesting the Trump administration was targeting the group for political reasons. They have made no secret of who they want to protect and who they want to destroy, he said. He acknowledged the existence of the informant program, but said it was a crucial initiative to gather intelligence. on extremist groups and did not run afoul of the law.

Some legal experts have questioned the strength of the charges, noting that public statements about its mission may be too broad to prove that the SPLC deceived donors. Others suggest the bank fraud charges are more compelling, but could require a second grand jury to correct technical errors in statutes used to bring the initial case. Today, we'll share views from the right and the left on the indictment, and then managing editor Ari Weitzman will give his take. We'll be right back after this quick break. All right. First up, let's start with what the right is saying.

The right says the indictment reveals the hypocrisy of the SPLC's work. Some argue the center's credibility should be permanently tarnished. Others criticized the media's reporting on the indictment. The Washington Examiner Editorial Board wrote, The Left's Hate Fraud Factory is exposed. The motive for the SPLC's funding of hate groups is simple. without high-profile hate incidents in the news, the SPLC cannot raise the donations it needs to remain relevant. It has a deeply corrupting vested interest in continued social division and appears to have fomented it.

It is why the group has been so eager to expand its definition of hate, the board said. The SPLC now claims it was paying these violent extremist groups only to protect staff and inform the public, but it also says it stopped all such payments in 2023. That raises an obvious question. If the payments were necessary to protect staff in 2023, why are they no longer needed today? Or is the real problem that the SPLC got caught promoting the very hate it claimed to oppose and is now saying whatever it can think of to cover up its role as an agent provocateur and fraudster? The SPLC built its brand by selling fear, and now the mask is off, the board wrote.

If the indictment's allegations are true, and that would certainly be in keeping with the loathsome character that the SPLC has displayed for several decades, this was not civil rights work. It was a racket. In flame extremism, exploit the fallout, cash the checks, and smear opponents. In the New York post Maude Maren said the SPLC weaponized hate and hurt the innocent. In 2023, the Southern Poverty Law Center slapped a target on ordinary parents' backs. That's when it added moms for liberty, defending education, and 10 other parents' rights groups to its list of anti-government extremists, feeding them directly into the SPLC's widely circulated hate map, alongside Neo-9. organizations in the Ku Klux Klan.

Those designations deserve another look in light of Tuesday's bombshell Department of Justice announcement, Marin wrote. I know from experience that left-wing protesters were emboldened to harass and even physically attack the parents who were associated with the SPLC smeared groups. Its dishonest label was a powerfully effective tool to damage reputations and so discord. It's perfectly reasonable for an organization like the SPLC to pay a member's fee or to buy an event ticket to access a questionable group's online material, track its activities, or record a speaker. Directing and supervising the very racism you claim to be combating is not so easy

to excuse, Marin said. By both paying old-school racists to stir up anonymity and expanding the pool of targets they could sully as hateful, the SPLC was engaged in a two-pronged effort to keep hate alive. In National Review, Beckett Adams criticized the media's Herculean effort to obscure the details of the SPLC indictment. It is possible to hold these two seemingly opposing positions at the same time that the Justice Department's case against the Southern Poverty Law Center may be legally questionable and that the underlying charges are imminently scandalous and newsworthy, Adams wrote.

It's all deeply embarrassing for the SPLC, if not outright criminal. Yet you'd hardly know this from following mainstream media press coverage. You'd know mostly that a supposedly noble and esteemed anti-racist group is tied up somehow in Trump administration chicanery. The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted for paying sources to infiltrate hate groups A-Tactic Federal agencies have used for decades, reported USA Today. Not even close. Justice Department charges prominent civil rights group with financial crimes reported the New York Times,

experimenting with the idea of a headline that says nothing at all, Adam said. The DOJ's case against the SPLC may or may not be too thin to survive. It shouldn't prevent newsrooms from simply reporting the news, but it has been like pulling teeth trying to find the facts of this story. All right, that is it for what the right is saying, which brings us to what the left is saying. The left is skeptical of the charges, with many calling the Justice Department's case fundamentally flawed. Some say the case is designed to appease Trump's base. Others suggest the SPLC's work is needed now more than ever.

