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Notes -
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?
If you want to read an eye-opening book about this (but not eye-opening in the way the author intended): Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream by Leonard Zeskind
The author worked for SPLC/Klanwatch for years, and the book is not impartial in the slightest. When discussing informers, he repeatedly takes the tack of "ha ha, you loser white supremacists, your org was infiltrated again!" He explains how David Duke was probably an informer/compromised by the feds given that Duke got arrested with explosives but the charges never materialized, and then somehow the Klan member/donor list "mysteriously" got into FBI hands shortly after that. He explains how a high-ranked Klan member of the Duke era, who repeatedly engaged in public threats of killing law enforcement, turned out to be on the federal payroll. Things like this happen over and over again in the book, but the author never once considers what this says about the nature of those organizations. At some point, anyone with perspective would have to wonder about the reality of these "right wing hate organizations" when high-ranking members and leaders are all being paid by the federal government.
I wonder what would have happened had Duke won election as Louisiana governor. I strongly suspect that the state legislature would have kneecapped every one of his actions and it would just have been boring business-as-usual. Might have been interesting, though.
My guess as well. He was already ineffective as a state legislator and I doubt he would've been much better as governor.
An amusing aside from his wiki entry:
Huh, doesn't that sound familiar?
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Are you saying that white supremacist organisations are flocks of wolves?
Not using the OG, booo!
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The FBI can lie on financial documents to pay informants. And I wouldn't be surprised if more than half of the supposed Nazis are actually LARPing feds, I mean how many Whitmer plots do you need to get suspicious? But plebes are not allowed to do that. People have largely accepted that the FBI can paint outside the lines and ignore the law, because they are the FBI. But if the same authority is granted to every leftist NGO, the right has no chance to survive in this country. So if Trump admin messes this up and doesn't get jail conviction and corporate death penalty for SPLC, this would be an absolutely catastrophic loss. Not immediately catastrophic, but long term - you can not survive if your enemy is allowed to break the law without any repercussions but you have to walk on eggshells.
If Trump's DoJ (he did not get around to rename that one yet, did he?) had any hard evidence that made the SPLC an accessory to some crime of a far right org they were infiltrating, they would not go after them for donation fraud.
FBI informers can get promises of immunity which may be dependable to a non-zero degree. The SPLC can make no such promises. So a rational informer will not feed the SPLC information which incriminate himself.
Furthermore, I do not think that the SPLC are actually mustache-twisting villains who want to enable far-right violence to justify their own existence. "Hi Joe, bad news. No payments this month, donations have plummeted, people simply do not care about Neonazis. Oh, you are planning to shoot up a synagogue? That is excellent news, I will have an intern prepare a list of impactful targets immediately. Do you need funds or should we rather ship AR-15's to you." <-- not happening.
In the US, you rarely go to prison just for being a member of an organization, liberty and all that. Nor do you go to prison for infiltrating an organization under false pretenses. I do not see anything stopping the right from infiltrating violent left wing organizations. I hear Antifa is a really big domestic terrorist threat. If some MAGA org wants to infiltrate Antifa and figure out their structure, they are certainly allowed to do so, as long as they do not fund serious crimes in the process (which they would not, because they do not want to see ICE agents murdered any more than the SPLC wants to see Jews murdered).
I don't think mustache-twirling villains tend to do this, and I think people who tend to do this don't metaphorically twirl mustaches. It seems to me that a common tendency of any activist - to the point that it should be taken as the default presumption unless there's overwhelming evidence to the contrary - is to overestimate one's own importance in the activism and the importance to society of the topic around which one's activism is. As such, believing that keeping one's activist organization well funded and running, no matter what, is something that any activist who genuinely, in good-faith, believes oneself to be doing good, can easily fall into.
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Why not? There had been plenty of hoaxes that aim at exactly that - creating an appearance of racism where there was none. The demand for racism on the left vastly exceeds the supply on the right. A simple law of supply and demand suggests manufacturing some must be profitable. One doesn't need to grow a twistable mustache to follow a simple set of incentives.
