As the Southern Poverty Law Center prepares for its arraignment, a growing chorus of legal and civil rights advocates is condemning the federal case against the nonprofit as retaliatory and politically driven.
“We’ve never seen a case like this under a Democratic or a Republican administration in our history,” Norm Eisen said at the start of a press call on Wednesday about the recently opened case against the Southern Poverty Law Center. “It is the latest in a series of unfounded, retaliatory, weaponized prosecutions by Donald Trump’s Department of Justice and FBI that brings shame upon those storied institutions.”
Co-founder of the advocacy organization Democracy Defenders Fund, Eisen described the indictment as “ill-conceived, misbegotten, and outrageous.”
The SPLC was indicted by a grand jury in late April on 6 counts of wire fraud, four counts of making false statements to a federally insured bank, and one count of conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.
The indictment largely revolves around claims that the SPLC’s use of paid informants, and alleged attempts to disguise payments to said informants, constituted defrauding the organization’s donors.
Various other advocacy groups quickly issued condemnations of the perceived targeting of a long-standing civil rights organization once the indictment was filed. Alabama Congresswoman Terri Sewell, one of two Democrats in Alabama’s Congressional delegation, declared she stood with the organization during a voting rights “shadow hearing” in April.
In court, the SPLC has criticized representatives of the Department of Justice for making allegedly false statements to the effect that the SPLC was not sharing the knowledge it received through use of paid informants with federal law enforcement.
During an April 26 interview on Fox News, the acting Attorney General who made the comments at issue walked back his position and said “it is true that over the years [the SPLC] have selectively shared information with law enforcement.”
Joyce Vance, who served as the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama during the Obama presidency and is now a professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, said a lot of donors to the SPLC were likely aware of the nonprofit’s use of informants.
“It’s very telling to me that DOJ launches this attack in Montgomery, Alabama,” Vance continued. “This is not an attack against the Legal Defense Fund or the ACLU in D.C., San Francisco, New York City. This is taking it to Montgomery, Alabama.”
Vanita Gupta, who served as U.S. Associate Attorney General during the Biden administration, also lambasted the indictment during the Wednesday press call. She called it “not a legitimate prosecution.”
Instead, “it’s the latest escalation in the administration’s coordinated campaign to weaponize federal law enforcement against civil society organizations that are right now at the heart of defending the rule of law, protecting vulnerable communities fighting for civil rights and disagreeing with the president,” she argued.
The Trump administration Department of Justice has issued several indictments in recent weeks and months that critics view as indicative of the politicization of the agency. Most recently, former director of the FBI James Comey was indicted for posting a pictures of sea shells spelling out “86 47.”
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, in a recent interview with CBS News, stated that accusations the Department is simply carrying out Trump’s political vendettas are “simply false.”
“I think that the broader non-profit ecosystem has been anticipating these types of attacks many months, and so we don’t know where this will go,” Gupta said in response to a question from APR about what the recent indictment might augur. “There also appears to be a coordinated effort by the Justice Department, some members of Congress, and state AGs on issuing threats or opening investigations on non-profit organizations that are doing a range of different work, really centering around defending the rule of law, taking the administration to court.”
“Frankly, most of these organizations are ones that have been doing this in Republican and Democratic administrations—that were challenging the administrations I worked in during the Obama and Biden administrations, as well as in Republican administrations,” she noted.
The arraignment hearing in the case will be held on May 7 at 1 p.m.