In just security, Andrew Weissman wrote about the poverty of the DOJ indictment. The charges may sound superficially plausible in a press release against an organization dissimilar to the SPLC, but nothing in the speaking indictment against the center appears to meet the legal standard required of the two sets of legal charges, Weissman said. Suppose the U.S. repeatedly paid a member of ISIS to disclose information about upcoming ISIS terrorist plans concerning American people and places. The U.S. obtains such information and uses it to thwart these attacks. Would it be correct to say that the U.S. is trying to promote ISIS and its attacks?

Of course not. But that is the precise theory of the DOJ indictment against the center. The indictment speaks about millions of defense. being used to pay informants for information and suggest a scheme a washwood donor money for almost a decade, from 2014 to 2023. But when you get to the actual wire fraud charges, the amounts dwindled to a combined total of a paltry $13,905 on a single day in

2023, Weissman wrote. No explanation has been given by Blanche, Patel, or others for the huge discrepancy between the introductory language, which is not the government of the criminal charges, and what is actually charged. On its own terms, the indictment, is frail and deficient. Time will tell if it's not worth the paper it's written on, and is serving a very different extra-legal purpose. In MS Now, Michael Edison-Hadden explored

what the DOJ's Southern Poverty Law Center indictment is really about. Imagine for a moment believing the SPLC or any other civil rights organization needed to fraudulently manufacture racism to sell it in today's America. Just two months ago, the president shared an artificial intelligence-generated video depicting his black predecessor and his predecessors' black wife, as primates Hayden said. In early 2025, the Trump administration suspended refugee admissions from majority non-white countries while investing in a special program to fast-track white South Africaners into the United States. Racism is not a rare commodity in this country to be manufactured. These charges look like a piece of political theater to shore up a wayward

magabase beleaguered by the scandal around Jeffrey Epstein and an increasingly unwieldy debacle in Iran. It's a Magibase that understands the SPLC as one of the primary villains in its propaganda stories and enjoys seeing its suffer hate en route. If the DOJ argues that paying informants furthers hate and that this makes the use of paid informants fraudulent, won't the SPLC's lawyers simply demonstrate how those efforts contributed to these groups no longer being around? If the SPLC propped up the National Alliance to defraud donors, why is it essentially defunct? In Salon, Austin Serrett argued the SPLC indictment lent support to hate groups. Conservatives have charged the organization with abandoning its mission.

In their view, the SPLC crossed a line when it labeled some right-wing organizations, including the Family Research Council, Center for Immigration Studies, and Alliance Defending Freedom, as hate or anti-government extremist groups, Sarat said. The ideologies being monitored, which include, according to Axios, views that are anti-immigrant, anti-LGBQ, sexist, racist, or bigoted against religions, make up an important part of Donald Trump's political base. Blanche's attack on the SPLC is politics masquerading as law. It is a reprisal and revenge against a group that had the temerity to oppose hate wherever it originates, Sarah, said. And don't be fooled.

If the SPLC can be brought to heal, the hate it opposes will have one less roadblock before it reaches black and brown Americans, immigrants, women, the LGBTQ community, people with disabilities and others. Today, as in the past, they need the kind of champion the SPLC has been. All right, let's head over to Ari for his take. All right, that's it for what the right and the left are saying, which brings me to my take. The indictment against the SPLC lists several different counts of wire fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy to conceal money laundering. Behind those allegations are three core claims.

First, that the organization sent roughly $3 million over a decade to members of the KKK and other extremist groups for the purpose. of informing other organizations, which included $270,000 over eight years to a person who helped organize the 2017 unite the right event, Charlottesville, Virginia. Second, that the SPLC criminally deceived donors by fundraising with the goal of, quote, dismantling violent extremist groups and quote, but instead used funds to pay high-level leaders of violent extremist groups. And then third, that the SPLC broke the law in dispersing those payments using fictitious companies with generic names like Northwest Technologies or Rare Books Warehouse to fund bank accounts, paying out

informants who at times themselves broke the law. Whether or not the SPLC did those things and whether those actions constitute fraud is for the courts to decide. But what we can't look at today are those core claims and we can draw some reasonable inferences about them, based on what we know. To begin to understand the situation, we first have to turn the clock back and understand the SPLC's history, starting in 1971.

That's when lawyers Morris Dees and Joe Levin founded the SPLC as a civil rights legal defense organization. They took on pro-bodo cases in Alabama, representing those with civil rights grievances who had difficulty paying for their own legal representation. Over time, the SPLC grew from a small legal defense nonprofit to an organization that strategically crushed the KKK and other white supremacist groups through lawsuits.