If there are non-LARPing Nazis around, prison is not the worst they could do to you. In fact, look what non-LARPing extremists on the left did, for example, to Andy Ngo. And several other journalists since. That's only things we know publicly.
What is stopping them is that Antifa will kill them, and Antifa-loving prosecutors won't even investigate it. Just as there is almost no meaningful prosecution of current Antifa violence - certainly not commensurate with the extent of the violence.
They very much do want to see ICE agents murdered, and some already were. More were violently attacked, and still are. SPLC, on the other hand, probably does not want actual Jews to get murdered. What they want is a lot of public calls to get Jews murdered, preferable from some scary-looking people, so that they could "expose" and "monitor" them and get those sweet grants for "fighting" them.
The ICE wall of honour continues to show zero deaths due to enemy action since Jaime Jorge Zapata in 2011. Like a medieval army, the vast majority of service-related deaths are due to disease (COVID-19, cancer from toxic exposure during the WTC cleanup, and one case of dengue while on a field assignment in Indonesia).
Turns out, I misremembered Prairieland attack, and the person who was shot in the neck was a police officer, not ICE agent, and he survived. So they tried to murder ICE agents, but they only succeeded in wounding a police officer, and murdering two other illegal immigrants: Miguel Angel Garcia-Hernandez and Norlan Guzman Fuentes (in a different attack). I was wrong to say antifa succeeded in their attempt to murder ICE agents, they tried, but so far other people and not ICE agents suffered from it. I stand corrected on that point. The rest of the points do not change from it though.
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Remind me how they got Al Capone?
"enable" is a stronger word than I'd use. Encourage isn't quite right either. Something like "generate just barely enough existence to keep money flowing and publicize 4chan memes, without causing significant harm to people we care about."
If the options are find a new cause or shut down and find different jobs... I also don't think, say, gay and lesbian actively desired to funnel questioning kids into lifetimes of medicalization, but the institutional survival incentives once they'd won pretty much everything else generated that as side-effect of the new cause area.
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I went to high school with probably the most prolific Neonazi in Australia and I'd be willing to bet money that he's been flipped along the way. He immediately joined the army out of high school, took a discharge after 6 months then becomes the biggest name in the movement within a year.
I don't doubt that he's authentically racist but the lack of real consequences and some personal links I know he has are sufficient for me to be highly skeptical he's not astroturfed.
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My timeline on X is filled with the Bronze Age Pervert-type, for lack of better term the philosemitic Far Right, accusing figures and organizations on the Right like Nick Fuentes and Patriot Front of being funded by SPLC and essentially claiming that right-wing antisemitism is astroturfed.
These were the same people that fed-jacketed Nick Fuentes with no evidence as well.
Almost certainly, the informant is from one of the "White Nationalist 1.0" groups, like the Aryan Brotherhood or something. Basically the groups that the SPLC and ADL wish still represented far right-wing antisemitism.
So what's most interesting here is the indictment seems to be helping the SPLC's mission insofar as the Bronze Age Pervert Sphere is playing a supporting role in the SPLC's gayops to bad-jacket the antisemitic Right wing and claim it is an inorganic movement.
The cost of victory is internal dissent. When the left was culturally dominant, they had infinite groups struggling for internal supremacy. They still have some of it.
Various flavors of righties fighting each other instead of the left is exactly what one would expect the moment they win. If, as I believe most likely, right-wing politics becomes more culturally dominant, this will only get worse. If the left becomes the cultural minority as it were, we can expect them to paper over their differences after some period of internal struggle and make some changes to try to get back in the saddle.
Political parties are coalitions. There's always internal disagreement. Winners fight over the spoils, losers become compacted as a coalition by failure.
The left had infinity groupuscles stuggling for internal supremacy long before it was culturally dominant. The problem goes back all the way to the 1st century AD and the conflict between the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front.
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Fuentes gets fedjacketed because he’s quite possibly the only person who entered the capitol grounds on Jan 6 who didn’t get arrested. Also he was arranging AFPAC during the Biden administration which basically gives Antifa types carte blanche to dox groypers by advertising public events.
Nearly every single charge was for people who entered the Capitol itself or restricted areas directly around the building, he did not get close to the building.
