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The SPLC has been federally indicted on six counts of wire fraud, four counts of false statements to a federally insured bank, and one count of conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. And the charges were filed in the Middle District of Alabama. 14-page indictment PDF here.
In brief, the indictment alleges that the SPLC raised money under false pretenses by claiming to fight right-wing extremism, instead funding extremist informants with roughly $3 million dollars of donor money. The informants included members of the KKK and an organizer of the infamous Charlottesville unite the right fiasco. They allegedly did this using illegal means, creating fictitious cutouts and lying to banks to open phony bank accounts to obscure the flow of funds from the SPLC to their informants.
I can't help but feel some schadenfreude here - "no one is above the law" also applies to left-wing NGOs who think they can larp as spies. They even named one of their cutouts Center Investigative Agency... It seems like they flew very close to the sun thinking that their brand and political affiliation would shield them from scrutiny. Project Veritas got a lot more heat for doing a lot less.
From a layman's perspective the indictment seems pretty compelling but I'd be curious to hear what the legal commentators here think. Of course this is only one side of the argument, but those statements to the bank in particular seem quite incriminating. Also, what exactly would be the consequences for the SPLC if the DOJ succeeds on some or all counts?
This is pretty thin gruel. Nonprofits have broad discretion to use unrestricted funds any way they see fit to support their mission. Cases of nonprofit fraud usually fall into five general categories:
Entirely fraudulent nonprofits: These are grifts from the beginning where the founders never intended to spend any of the money they raised on the ostensible purpose and only lined their pockets. This is the most obvious fraud.
Embezzlement: Where an employee or director of a legitimate nonprofit misappropriates funds to line his pocket. Again, an obvious fraud, though it's limited to one person (or a few people) and isn't representative of the organization as a whole.
Questionable nonprofits: This is a term I made up to refer to organizations whose administrative expenses are grossly disproportionate to program expenses. E.g., a food pantry in a large city that raised $45 million one year but only distributed $149,000 worth of food. These are usually the biggest media scandals because they often involve large organizations that do a lot of advertising and fundraising, reflected in financial statements that suggest they spend money on little else than advertising and fundraising.
Improper use of restricted funds: This is often benign in a PR sense but serious in a legal sense. If someone donates money for a specific project, it can't be used for another project or to cover general expenses. If the food bank in the above example solicited donations for a building fund that would pay for planned renovations to their facility, and when food stamps were in jeopardy last fall they raided the fund to buy food for the needy, one could argue that it wasn't that big of a deal, maybe even the right thing to do. But it isn't permitted.
Other improper use of funds: Again, this usually involves some personal benefit to the organization's employees or directors, like directing program services towards them or distributing profits. It also includes other miscellaneous non-nos like spending money on political campaigns or endorsements and improperly paying volunteers in ways that subject you to labor laws that you aren't following.
The first thing I would note for any of these is that none of them is particularly likely to result in a Federal fraud indictment. regulation of nonprofits is done at the state level, usually by the AG. Federal involvement is limited to the IRS for tax status and the FTC if they are large organizations that do a lot of advertising. What SPLC is accused of doing, though, doesn't fit into any of these categories, and there's no clear violation of nonprofit law. What the indictment accuses them of is fraudulently soliciting donations by using the funds in a manner that is inconsistent with the mission statement as it appears on their website. If what they are accused of doing is a matter for Federal criminal charges, then practically every nonprofit in the country should be charged, mostly for stuff that is entirely unobjectionable.
Consider the following fictional example: The Allegheny Trails Alliance is a nonprofit whose advertised mission is to support trail maintenance and construction on public lands in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. They donate $10,000 in unrestricted funds to support a trail construction project in Garret State Forest in Western Maryland, which is outside of their technical operating area but is frequented by the same people who frequent trails in PA and WV. Is this wire fraud? What if they pay a contractor to perform invasive species removal at a state park where they have a maintenance contract? Is this wire fraud because it isn't directly related to trail construction or maintenance?
The answer is no, because advertising gets a lot of leeway when it comes to promises like this. Practically every product you buy contains some kind of statement that would constitute fraud if we held the manufacturers to their exact word. The biggest risk to a nonprofit spending program funds like this is from donors, who might not donate again if they don't like the projects. From a legal perspective, what matters is the mission statement that appears in official filings, and even then, most nonprofits write these as widely as possible, state AGs will only pursue the most egregious violations, and the penalties are civil, not criminal. But in SPLC's case, it's not even clear that what they did violated their ostensible mission. I don't think Todd Blanche or anyone else in the administration is going to argue that SPLC gave money to hate groups because they really like white supremacy. It's pretty uncontroversial that they were using the money to pay informants, and that they notified the authorities if any illegal activity was discovered. It may be a shady practice, but it's not directly contrary to their mission, and when you add that to the fact that the government is relying on an advertising statement on a website as an inducement for fraud, it's hard to see how this stands up.
