SPLC Paid Klan Members Not to Leave the Movement When They Got Cold Feet: Indictment
4th June 2026
The Southern Poverty Law Center allegedly paid at least three people who wanted to leave the white supremacist movement not to do so, according to the Justice Department’s superseding indictment handed down Tuesday.
A federal grand jury in April had indicted the SPLC on charges of wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to conceal money laundering. The SPLC has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
While the organization “purports to fight white supremacy and racial hatred,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a press conference that “the SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose.”
The charges revolve around the SPLC’s program paying “field sources” inside white supremacist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups. The organization has maintained that it paid these informants in order to alert law enforcement to extremist violence before it happened, and some of the informants’ information did lead to prosecutions.
However, the indictment claims some of the SPLC money actually went to prop up the organizations—and the superseding indictment reveals more details of the allegations.