Also I forgot Fuentes is also buddy buddy with SPLC types like Hannah Gais… kinda interesting isn’t it?
Guy who:
might not be a FED but he certainly isn’t hurting left-wingers.
I like the idea that the SPLC is in cahoots with BAP but Fuentes praising Hannah Gais’ work must be him being naive or something… poor lil Nicky… always in such compromising positions!
He was investigated and subpoenaed in front of Congress.
"Organizing public events" makes you a fed, how does that make sense? He's trying to engage in politics under really difficult circumstances.
How is Fuentes "in the good graces of the SPLC"? Do you just say stuff with no evidence whatsoever?
Nick Fuentes was also like 18 during Charlottesville and people still claim he was paid by the SPLC, is this an op or something? Do people making these claims seriously believe them? I seriously doubt BAP etc. actually believes it, just spreading disinfo to help the SPLC's mission.
Organizing AFPAC publicly so your followers can get doxxed (except without your superchat income) is at best irresponsible but at worst a good way to help Antifa. This, if I recall, was the source of Fuentes’ enmity with BAP because BAP said it was a bad idea to host public events.
Lots of people get subpoenaed - again was there a single other person who urged their followers to break into the Capitol and entered the Capitol grounds who wasn’t arrested?
Who said anything about Nick at Charlottesville - there’s been 7 years in the interim.
Hannah Gais:
https://x.com/hannahgais/status/1773741238291689497
Michael Dyson:
https://x.com/mantonmilitant/status/1974217829760045352
Fuentes praising Gais:
https://x.com/jadenpmcneil/status/1974198265588691027
The SPLC has been unrelentingly hostile to the BAPphere because it refuses to engage in the WN 1.0 and cargo cult tactics like hosting public political conferences which might allow the Left to ruin the lives of the participants.
In addition, Fuentes can be counted on to dox anyone who works with him… he’s an absolute value to the Left.
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Of those who were not charged how many have videos of themselves at the event telling other people, directly, to enter the building?
Nobody was charged under similar circumstances, Fuente's circumstances are different from everyone who was charged. If he went into the building and didn't get charged, ok suspicious, but people saying he is a fed because he wasn't charged like everyone else who stayed away from the building is absurd.
Do you have any examples of people in cricumstances similar to those of Fuentes?
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That whole BAPsphere, as far as I can tell, hasn’t done a single positive thing for advancing the Right. The closest they’ve come is creating an online bookseller, but it’s not the 1960s and ideology is no longer disseminated by written material.
Au contraire, their twitter presence has meaningfully spread right wing ideas. Mostly dumb ones, but most people are dumb and very receptive to dumb ideas. As you yourself note, books don't spread ideology. Edgy memes do. BAP is a jewish homosexual who convinces his followers to spread memes far and wide.
I like how whenever BAP is mentioned, there's an inevitable conga line of the lowest-quality jooposters claiming that he hasn't contributed anything. BAP's undeniably one of the top-5 most important figures in forming the current Online Right, and it's pretty transparent the extent to which the notable BAP haters on twitter are little dogs trying to nip at the ankles of the big old dog. It's particularly funny when people make comparisons to someone like Fuentes - he may be a darling of the liberal press, but I can't think of a single idea that's attributable to him, or even (despite him being undeniably funny on stream) a meme other than 'the holly'.
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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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This is why I voted for Trump. Thé SPLC is my enemy, and driving them out of the face of the earth is a good thing.
I have two objections. One is that lawfare contributes to a decline in civility. Naturally, the Democrats have done a lot of lawfare against Trump, so you might say turnaround is fair. But it will also be a further step of escalation. At the moment, Democrats and MAGA are not yet in a state of total war against each other. Heck, even Iran and Israel are not in that stage. Unlike chess, neither war nor the culture war are zero sum games where hurting your enemy and helping your side are identical.
Every move in the culture war has two separate properties, one how much it brings your side closer to their objectives and one how much it escalates the conflict. Lawfare did not work particularly well against Trump. My second objection is that it will likely not work particularly well against the SPLC. So Trump's move will simply further normalize wasting taxpayer money to harass political opponents in cases which will result in not guilty verdicts.