The bank fraud allegations seem more serious, but upon closer inspection, they aren't. What they basically did is have an employee open up various accounts in the name of fictitious sole proprietorships. The SPLC then put money into these accounts, which were used to funnel money to organizations they targeted. The purpose of the fictitious businesses was to disguise the origin of the money from the organizations. If we look at the text of the statute they are indicted under:
I omitted a lot of surplussage there. In fact, I admitted so much surplussage that I wouldn't be surprised if the attorney presenting this to the grand jury read the part up to the ellipses and skipped to the end, because, and I never thought I'd say this, the indictment doesn't allege facts that make a prima fascia case! I don't see anything in that statute about opening a bank account. If you read the entire section, including the short title, it's clear that it is referring to loan applications. There are no allegations in the indictment that the SPLC ever applied for a loan. There might be some FinCen reporting requirements or something that they violated, but cursory searching has failed to uncover anything that would have been in force when the accounts were opened in 2008, which incidentally creates a statute of limitations problem as well.
The money laundering charges are subordinate to the fraud charges, and are thus bogus. I predict this goes nowhere.
Patio11 has a pretty in-depth writeup. I don't particularly trust him, in no small part because becoming a domain expert in this field requires you to compromise your objectivity... but he is a domain expert.
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I am sure that if we give the administration long enough, they will eventually open a criminal prosecution against a political opponent which is based on rock solid evidence, but I am less sure that it will happen in this century. Getting someone indicted is easy, but Trump's feds getting someone indicted is not evidence of anything besides the fact that he does not like the defendant, which is hardly news. Basically, if Trump manages to get a jury to convict the SPLC for fraud, that would be new information to integrate into my world view, but so far this seems unlikely.
Not that I am a fan of the SPLC or anything. I have not studied their work or designations in detail, but on priors I would assume that a left-leaning organization which designates hate groups will obviously get taken over by SJ and lose any epistemic standard it might have had. Like, if they designated ACX as a hate group for HBD that would also only mildly surprise me.
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I largely agree with your argument regarding the wire fraud charges, it seems like quite an uphill battle.
After doing a bit of googling I found some model jury instructions for the bank fraud charges though, and there does not appear to be any requirement for it to be a loan. The criteria are simply:
1 and 2 are met, and 3 is met because opening a bank account is an action, and the false statement was intended to mislead the bank into opening an account it otherwise would not have opened.
Maybe this is interpreted differently in Alabama, but those Ninth Circuit jury instructions make it seem like a slam dunk.
Yeah, I independently reached the same (tentative) conclusion. Also, it does appear that people have been prosecuted under 18 USC 1014 for setting up bank accounts under false names. I have asked @Rov_Scam if he can cite any precedents to support his claim that 18 USC 1014 applies only when there is some kind of loan or credit application. I guess we'll see if he comes up with anything.
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Those are old jury instructions that don't reflect the 2025 Supreme Court decision in Thompson v. United States, which held that the statements involved must be false and not simply misleading.
I don't think the falsity is hard to prove here. Opening a bank account for an entity that does not exist must involve making a false statement somewhere, especially given the giant stack of forms banks make you sign to do anything.
Yes, true. I was incorrectly thinking of any misleading statements to donors; false statements to the banks themselves would be much more straightforward.
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I don't practice federal defense or prosecution, so I'm not qualified to get into the weeds. I will note, though, even with a Supreme Court that seems rather hostile towards the notion of wire fraud prosecutions against elected officials, they upheld a wire fraud conviction against a contractor who actually provided the agreed-upon services but wasn't a minority-owned business as they claimed. If that can support a federal wire fraud conviction, then I don't think it's that big of a stretch that SPLC's promises and behavior here could suffice.
Kousisis v. United States, 145 S. Ct. 1382 (2025)
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The law is a funny and stupid thing, because that sure sounds like some form of fraud to a layman.
Unless you're in New York?
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I see your point, but I think a better analogy would be if they paid a contractor to organize a "Let's Trash the Trails" event and then cited that event to potential donors as a reason why they should donate. At a certain point, the use of the money is so different from the organization's stated goals that a decent argument can be made that the donors were defrauded. For purposes of criminal prosecution, organizations should get a good amount of leeway on this issue, but depending on how the facts shake out, it looks like SPLC may have crossed the line.
That seems like money laundering to me. I mean, they are setting up phony bank accounts in order to conceal the source of money. If Donald Trump had pulled something like that in order to discretely pay a few sugar babies, he surely would have been prosecuted.
I would guess it's pretty unusual for not-for-profits to help fund and organize activities which they nominally oppose.
An even better example would be if investigators discovered several invoices to contractors for "trail obliteration" totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. Trail obliteration is the process of disbanding and renaturalizing eroded, worn out trails to limit additional damage and provide a better user experience through reroutes. At minimum, this can be done by volunteers in an afternoon by disguising the entrance of the old trail with brush for the first 50 yards or so. At maximum, this can involve going in with heavy equipment to regrade the entire corridor, followed by covering the disturbed area with brush and new plantings. It's a necessary management practice where appropriate, but it's always a hard sell to donors, land managers, and even within the organization, because when you have to fight tooth and nail to get every mile of trail built no one wants to hear how much money you plan on spending to get rid of mileage. But identifying old, unsustainable trails and getting rid of them is a best practice, and this type of work is related to the core mission of any trail development organization, regardless of how contradictory or unpopular it may be. It is not, however, evidence that the organization hates trails and is trying to get rid of them.