After nearly a decade of litigation, the SPLC won a consent decree in the case Brown v. Invisible Empire and Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in 1989, after about 90 years of work, requiring the Klansmen to pay damages, perform community service, and refrain from white supremacist activity. As the SPLC grew more successful, it broadened its targets, but monitoring the Klan was always a supporting part of that mission. In 1981, it started a tracking system called Klan Watch with a defined scope and direct tie-in to the non-profits mission of prosecuting civil rights cases. Then in 1998, KLKWatch was rebranded as the Intelligence Project, reflecting the organization's shift from tracking the KKK to gathering information about an array of extremist

and white supremacist organizations. And the SPLC continued to win cases. In 2000, D secured a $6.3 million judgment against the Aryan nations in Idaho after some of its members shot at and attacked a couple who'd stopped to look for a lost wallet outside its headquarters in Cordoise. Most people don't know that the SPLC's use of informants as a decades-old technique, and one used by other civil rights groups. For example, the American Jewish Committee infiltrated neo-Nazi groups to better understand how they operate and communicate with each other. But while that information might not become a knowledge to the average person, SPLC donors may have had a better idea of what was going on. In that regard,

the second of the indictment's core claims that the SPLC was defrauding its donors with a bait and switch is pretty flimsy. But the indictment's first claim that the SPLC was paying members of the KKK appears rock solid. The Justice Department gathered specific co-names of informants, identified the accounts used to pay them, and even found details of the transactions themselves. The SPLC isn't even denying that they did this. The third claim, and the one that transitions these facts into criminal allegations of fraud, appears to have some legs stand up. The SPLC seems to have lied to banks in creating these accounts.

The obfuscated payments could have broken tax law, and one of the informants the SPLC funded allegedly stole 25 boxes of documents, albeit from a neo-Nazi group called National Alliance. the legality of all of that will be worked out by courts over time. But right now, in the court of public opinion, we can discuss two larger questions today. First, did the SPLC funnel money to the extremist groups? And second, is the DOJ right to bring this case? On the first question, the answer seems to be an uncomfortable sort of. Paying informants is very far from funding the KKK itself. But if the facts of the indictment are correct,

then the SPLC materially supported an informant while that informant was helping to organize the 2017 Charlottesville rally. The person was killed at that event. It drove a wedge into the country that we're still recovering from. If the SPLC had any role in supporting people who plan that event, no matter what their intention was, it would be a serious betrayal of their core mission. To answer the question of whether the DOJ is right to bring this case,

let's dive into some of the more recent history to explore the different biases of play. In 2007, the SPLC founded its blog, Hate Watch, which in 2015 described itself as a blog that, quote, monitors and exposes the activities of the American radical right, end quote. The new branding reflected an increase in the scope of the SPLC's purview, which broadened to include prisoners rights, immigrant worker protections, and LGBTQ rights. In support of this mission, the SPLC began identifying, political activist organizations that supported anti-gay agendas that led them to designate the Alliance Defending Freedom or ADF as an anti-LGBT hate group in 2016, and now infamously to put

Turning Point USA or TPSA on its hate map in May of 2025, four months before Charlie Kirk's assassination. Over time, the SPLC shifted its focus from defending the civil rights of poor Alabamians to pushing back against a broader definition of right-wing extremism. That change can actually be traced as far back as 1986 when the entire legal staff of the SPLC resigned over the organization's shift in focus to a broader political fight. At the same time that the SPLC altered its internal focus, it continued to exaggerate the threat of the KKK in order to raise money externally. The Montgomery advertiser was named a Pulitzer finalist for documenting that shift in 1995, along with revealing reports of the SPLC discriminating against black employees.

And then, in a stunning twist, SPLC's co-founder Morris Dees was fired in 2019 amid sex and race discrimination complaints. On one hand, the organization's evolution is understandable. The SPLC understands its mission as protecting civil rights, and it has a history of directly confronting groups who infringe on those civil rights. As such, it makes sense that it would be. see LGBTQ legal protections as within its purview and groups that question the extent of those legal rights as its new enemies. However, that stance has taken the SPLC to a new modus operandi that is almost unrecognizable from its original mission. No longer a legal tool for fighting