Organizations like the SPLC, the Proud Boys and so forth exist because what they do is mostly legal and significant fractions of the population support them. Even if by some miracle Trump secures a victory against the SPLC and a few leaders go to prison for donation fraud, this will not be a major victory. The SJ left will not shrug and say "they destroyed the SPLC, too bad that nobody is keeping tabs on the far right now". They will simply found a new organization, and hire the former employees with all their informer contacts.
Yes. As I and many others have pointed out an innumerable number of times over the last decade, at the time when such observations might have done some good if people were willing to listen.
"the Democrats have done a lot of lawfare against Trump" is an interesting phrase.
In the abstract, if party A engages in some minimal level of lawfare against party B, I think you would agree that it's possible that the correct response is for party B to object, but otherwise continue their business as before. If party A continues to unilaterally escalate the level of lawfare, do you think there is a level at which it is reasonable for Party B to engage in lawfare back?
If you do not think there is a level at which engaging in reciprocal lawfare is justified, then lawfare must be a very bad thing indeed. What alternative consequences should be imposed on Party A for their engagement in this very bad behavior?
If you do think there is a level at which engaging in reciprocal lawfare is justified, what is that level and why are you confident that we have not already reached it? And in this branch is why I think "The Democrats have done a lot of lawfare against Trump" is an interesting phrase.
What is "lawfare"? Does it have a commonly-understood, rigorously-applied definition? You claim the Democrats have "done a lot of lawfare against Trump"; was this lawfare generally recognized as such at the time? If not, was it recognized at some later time preceding, to put it delicately, five minutes ago? Can you name specific incidents where the democrats used lawfare against Trump, where you yourself recognized it as lawfare at the time? Can you show how the awareness of the existence of lawfare generated sufficient internal resistance from within the blue sphere to impede further such efforts?
Suppose I object in principle to lawfare, and want to see less of it. You are telling me that "the Democrats have done a lot of lawfare against Trump". My recollection is that this is not a sentiment Blues were willing to endorse when the lawfare in question was actually happening, which leads me to suspect that the reason Blues are willing to endorse it now is because they're on the wrong end of it. If we observably get closer to consensus that lawfare is actually a problem when my side reciprocates, why should I accept an argument that my side should refrain from reciprocating?
How deep does this newfound enlightenment go? Are the journalist and academic classes, the bureaucracy and the Democratic party itself willing to admit that "the democrats have done a lot of lawfare against Trump", or is hearing it from pseudoAnons in an irrelevant corner of the internet supposed to be sufficient? If this is a bad response, what other response do you believe would be more productive?
The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble.
The state of total war between the tribes is not inevitable, but it is much more likely than other outcomes. You are correct to recognize that this is an escalation spiral. Unfortunately, actually breaking out of an escalation spiral requires considerably more than the statement "we are in an escalation spiral".
How much waste of taxpayer money to harass political opponents is currently happening, and how much has happened in the past decade?
Of course they will. The win here isn't jailing SPLC leadership or shutting down the org. It's probably better for me if they continue exactly as they have indefinitely!
It is better to consider the SPLC not as an organization, but as a particular instantiation of a cluster of political tactics. The proper goal here is not to maximally-suppress this particular cluster, but rather to suppress the tactic in general. When the SPLC's set of tactics is deployed in the future, I and hopefully others will point out how such tactics have been proven to work in the past, and argue that they should not be allowed to operate in the future. I will argue that the SPLC was for decades running awarded extreme levels of deference and influence while operating as a socially-corrosive grift, and as a consequence neither it nor its replacements should be given the benefit of the doubt. To arguments that it's different this time because it's a new organization, I will simply respond as you have here: it's a new coat of paint on the same old machine; it was a grift that Blues were willfully blind to before, and it will still be a grift that Blues are willfully blind to in the future.
This works better the more harm can be inflicted on the SPLC now; as we've seen with Trump's 34 felony convictions, the point is at the end of the day to generate legible, mimetically-fit tokens. Power flows from such things, and power is necessary.