Do you seriously believe that the reason the SPLC gave these groups money is because their directors are actually white supremacists who are trying to fleece their liberal donors? Because that's what would be required for their donations to constitute the kind of fraud that you're alleging. It seems more likely to me that, whatever their exact thought process, it was part of a scheme that they thought would benefit their mission. It may have been a dumb, misguided scheme that was unlikely to work and that would have pissed off their donors had they known about it, but wire fraud isn't about making misleading statements over the internet that some people don't like. It's a crime with specific elements that must be satisfied, and there's no evidence that they were satisfied in this case.
Whether or not it seems like money laundering to you is irrelevant. Let's look at the statute:
I've omitted a lot of irrelevant surplussage, but the upshot is that you can't launder legally earned money. It isn't a crime to play secret Santa. If there's no fraud, then there's no laundering.
Are we assuming that the organization boasts on its website about how it opposes "trail obliteration"?
Totally disagree. Another possibility -- consistent with this kind of fraud -- is that in reality, the SPLC values fund-raising (and its continued existence) far more than its nominal mission. Something which, to put it mildly, is not unheard of among not-for-profits.
I agree that there is a difference between common parlance and what's contained in federal statutes. And that for purposes of actually prosecuting someone, one needs to go by the actual words in the statute. And it looks like the feds did just that, using 18 USC 1014.
So really the question is whether 18 USC 1014 applies. Here's the argument you made:
Looking at pattern jury instructions for 18 USC 1014, it does NOT appear that an element of the crime is that a false statement be made in connection with a loan or credit application. And there have in fact been prosecutions under 18 USC 1014 against people for opening bank accounts under false names. For example United States v. Glanton, 707 F.2d 1238 (11th Cir. 1983).
Do you have any authority to support your claim that 18 USC 1014 applies only to situations where the defendant is applying for a loan, for credit, etc.?
If there's case law suggesting that it applies to opening a checking account, I'll concede the point. But that doesn't mean there's criminal liability in this case, because we still have to meet the elements of the crime. As @odd_primes points out, there are three elements:
I get why 1 and 2 would seem self-evident, but it isn't clear to me whether either of these prongs have been met. The alleged false statements were contained in documents called "Sole Proprietorship Resolution of Authority", which stated, for each of the at-issue accounts:
The evidence that they present of these statements being false is that, following an investigation by the bank, the accounts were closed and the SPLC had a discussion with the bank memorialized in a letter stating that the accounts were opened for the benefit of SPLC operations and under their authority. The confusion here arises from the difference between legal ownership and beneficial ownership. To cite an example that explains the difference, we'll go with one I'm familiar with, the lawyer trust account.
Suppose a client hires my law firm to handle a commercial real estate transaction worth several million dollars. They give me a check for 5 million dollars so that when the closing date arrives, I will have the cash on hand and be able to pay the seller. In the meantime, though, there will be due diligence and continuing negotiations, and the actual closing date may be several months from when the client gives me the money. I can't just deposit the check in my firm's operating account, because it's not mine to spend, and comingling client funds with my own would get me in trouble. Since the money is likely to generate a non-negligible amount of interest during the time the transaction is pending, I have to open up a client trust account with a bank so that the client doesn't lose anything because of the delay. I am legally responsible for this money and I'm legally the only one with the authority to spend it. But the only way I can spend it is by paying the seller of the property, and if the deal falls through I have to return it, along with any interest it accrued. I am the legal owner, and the client is the beneficial owner.
This distinction comes up a lot in the context of contemporary FinCen and KYC regulations because criminal enterprises will often try to hide behind webs of LLCs. The LLC is the legal owner of the money, but since the LLC has an owner, that owner is the beneficial owner. So If I start a single-member LLC it's easy because I'm the beneficial owner. It gets more complicated when the LLC in question is owned by other LLCs, which are in turn owned by other LLCs, and it takes a day on the Secretary of State's website and lots of money spent ordering incorporation documents that are on microfilm in order to figure out who the physical person is behind everything. The implication that the prosecution appears to be making here is that since the accounts were being used for SPLC purposed, the SPLC was actually the beneficial owner of the accounts, and the statements that the employee was the sole owner of the accounts were therefore false.
There's one problem with this theory, though—sole proprietorships do not have beneficial owners. All a sole proprietorship is is a business name that an individual uses. There is no separate corporate structure apart from the individual. The way counties record them is instructive, either as "fictitious names" or "doing business as". e.g. Robert T. Beck dba Beck Paving Company. The idea of a sole proprietorship having a separate beneficial owner is similar to the idea of an individual having a separate beneficial owner. For that reason, all the various regulation that's been put in place over the years regarding disclosure of beneficial owners doesn't apply to sole proprietorships. The point of the Resolution of Authority is to certify to the bank that you are the person legally authorized to open the account, and to appoint agents who will have access the account. A beneficial owner does not have this authority; if I open a client trust account the client doesn't have any authority to access the account or to designate agents. The same is true for an LLC. If there is a web of legitimate LLCs, and the one I'm in charge of running is owned by another LLC with a different board and different management four layers above, those owners/managers can't open bank accounts in their capacity as beneficial owners. If you look at Resolutions of Authority for LLCs, they don't ask about beneficial ownership at all; in fact, they don't ask about ownership at all. All they ask is for the person opening the account to affirm that they have been authorized to open the account and to provide paperwork to that effect.
