The Justice Department Sides With the Ku Klux Klan |
The Justice Department Sides With the Ku Klux Klan
The administration’s vindictive targeting of the Southern Poverty Law Center is yet another mask-off moment.
The United States did not always have a Department of Justice. President Ulysses S. Grant founded it in 1870 to help suppress the Ku Klux Klan in the Southern states and enforce federal civil-rights protections for formerly enslaved Americans. On Tuesday, Justice Department officials announced what may be the first Klan-friendly prosecution in the department’s history.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC, is one of the most influential civil-rights groups in the nation. Founded in 1971, it has spent the last five decades monitoring, documenting, and exposing hate groups and violent extremists. The group rose to national fame in the 1980s by financially breaking the modern Klan through strategic lawsuits on behalf of their victims. The SPLC’s most persistent targets have been white-nationalist groups like the Klan and various neo-Nazi gangs, but its work has expanded over the years as well. (More on that later.)
Trump Justice Department officials struck a much different note about the SPLC’s work when announcing the indictment. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed on Tuesday that the SPLC was “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”
“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” Blanche later said in a press release. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked. This Department of Justice will hold the SPLC and every other fraudulent organization operating with the same deceptive playbook accountable. No entity is above the law.”
Those are serious accusations even without the claims of criminal misconduct. The SPLC is one of the nation’s best-known anti-racism groups, and accusing it of “manufacturing racism to justify its existence” is akin to claiming that anti-abortion groups are secretly funding abortion clinics or that the Sierra Club was buying oil and gas leases in Texas. Blaming white-nationalist violence on the groups that oppose them may have been the entire point.
Tuesday’s indictment lists eleven counts against the organization. The first six counts involve allegations of wire fraud. To prove wire fraud, prosecutors need to describe some sort of scheme to obtain money under false pretenses. Another count, conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering, also hinges on the premise that the SPLC was trying to conceal details about “fraudulently obtained donated money.”
According to the indictment, the SPLC “explicitly sought donations under the auspices that donor money would be used to help ‘dismantle’ violent extremist groups.” Instead, the indictment claimed, SPLC donors “were not told that some of the donated funds were to be used by the SPLC to pay high-level leaders of violent........