The more fruitful discussion, it seems to me, is whether the viewpoint underpinning the above is wrong. One could argue that the SPLC was not a grift, that they were performing socially-useful work, that their tactics and policies were effective and necessary, that they and the money donated to them made the world a better place.
I note that no one seems all that interested in making such a case. It seems to me that this is because most here, even the Blues, understand that such an argument would not be sustainable, given the facts, but perhaps that assessment is wrong.
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Lawfare failed against Trump. It took out Alex Jones, Rudolph Giuliani, the Proud Boys, and multiple right-wing protest groups (e.g. carrying Tiki torches during a protest turns out not to be protected by the First Amendment when done by the right). It has harmed randoms por encourages les autres, such as the college students jailed for saying the N-word and the Virginia man pantsed by the police for objecting to his daughter being raped by a trans student. And of course there was the decimation of the NRA as @gattsuru mentioned.
It's not that lawfare doesn't work. It's that Trump was particularly good at getting past it.
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The ongoing existence of the SPLC also contributes to a decline in civility. Civility is a difficult thing to build, easy to destroy.
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The lawfare against the NRA did massive damage to the already-wobbly organization, and to the extent it moved its political arms to third groups (eg SAF), the soup-and-nuts fundamentals work - training programs, lead abatement, range insurance - still remains badly crippled and under the control of Blue Tribe administrators. I’m not sure there’s going to be any way for a non-NRA org to take over them, given the pressure applied against banks and insurers that only the NRA’s self-insurance warchest has allowed them to survive under.
That’s… kinda the problem. “It doesn’t work” is a testable hypothesis, and only survives so long as it almost never works. “It’s a bad escalation” only works if you can persuade people that refusing to push the button means it remains unpushed; that’s clearly not true and can’t become true without a Time Machine.
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I think seeing it as just 2 teams is more simplistic than is warranted here. I see this not as Trump or his ill attacking my side, but rather shooting out a cancer that's been rapidly and successfully killing the healthy parts of my side for decades. It'd be preferable to go to a surgeon who has expertise and incentive to keep the rest of us healthy and alive, but when all the surgeons have decided to join the cult of the cancer that values the cancer itself over the host, that's hard to come by.
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I'm no fan of the SPLC, but... I don't see any contradiction between claiming to fight right-wing extremism and funding extremist informants.
If they broke laws while doing it, that's a different matter, but I'm not understanding the framing that they were hypocrites or something.
I would say it depends on how far they go. If they are funding leaders; if they are paying for people to attend right-wing rallies; etc., then at a certain point there's a contradiction IMO.
Especially when the supply of organized right wing extremists isn't that large and you can get informants to say essentially anything
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There's certainly a contradiction. It may not be illegal - after all, it's not illegal to be a colossal hypocrite - but it's certainly looks contradictory when you say you collect donations to fight those people and then give those money - and a lot of money, they mention hundreds of thousands of dollars there - to the same people. Call it "informant" or anything else, it looks like it is - that they very much prefer the cause they pretend to destroy actually prospers so that they could collect more donations and pretend to fight it forever.
Is there a reason a state should generally allow private actors to play "undercover informant"? Citizens aren't generally encouraged to start writing dossiers on each other even if they did say they were going to turn them over to law enforcement. Doubly so for not-even-illegal activities, some of which are constitutionally protected.
Seems at least arguably a road to privatized secret police, although I'd steelman the reverse by saying that Target should be allowed to have a loss-prevention department and take evidence to the real police. Open to other thoughts on the principles here, though.
Reporting on the activities of political groups is just as 1st amendment protected as participating in them.
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I think that to some extent, this is permissible. Here's an example: Suppose you are a luxury watch brand ("Brand A") and you believe there is a store which is selling counterfeits of your watches. You hire an investigator to walk into the store and ask if can get a Brand A watch at a terrific price. He records the whole interaction and it's later used as the basis for a civil lawsuit. As far as I know, this is legal.
But of course there are limits. If you believe that a store down the street is selling cocaine, and you attempt to bust them by buying cocaine and recording the interaction, then in theory you yourself could be prosecuted for drug trafficking.