Assuming that the person who opened the accounts was indeed the legal owner of the sole proprietorships, and the indictment doesn't suggest that he wasn't, you have imply that the language in the Resolution of Ownership implied that it was also refering to some type of beneficial ownership, which wouldn't make any sense. Now, one could make the argument that due to some kind of collateral agreement between the legal proprietor and the SPLC that some sort of beneficial ownership did exist. I can't find any law suggesting that such an arrangement is possible; maybe you can. But even then, in order to prove that the statement was a lie, you'd have to prove that the bank contemplated such an interpretation at the time, and it's highly unlikely that the government has such proof, since the nature of the paperwork they are using as evidence isn't used to determine beneficial ownership even when a beneficial owner who would not appear on that paperwork could theoretically exist. And that still doesn't get you all the way there, because that only gets us to the second prong, that the person opening the account interpreted it this way as well, and thus knew they were making a false statement. If someone asks you if you own a company without any qualification, and you are the only legal owner, and you say yes, you can't say they knew they were lying because some obscure interpretation that you weren't made explicitly aware of exists which would make the statement untrue.
And we haven't even gotten to the third prong yet, and it's likely to fail here as well, that the false statement was made to mislead the bank. It's unclear why the person opening the account would have a motive to mislead the bank. In the case you cited, it was clear that the guy was trying to mislead the bank because he was using the accounts to deposit checks made out to somebody else. The indictment alleges that the accounts in the present case were used to mislead third parties as to the source of the funds, but that isn't an element of the offense. The SPLC had its own account with the same bank, and there's nothing in the indictment to suggest that the bank would have refused to open the accounts had they known that the SPLC was behind them, or that the employee who opened them was deliberately trying to conceal their purpose. This is the weakest argument, since one could argue that any false statement was made to mislead the person to whom it was made, but it would take a miracle to even get this far, and such an implication is just as weak for the prosecution.
No, but if you want to split that particular hair then it works both ways. Where on the SPLC website did it say they wouldn't give money to a particular group? That's beside my point though, which is that the language is simply too vague to prove fraud. Look at a typical fraud case: I tell you that if you invest your money with my firm I'll put it in the stock market, and you chose a few funds to invest in. In the meantime, I use your money to make loans to my son's unsuccessful woodworking business, and I produce fraudulent statements showing the amount of money you would have had if I had invested the way I told you I was going to. In other words, there was a clear promise that I would do something, made to you in particular, you relied on that promise, and you can imply from the circumstances that I never intended to invest your money the way I promised. That's a very different circumstance than a general statement made on a website that you can't prove that any individual donor actually saw, let alone relied upon. In the nonprofit environment, misusing restricted funds comes looks a lot more like traditional fraud than using general funds that may be at odds with what is said on a website, in that you made a specific promise to a specific donor to use funds a certain way, and then used them for something else. And even in those cases, the result isn't a fraud prosecution, but a civil suit from the state AG to recover the money, and possibly loss of tax status.
Look, I don't have much love for the SPLC, would never consider giving them money, and I understand your arguments. But I'm not willing to squint hard enough to believe that this indictment is any more than an attempt to spin straw into gold.
Ok, it seems like you are abandoning your position that the law in question applies only in situations where there is a loan or credit application of some sort.
Which is fine, but it seems you've shifted the goalposts -- creating an entirely new argument for why the indictment falls flat. It looks to me like you are arguing backwards here. In other words, it looks as though you've started from the conclusion that the charges are meritless and then searched for arguments for why this is so.
In any event, your new argument seems even weaker than your original argument.
Ok, and the following seems pretty clear to me:
If you were practicing law as a sole proprietor, and you opened up this kind of account, the name on the account would be "Rov_Scam, Esq. f/b/o John Q. Client" (And in fact, most banks in this situation would ask for a W9 form from John Q. Client so that interest income could be properly reported to the IRS.)
If you opened up the account as "Rov_Scam, Esq." i.e. omitting the Client's interest in the account; and you did so in order to conceal the Client's interest in the money; then at a minimum you would get in trouble with the attorney disciplinary committee.
Of course, in that situation you would certainly have an argument that 18 USC 1014 does not apply. Your defense attorney would argue that even though you engaged in deceptive conduct, you didn't make any statements to the bank that were literally untrue.
But in this case, I don't think that would work. From the indictment, here is one of the statements that was allegedly made:
The indictment alleges that there was never any actual business called Fox Photography. And I tend to believe this, i.e. I believe that the person in question was NEVER actually engaged in business under the trade name of Fox Photography.
