Southern Poverty Law Center interim CEO and President Bryan Fair will be brought before the House to answer for the group’s alleged actions.
The House Judiciary Committee will be grilling Fair on Tuesday after the group was hit with an 11-count indictment regarding alleged financial crimes, including “defrauding its donors by concealing payments to members of extremist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, United Klans of America, the Aryan Nation and other neo-Nazi groups,” Fox News reported.
Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, spoke to the outlet on Monday.
“There are a lot of legitimate questions about what the SPLC was doing with donor money and how they were using it to basically fund the type of hate that they were pretending to be going after,” he said.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, believes that it is worth investigating the ties between the SLPC and the former Biden administrations’ Department of Justice.
“For me, the biggest takeaway is the fact that the Biden White House and the Biden Justice Department helped make the Southern Poverty Law Center the standard,” the lawmaker said to Sean Hannity last week.
Indeed, Republicans have long criticized the relationship between the SLPC, which targeted conservative groups and causes with a “hate map,” and the Biden administration which was supposed to represent all Americans, not just leftists.
“The purpose of doing that was to basically stifle their ability to get the conservative message out,” Gill accused.
But rather than tackling hate, SLPC is accused of funding it. As BizPac Review previously reported, the group is accused of paying “at least $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to eight individuals, including people linked to the Ku Klux Klan and U.S.-based Nazi groups.”
From the article:
“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,” Blanche said at a news conference Tuesday.
SPLC CEO Bryan Fair said investigators appear to be examining the SPLC’s prior use of confidential informants to gather intelligence on violent extremist groups, according to the Associated Press. Fair said the organization deployed informants to monitor credible threats and, in some cases, shared that information with local and federal law enforcement. Fair defended the program, saying the SPLC operated in an era marked by violent attacks and systemic failures to protect civil rights activists.
“When we began working with informants, we were living in the shadow of the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators, and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system,” Fair said. “There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives.”
It remains to be seen if this version of events, that SLPC was using informants to assess threat levels within these groups, will satisfy the House Judiciary Committee.