Anyway, I agree that there need to be limits on what private citizens can do.
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You certainly can inform anybody on anything. Like, if you know something, you can tell that to somebody else. If you signed an NDA, the NDA owner could sue you for that, even in that case it will be a civil matter. I do not see any criminal statute that could stop you from disclosing anything you know to anybody, short of national security secrets and such. So yes, you can collect "dossiers" on other people, that's just information. You can not become "private police" unless you are also granted enforcement powers - i.e. powers to arrest, deprive of liberty, confiscate property, etc. Some activities are regulated e.g. via private investigator licenses, but frankly I don't see any principled reason to do so, it's more like dog grooming licenses - some people think it'll improve the quality of services to require people providing the services to jump through some hoops, but there's nothing special in activity itself. Some states don't even require that, it's not a matter of principle but more of how much regulation a particular jurisdiction wants to have.
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The SPLC is interesting because they don't have a real incentive to shut down the organizations they target. Police eventually want a big press conference with drugs or guns on the table and a bunch of arrests, that's how they demonstrate their efficacy. The SPLC has no authority to do any law enforcement, the best they can do is say "we helped" when law enforcement eventually does act. But they have a direct incentive to have more hate organizations to add to their hate map, more scary news headlines to use to raise money from their donor base, etc.
So if they are able to prove the SPLC funded some of these hate groups for decades and made no serious effort to shut them down, just farming them for content, that does start to look like a deceptive use of donor money. It requires more of a stretch compared to the other counts, but if they do get convicted, their reputation is ruined.
Funny you should mention "dope on the table" ironically the closest thing to what the SPLC is doing, the police are incentivized to bust some dope, catch some low level mooks and parade infront of the media how much they are doing to fight drug crime, but if they magically suddenly caught all the bosses and everyone involved what will justify their drug busting budget next time? So they do the minimal needed and the higher ups keep cases contained and local.
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And indeed, making up ‘hate’ from essentially innocuous outside the mainstream organizations, which they then confirm with informants who are actually getting an answer of ‘sûre, buddy, why don’t you go play with someone else?’.
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No, because they'll just claim it was a witch hunt against them by the Trump administration, and their donors will believe them.
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Same sort of issue as the FBI prodding along and composing a significant fraction of the Whitmer kidnapping plot, the line between fighting something and manufacturing something to fight gets patchy.
Paying informants to stay in an organization, continue rousing for it, and report back is fungible with just paying the organization to exist.
No? In that case you could point to specific actions which would not have happened without fed involvement. What’s the equivalent here?
I suspect we'll find out if this makes it as far as discovery! At this stage, the available information and how to interpret it relies too much on partisan bias to say with much confidence.
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Maybe on some scales. Was the USG paying the USSR to exist since some KGB guys were on the American payroll?
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I think it's useful to note before getting into any particular details that the Trump admin's record of even securing a grand jury in prosecutions against groups and people they don't like has been extremely poor, yet alone ever getting to a conviction. Whether it be frivolous defamation lawsuits or nakedly politically motivated investigations against someone like Jerome Powell, they keep losing when forced to find or put actual evidence in front of judges and juries. One reason as stated by a top Bondi aide is that finding competent lawyers who are also willing to play MAGA politics over their career prosecution success rates has been quite difficult. Not many want to walk away in 2028 with tons of failed indictments that couldn't even get past a grand jury attached to their name.
Not that it necessarily matters, as FIRE points out
In the same way, just having the federal government use the legal system to smear your name, out private details, and force you to defend yourself is a victory for lawfare wagers.
But let's get into the details anyway.
This is already questionable. The idea that paying for an informant inside of a group to provide you leaks and information that you report on, and even share with law enforcement if it hints at potential criminal behavior counts as "funding" the movement as a form of support is quite a stretch. I doubt they'll find many major donors who consider this to be a fraudulent use of a really small fraction of their money.
It's also really interesting to see some of the blatant social media shills flip from "unite the right was peaceful" (which it was) to "unite the right was a dangerous rally caused by the SPLC!' just because of a single guy unrelated to the informant organizer driving into a crowd. Just peak partisan brain on display.