So we have a certified statement which was (1) intended to deceive; and (2) literally false. Moreover, it seems nearly certain that the person who made the certification was well aware that he was NEVER engaged in business under the trade name of Fox Photography.
The simple answer to this question is that the person wanted the account to get opened under the name of Fox Photography. The slightly more complex answer to this question is that at the time he applied for the fake bank account, the person was acting as an agent of SPLC. And SPLC was obviously trying to influence the bank into opening the account under the fake name.
Anyway, I have a couple of questions:
Do you agree that, at least according to the indictment, the statement "I am . . . engaged in business under the trade name of Fox Photography," was literally false?
Do you agree that at the time that statement was made, the individual was acting on behalf of the SPLC?
Looks to me like you are the one who is hair-splitting here. But let me make sure I understand: If (1) an organization states on its website that it opposes a particular event; (2) it actually donates money to help organize and support that event; but (3) it doesn't explicitly say that it won't donate money to support the event, then there's no fraud?
Looks to me like you are squinting in an attempt to do the opposite.
Courts don't operate like a Harvard debate club, and I don't argue here like I'd argue in court. I try to do my homework but I don't have the time or inclination to fully research my position as I would if it were for an actual client. When I read the statute I didn't get the impression from the language used that it would apply to opening a checking account, so I stopped right there and didn't bother to analyze the case further. You helpfully pointed to a case that demonstrated that such an interpretation would work, and I owed it to you to continue with the analysis.
Anyway, to answer you questions, the statement was colloquially false, but whether it was literally false depends on how you define "conducting business". They were, in fact, accepting money from one party and giving it to another. Maybe this doesn't fit your personal definition, but I can assure you that it's not an uncommon arrangement. In fact, several companies I represent only exist to do exactly that. Basically, they exist to get sued. The insurance companies pay them, and the money is used to pay settlements. The reasons for this are complicated and I'm not going to bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that these companies have no offices, no employees, and don't do anything that would conventionally be described as business. There are thousands of similar shell corporations that exist in the country, and I've never heard of any suggestion that if one of their officers signed a form with a bank that had language about "conducting business" it would subject him to criminal prosecution for lying to a bank. We can argue about this all day long if you want to, but it's ultimately irrelevant, because the indictment alleges that they lied by concealing the ownership of the companies, not because they lied about whether or not they were conducting business.
Yes, but like I said, there's nothing in the indictment that suggests the individual in question ever made a statement to the bank that this was not the case. The document with the alleged false statement is simply confirming that the individual had the legal authority to open the account in the company's name, and the government hasn't presented any evidence to the contrary. The only person with the authority to open those accounts was the person whose name was registered as the dba.
I'm not going to get into all the elements right now, but at minimum the government would need to identify a particular person that saw the representation, relied on the representation, and that the organization made money off of that reliance. The indictment doesn't indicate that. That doesn't even begin to touch the prevailing theory that the SPLC was manufacturing racist incidents to increase donation numbers which, again, isn't alleged in the indictment, and would be difficult to prove without a witness within the SPLC willing to testify to it. Again, at the very minimum they would need to identify at least one incident that the SPLC caused to happen.
It wasn't that long ago that you were arguing how it was similarly clear that Letitia James totally committed mortgage fraud, a couple weeks before multiple grand juries failed to indict her. This case is similarly going nowhere,
On the contrary, it seems you argue exactly as a typical litigator would. He's been hired to make the best arguments he can for a certain result, and if one argument fails, he just moves on with the next.
Just a coincidence that the next argument you found happened to support the same conclusion.
Even that is literally false, since (presumably) the money transfers did not begin until after the account was opened.
But in any event, the jury would be instructed to use common sense, and it's pretty unlikely that any reasonable person, using common sense, would agree that this individual was "engaged in business under the trade name of Fox Photography" I can imagine you making that argument to the jury, though: "Ladies and gentleman: Clearly my client was engaged in business. The business of Fox Photography was to transfer money to informants while disguising the source. So nothing that my client said was literally false." Meanwhile, any attorneys sitting in the gallery would be smirking and rolling their eyes.
This is totally false. Just look at Paragraphs 14 and 28 in the indictment. It's right there. Anyway, the fact that you would so wildly and so confidently misrepresent the contents of the indictment in a way that's consistent with the results you have reached demonstrates pretty conclusively that you are in "arguments as soldiers" mode.
I have no idea what your point is here. In making the statements in question, the goal of the employee (and the goal of the principal, SPLC) was to influence the bank to open the accounts. No reasonable person could dispute this.
As far as I can tell, this is totally false. The wire fraud statute (18 USC 1343) doesn't seem to say anything about reliance, or that the scheme needs to succeed. It looks to me like you are just making stuff up. But let's do this: Do you have any kind of case authority for the claim that wire fraud contains these elements?
I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you claiming that my position is that it is "clear" that SPLC "totally committed" fraud? Same question about Letitia James.
That may very well be the case, but that's a different question from whether your arguments have any merit.
Anyway, are do you want to predict right here and now that the indictment will be dismissed by the District Court?