extremist hate groups, the SPLC now puts itself into political fights by promoting its hate map and applying the hate label to conservative groups like TPUSA and the APA and the To put my cards on the table, I'm generally more on the side of the things the SPLC argues for. More often than not, I'm on the other side of the things TPPSA and the ADF push for. Personally, I want less religion in public spaces, and I'm staunchly in favor of protecting LGBTQ rights. But it just goes too far to lump TPSA and the ADF into the same category as the KKK and neo-Nazis, and almost obviously does. When the SPLC decided to label them as hate groups,

they opened themselves off to counterattacks. And it should be clear to everyone that this indictment is at least in part a counterattack. And that the recent history the SPLC has had with conservative groups has put it on the Trump administration's radar. As we've written about before, any auspices of DOJ independence under President Trump are long gone. And so far in the second term, the department has shown a willing eagerness to go after political enemies.

The SPLC is a clear candidate. For that reason, the indictment against it makes me more than a little uncomfortable. Still, this indictment is a lot more substantial than other straightforward political hits, like the James Comey indictment and the Jerome Powell investigation. And the overall contours of the case against the SPLC look incredibly dark. An organization with a history of paying informants, of internal tensions, over its direction and using questionable practices to drum up support for its causes is accused of sending millions to members of the very organization it became popular fighting against. With the potential for wire fraud, that all seems to be enough to me

to justify a prosecution by an independent DOJ. But that's not the DOJ we have. And that's frustrating. The SPLC is responsible for some bedrock civil rights litigations and a high-profile lawsuit that targets what for them is ultimately a pretty small amount of money could provide the perfect course correction for an organization that needs it. Instead, the SPLC can dismiss the entire case as a political witch on and preserve its reputation. The sane world would invite some accountability. Instead, I expect they'll be using the DOJ indictment as a fundraising tool tomorrow.

We'll be right back after this quick break. And that brings us to your question's answer. Today's question comes from Tony in San Diego, California. Tony asks, who writes Trump's speeches? The president has a large speech writing and communications team, but will focus on a few individuals who have been the architects of many of Trump's highest profile speeches. Ross Worthington is Trump's top speechwriter, serving as the White House director of speech writing.

He became a speechwriter for Trump in 2016, working with Stephen Miller and others to reshape the president's message. Worthington also helped draft Trump's speech on January 6, 2021, and was subsequently subpoenaed by the House Committee appointed to investigate the January 6th Capitol riots. Worthington would later rejoin Trump's team in the lead-up to the 2024 election, assisting not only with speeches, but policy platform development and debate preparation. Trump has also had several former speechwriters who still play a role in crafting the administration's message.

Vince Haley, who is now the director of the Domestic Policy Council, previously co-led the speech writing department with Worthington towards the end of Trump's first term, During the 2024 campaign, Haley worked as Trump's director of policy and speechwriting. While he's no longer officially a speechwriter, Haley is known to have a strong grasp of policy, and the president notably relied on him for sections of the 26th State of the Union. When Worthington and Haley co-led the speech writing team in Trump's first term, the entire team fell under the supervision of Stephen Miller. In the second Trump administration, Miller seems to play a less active role in speech writing,

but he still advises on major speeches such as the State of the Union address. Finally, Trump's most prolific speechwriter is probably itself. If you've watched Trump's speeches, you will know that he's a tendency to stray off script or weave, as he likes to call it, in any list of individuals who write Trump's speeches, would definitely be incomplete without including the president. All right, send it back over to John for the rest of the pot. Thanks, Ari. And last but not least, R have a nice day story. In July 2022, the 9-88 suicide prevention,

hotline rolled out nationwide. Since then, suicide rates among people ages 15 to 34 have dropped 11% below historical projections, preventing an estimated 4,372 deaths. A Harvard Medical School Study in J-A found the effect strongest in states with the highest volume of hotline usage. The hotline, which replaced a 10-digit number, has fielded over 25 million contacts since launch, and it comes with $1.5 billion in Crisis Center funding. The implication of this, that is that sustained funding for this program matters, Dr. Vishal Patel, an author on the Harvard study said. The New York Times has this story, and there's a link in today's episode description. All right, everybody, that is it for today's episode. As always, if you'd like to support our work,

please go to retangle.com, where you can sign up for a newsletter membership, podcast membership, or a bundled membership that gets you a discount on both. We'll be right back here tomorrow. For Isaac and the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a great day, y'all. Peace. Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Wall. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will Kayback and associate editors Audrey Moorhead, Lindsay Canuth, and Bailey Saul.

Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website at retangle.com.