JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
A leading civil rights organization is facing criminal charges for the way it infiltrated right-wing extremist groups. A federal indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center accuses it of fraudulently using donations to pay secret informants. NPR's Debbie Elliott joins us now. Hi there.
DEBBIE ELLIOTT, BYLINE: Hi, Juana.
SUMMERS: Debbie, tell us, what's in this indictment?
ELLIOTT: Well, it was handed down by a federal grand jury in Alabama, where the Southern Poverty Law Center is based. And it includes charges of wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The accusation is that the center, known as the SPLC, misled donors, advertising that it was fighting hate groups but then using the money to secretly pay some $3 million to people affiliated with groups including the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nation. Here's what acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche had to say in announcing the charges.
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TODD BLANCHE: The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.
SUMMERS: What does the Southern Poverty Law Center have to say?
ELLIOTT: You know, it declined NPR's request for an interview. But in a written statement, interim CEO Bryan Fair calls the allegations false. And he says they will, quote, "vigorously defend ourselves, our staff and our work" at a time when, he says, the federal government has been weaponized to dismantle civil rights.
SUMMERS: Debbie, I know that you have been following the work of the Southern Poverty Law Center for decades. Remind us - tell us more about what they do and how it has become controversial.
ELLIOTT: Yeah. It was founded in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1971 as a legal nonprofit pursuing mostly civil rights cases. And it had notable early success using civil lawsuits to secure multimillion-dollar judgments against hate groups, basically crippling them. The legal profile then, over the years, grew to include issues like same sex-marriage, immigrant rights, voting rights and the treatment of prisoners. Then a huge part of its mission has also been to track and document hate groups through its intelligence report and other publications. You know, that, Juana, has become somewhat controversial in recent years as that list has expanded.
SUMMERS: And that, to my eye, appears to be what the Justice Department has really zeroed in on in this investigation.
ELLIOTT: Right. Some conservatives argue that SPLC exaggerates the extremist threat in order to raise money and that some Christian advocacy organizations are unfairly mislabeled as hate groups because their positions on issues like gay rights and transgender care are the opposite of what the center's are. I talked with attorney Horatio Mihet, who is with one of those groups, Liberty Counsel.
HORATIO MIHET: The Southern Poverty Law Center has made hundreds of millions of dollars by falsely labeling ideological opponents as hate groups. And so all of a sudden now, these groups find themselves denigrated and maligned and put in the same category as the Klan, as the neo-Nazis.
ELLIOTT: And he says that's led to those organizations being threatened with violence.
SUMMERS: Debbie, you mentioned earlier that this indictment, it centers on the Southern Poverty Law Center's use of paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups. What can you tell us about that?
ELLIOTT: The center says the program, which is no longer in operation, was necessary when it started in, quote, "the shadows of the Civil Rights Movement," doing risky work. So it secretly paid informants and frequently shared the intelligence with law enforcement, including the FBI. Joyce Vance, who was a U.S. attorney in Alabama during the Obama administration, says the center provided valuable insight.
JOYCE VANCE: What they were doing using paid informants had nothing to do with stoking the work of these terrorist groups and everything to do with exposing it. Look, the kind of people that are attracted to those sorts of groups are not choir boys. They're not people who suddenly have a conversion and come in to tell what they know.
ELLIOTT: Vance says, in the same way that her office and other law enforcement agencies do, the center enticed informants with pay to gather information.
SUMMERS: And just quickly, Debbie, what's been the reaction from other civil rights groups?
ELLIOTT: You know, generally, condemnation. As one organization, Race Forward, put it, the investigation and charges sent shockwaves through the civil rights community. And groups vow not to be deterred.
SUMMERS: NPR's Debbie Elliott, thanks.
ELLIOTT: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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