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That's obviously true, but not criminal. It is, unfortunately, perfectly legal for the Save-the-World foundation to raise a million dollars (using chuggers who take a 40% commission), and spend $400k on executive salaries and the other $200k on a big celebrity-studded party to "raise awareness" of worldsaving.
If, as seems likely, the only crime (in the legal sense) here is opening bank accounts in false names, then absent losses to the banks or IRS, the likely penalty is a slap on the wrist. That said, using banking-related process crimes that the SPLC is clearly guilty of to throw the book at a fake charity doesn't seem like an abuse given US norms re. prosecuting white-collar crime.
What’s interesting is if Save-the-World took their donors to make the world needing more saving in order to drive further donations.
That seems different than overhead and dinners etc.
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I would say it depends. See below.
If the Save-the-World foundation lies about these spends to its donors, then it might very well be criminal fraud.
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Are you seriously arguing there’s no crime in lying about KYC?
So if I just go to banks and make up my personal info that’s perfectly legal?
I find that very hard to believe otherwise everyone would do it.
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If the legal statutes allow for that level of immorality, they should be considered entirely irrelevant. Human systems are for human beings, not the other way around.
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Would the SPLC claim I was a white supremacist if I gave money to those groups for no other reason than giving them the money?
The SPLC is, as defined by the SPLC, a white supremacist hate group. Seriously.
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The argument the other poster is making is that SPLC:
Rinse and repeat. They basically are creating the demand for their funding
Now whether that’s fraud is a different story I’d want to think through.
But only because the legal and popular definitions of "fraud" are different. Maybe it doesn't satisfy the former; it trivially satisfies the latter.
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The ideal self-licking ice cream cone.
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For your comment on “Is the SPLC secret white supremacists” I think people are saying it’s a “no”.
The idea would be that the SPLC needed white supremacists incidents to show their donors in order to continue to raise money from their donors. The SPLC couldn’t find any white supremacists so they funded some guys to be white supremacists. Then they show their donors what they did to combat the white supremacists. Basically like finding 10 guys saying stuff on Twitter and giving them money to meet in person and have a gathering.
The fraud was the issue was non-existent but the management of SPLC didn’t want to shut down and wanted to keep their jobs. So they created a problem so they could raise donations to pay their own salaries.
That's fine as a theory, it just suffers from the critical weakness that there's no evidence for it whatsoever, and it doesn't mesh with the current indictment, though the indictment is so poorly drafted that I don't know that any theory really meshes with it. Unless you're aware of some memo that the US Attorney is not that lays all this out in detail, trying to prove this through extrinsic evidence is going to be tough sledding indeed.
Is your standard here that the SPLC should have a public website that says "we pay white supremacists to continue existing so we can keep our cushy high-status jobs"?
What sort of evidence do you expect to see for that kind of self-justifying creative endeavor?
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Everything I’ve seen that is exactly what they were doing. They were paying people in the groups to fund their events.
It’s not like we haven’t seen this before. The noose in nascar. Duke Lacrosse. Lots of people create racism for profit.
This reminds me a lot of Britain paying for pythons in India.
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Inconsistent is one thing and I can see how there is wiggle room in the definition. But what they are being accused of is not just inconsistency with the mission statement, it is doing stuff directly opposed to the mission statement and directly opposed to what they said the money would be used for. From the indictment:
Here is I think the strongest example of the SPLC doing the exact opposite of what they claim to do:
If the SPLC specifically opposes this guy, and solicit donations on the basis do they really get to just turn around and give him $70k? That seems to be the exact opposite of opposing him, no?
Or to ask in terms of your Allegheny Trails Alliance example - if ATA had instead secretly donated that $10,000 to "Mr. No Trail Maintenance Ever" would your answer to "is this wire fraud" still be no? Even when the ATA explicitly told its donors "Donate to us to stop Mr. No Trail Maintenance Ever", who then went on to oppose trail maintenance according to the ATA? Because that seems to me to be closer to the story in the case of F-30, like this was not simply doing something slightly outside of their scope as in your example.
I'm going to ask you the same question I asked the other commenter: Do you believe that SPLC leadership are actually hard-right cryptoracists who have been bilking hapless lefties out of their money and used it to fund white supremacist hate groups? Or do you think this was all part of a weird, hare-brained scheme to achieve some ostensibly left wing goal? If you seriously believe that it's the former, and the government can prove that it's the former, then yes, I will agree with you and say that there is at least a decent case for fraud here. But if it's the latter, then it's just a group of people who used questionable tactics and bad judgment,
I believe the SPLC leadership are hardcore anti-white racists funding anti-black/jewish racists to fundraise off that perceived threat, who have been bilking hapless lefties out of their money to put on a racist kabuki theater while enriching themselves.
Of course, anti-white racism requires enough cognitive dissonance and luxury beliefs that it usually involves a fair bit of anti-black racism too, but that's generally subconscious.
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I'd say the latter but it still feels pretty iffy if a group that's ostensibly trying to resolve issue A is funding issue A to make it look bigger than it actually is. If a firefighting charity is running around throwing petrol on things I think it's reasonable to ask questions
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This does seems more like the defense that the SPLC will offer, than an accurate representation of the 'material misrepresentation' prong of the federal wire fraud law.
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Do you believe that Jussie Smollet is actually a hard right racist who wants black people to be lynched on the street? Can you think of other reasons he may have paid some people to attack a black man on the street and put a noose on his neck?
Yeah, I made a similar point to @Rov_Scam. The most likely motive, of course, is self-aggrandizement. So that there are (at least) three possibilities:
SPLC is secretly a racist organization and it gave money to those various individuals to promote racism.
SPLC is, as it says, against racism and decided in good faith that the best way to oppose racism was to put some prominent racists on its payroll.
SPLC is primarily about making money and realized that it could improve its fundraising by secretly supporting the organizations it nominally opposes.
I think everyone would agree that (1) is not a realistic possibility. So the real question is whether it's (2) or (3). I think it's too early to tell for sure, but there does seem to be some indication that SPLC's motivations fall under (3).
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I think they correctly assessed that the various white supremacist orgs posed little to no actual threat, but that their activity directly benefited SPLC through driving donations and strengthened political advocacy for the policies SPLC preferred.
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No, they're straight-up grifters who have been bilking hapless lefties out of their money and spending it both to create a problem and fight it.
If that's what you think, fine, but it means that the government's case requires them to prove that hate groups aren't a problem. To an Alabama jury that's likely to have more than a few black people on it.
It requires the government to prove that the SPLC created hate groups(which it kinda sounds like they did?) to pretend to fight. To a jury full of black people.
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No. All it requires them to prove is that they paid these bad guys to make sure they were visible so that they could make money “fighting” them.
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So you're saying that even if they did exactly what I said, they'll get away with it because black people will never believe this?
No, I'm saying that you aren't aware of the burden of proof your argument requires to stand up in court. The SPLC lists over 1300 hate groups on its website. For your theory to hold up you would have to be prepared to present evidence that somewhere between an overwhelming majority and all of them are figments of the SPLC's imagination and/or filled with SPLC plants, that the SPLC knew these were all fake, and that the SPLC deliberately sounded the alarm about this fake problem anyway because they wanted the money. It's not that black people would never believe this, it's that the only people stupid enough to actually believe this are whites who want to believe it for self-serving reasons.
Immigration Reform Law Institute
Federation for American Immigration Reform
Center for Family and Human Rights
Parents Defending Education
Constitutional Rights PAC
The Family Foundation
Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine
American Police Officer's Alliance
Eight is only a small fraction of 1300 but I don't want to get too gish-gallopy. I note that some fraction of what SPLC lists as hate groups are... similar organizations to the SPLC that they happen to disagree with! Funny how that works. Wish I could get paid to name all my enemies as hate groups, that's a helluva racket.
Now, that's not to deny groups like The Blood Tribe exist and are also listed (wonder if they got paid). They seem to be the kind of "hate group" and probably skinheads people actually think of, not just some lobby group that the SPLC disagrees with. But I had to go through multiple states to find them.
But that begs the question: what percent of the 1300 are "real" hate groups, and what percent are the SPLC doing this scumbag "we disagree so they're hateful" routine?
I see no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt after this little experiment.
edit:
looking at the site again they list
1,371 active hate and antigovernment groups
118 white nationalist groups
I would not be surprised if less than 150 of the groups they call "hate groups" total fit the colloquial definition of "hate group," and of that number it would be a smaller fraction that are actual problems.
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Uh, how many of those 'hate groups' are about race, vs completely unrelated issues that nobody really cares about because they're fringe? There's a lot of groups on the SPLC hate list which are, yes, real, but don't seem to hate anyone, including blacks(and blacks agree when they know these groups exist).
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Ah, so if the SPLC only faked/supported ~700 of the hate groups, they're off the hook? That seems like a problem with the law.
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I'm confused. "led the National Socialist Party of America" is a direct quote from the indictment, but Wiki claims that literally describes only two guys, neither of whom seems to fit the rest of the description. Did some other organization take the same name after (or before) the first one disbanded? Is this a People's Front of Anti-Judea vs Anti-Judean People's Front thing?
For any present "director of a faction" of some hate group or other, I'd have said opsec might be a mitigating factor here. If the SPLC lists in its "Extremist Files" the leaders of factions A, B, C, and E, then they pretty much have to list their mole in faction D too, or they risk having to list his successor after an untimely murder later. But these indictment entries are saying things like "led", "the Imperial Wizard", and "National President", and they distinguish those from cases like "the former chairman" and "the former director of a faction", which suggests that these were singular-leader roles during the period of the SPLC payments. Even if they've found themselves stuck metaphorically riding a tiger they can't safely dismount, it seems pretty damning to pay someone who's in that position as a mere "field source". "What is your hate group doing tomorrow?" "Same old: whatever I tell them to." At that point at least feed the poor bastard some de-escalatory suggestions.
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Don't get my hopes up. I would love for them to go for those wikipedia guys next.
That's practically impossible. Wikimedia Foundation (the org behind Wikipedia) does not do the editing and does not exercise any editorial control (excepting some rare cases where it is necessary to comply with the US laws). The editing cabals and Wiki admins are not controlled by Wikimedia and by any other official organizations, and a lot of them not even in the US. Those in the US would be protected by the First Amendment. Wikimedia sponsors a lot of stuff, including a lot of woke leftist stuff (don't think any Nazis though, SPLC is way ahead of the curve here), but there's no possible way to consider it fraudulent - they do it all in the open AFAIK. I am not very happy that the biggest and one of the most trusted (despite all) knowledge repositories on the planet is captured by the woke, but the US government can't do much about it, at least not without discarding the First Amendment, which would be a much bigger loss.
I think the argument is more Wikipedia begs for donations "to keep the servers running" but uses the vast majority for causes completely unrelated to running Wikipedia.
"Running Wikipedia" is a very nebulous term. You can take it in a very restrictive sense - paying for hardware, bandwidth and maintenance for the skeleton crew necessary so that the site remains on air. Then indeed, most of the donations do not pay for that. If, however, you allow development of new software and new modes - there are many more wikis beyond Wikipedia, though most are not as well known, but they exist and have their own audience, such as Wikidata, Commons, Wiktionary, Wikivoyage, and many others - then the donations would cover a significant part of this already. If you add some grants that are aimed at improving wiki content - such as paying people for writing software or articles for the benefit of Wikipedia - then you cover the substantial bulk of the expenses. Sure, some of these grants would have very woke tint - e.g. specifically concentrating on some woke selection or aspect and serving specific woke audience - but you can not say these grants are fraudulent and a private foundation has the right to be woke and finance woke grants. While for a federal government distributing tax money the equanimity and absence of any discrimination must be a requirement, for a private entity it is not possible to ask for that, and if they do choose to prefer woke causes, it is not a crime.
Moreover, if I remember correctly, the fundraising banners don't even claim these donations are necessary to run Wikipedia (indeed, they are not for many years now, though once they used to be, Tides foundation's support ensures Wikipedia can survive financially without any additional donations, if necessary, even though at the cost of freezing a lot of projects) - see the example here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising/2025_banners#%22Current_best%22_banner_as_of_July It just says, roughly, "Wikipedia is cool, please give us a little money". It does not make any claim about necessity of the donation or where that donation would go.
I would call it somewhat deceptive:
Implicitly the last point relates to the first two, ie your donations allow Wikipedia to continue to exist.
If they had the first paragraph be an introduction to their grants program, that would be different, but I would call their current banner less than maximally honest. Obviously legally it’s safe.
I agree. If the NRA had engaged in a similar level of deception, you can bet that Letitia James would have come down on them for it.
Anyway, Wikipedia is a terrible institution. In the sense that it has been gutted and is now worn as a skinsuit by the Left. I hope that the Trump administration finds a way to go after Wikipedia.
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Yes, it's leading on, of course, but that's a cornerstone of advertising industry. Like they show a guy drinking $BRAND_NAME_DRINK and then beautiful lightly dressed ladies surround him adoringly. The implication is clearly that the same would happen to you if you start drinking $BRAND_NAME_DRINK even though it's clearly a lie. But it's a lie within socially accepted boundaries.
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I think some of the indictments we see out of this administration are not for the purpose of getting a verdict, or even for the purpose of wasting time/money, but to get stuff out of the dark and into the air. The SPLC was spending money to support the leaders of organizations they claim to oppose. There's now a document with a summary of the FBI's investigations on a government website for everyone to reference. Information that once would have been a conspiracy theory is now as public as possible.
I think, if donators to SPLC knew ahead of time that their money would be going to "The Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America" or towards coordinating transportation to the "Unite the Right" rally, they probably would not have made that donation. SPLC characterized these people as informants, but many seem very highly placed. So highly placed, that they are in charge of the organization instead of informing on the organization.
Yeah, I think the chances of actual conviction are pretty slim. The chances it could make SPLC brand radioactive and ultimately bring them down by attaching an image of "pretend to fight Nazis but actually are financing Nazis with your donations" to them are much bigger, and getting a grand jury sign under it is a good move in this direction.
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This is something I went into a little with my comment, the purpose of this doesn't have to be actually convicting anyone. In the same way that defamation suits don't necessarily have to win. The point of lawfare is to throw accusations into the public eye and to make your victims suffer having to spend lots of money and fight for years in court.
Even if this case is as frivolous as their many other cases against political opponents, the Trump admin still makes out in important ways. They get to tar the SPLC's reputation simply by having the indictment make the news to begin with. They get to force the SPLC to dedicate lots of time and money fighting the allegations. And interestingly enough like and I've never considered this before, the DOJ just used this to publicly expose SPLC informants and sources inside of extremist groups, helping the groups to clean house of leakers. If that's the intent, it's clever. Incredibly unethical and fucked up abuse of law enforcement, but clever.
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This was my immediate thought to. I don’t know the criminal law but if the SPLC did this it is still fraud by the layman’s definition.
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