Now that might actually have some teeth to it, assuming of course that this is actually correct considering ya know, the Trump admin repeatedly failing over and over when having to actually provide evidence for their claims in court against political opponents. But assuming this one is true and they did lie to the banks themselves, then it does seem criminal.
Ok there is the legal question here, and it kind of looks like they are cooked because lying to banks seems like a very easy thing to prove. But probably more important is the court of public opinion, and what future donors will think. And reading the indictment it really seems very bad, the SPLC was going far beyond just paying informants for information. They were directly funding people who they promised to fight against. They were directly funding behaviors and events they promised to fight against. They were directly funding leadership of organizations they promised to fight against. To the tune of millions of dollars.
Some examples from the indictment:
The SPLC billed this as a hate rally, they told their donors they were working against it, and they solicited donations from them on that basis. At the same time they were paying organizers, they were telling people they paid to attend, and they were coordinating transportation to the rally. They told their donors they were working to stop a hate group doing "hate speech" while they directly funded and coordinated with leaders of that group to do that very same thing they promised to stop, with money that they said would be used to stop it!
This is what the SPLC tells its donors about the National Alliance. If the SPLC wanted to dismantle National Alliance why would they give their fundraiser a million dollars? How exactly could donating to a group be considered dismantling that group?
Is it honest and ethical to tell your donors you are working to stop this specific person and this specific organization while secretly paying that person, the former leader of that organization, $140,000? While giving their fundraiser (and presumably by extension that group) over $1,000,000? In what sense can the SPLC be said to be working against a man when they are directly funding him and indirectly funding his organization? In what sense is that not just flat out lying?
These are the people who set policy, who make decisions, who control the entire organization. In a very direct sense they ARE the organization, more so than anyone else, and the SPLC is giving them, the KKK, the SPLC's biggest bogeyman, hundreds of thousands of dollars and indirectly funding their lawsuits.
The indictment is pretty short so I encourage you to read it if you think I am taking these out of context. This information was not in the OP so maybe you were not aware of it, but does seeing it now does that change your mind at all? If it was just paying informants for information then I agree that the funding allegations would be quite a stretch. But that is not really even close to what was happening here. They were directly coordinating and promoting and facilitating this stuff. It looks much closer to "self licking ice cream cone" than "informants for info".
That’s disgusting. $30,000 a year for making racist postings and helping to plan and coordinate a rightwing meet-up. How does one get on the radar of organizations for these types of jobs? Just so I know how to avoid such disgusting side gigs.
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This seems to assume that the Charlottesville rally would not have occured had they not been in touch with a single member of the larger group chat behind the rally. Informants have to be higher ups in order to provide solid information, but it's not like they are gods who make all the decisions by themselves for the groups. Helping the informant avoid exposure also seems like a basic concept that doesn't require assuming Charlottesville wouldn't have happened without them.
Because if you want an informant on the inside to leak you information and stay under cover, financial appeal can help you where moral appeal might not. Just paying people to snitch is not some new concept. It's not something the SPLC has invented, it's been around since the beginning of snitches and is used by law enforcement constantly.
Consider in just the five years from 2012 to to this hearing in 2017 the ATF and DEA alone paid informants almost 260 million.
Surely there's a difference between the government doing something, and theoretically being democratically accountable for it, versus an NGO of questionable action and well beyond any form of normal accountability?
Though I'm not sure exactly where I fall on the question being "paying informants creates questionable incentives" versus "NGOs should be more accountable for self-interested and possibly fraudulent behaviors."
I struggle to come up with a more sympathetic NGO where I would find this acceptable. Like... if Worldvision was paying people to have more kids and put them in orphanages, I think we could agree that's perverse and insane.
As I said in another comment whether or not it's actually effective is a different question. It's not fraudulent to do a dumb idea that you genuinely think could work. If Tom accepts money on Kickstarter to make a new indie movie sequel, tries out a new editing technique for it and it turns out the sequel sucks because of that, Tom didn't commit fraud. Backers can be upset that the movie sucked but unless it was caused by purposefully wasting the money for something else then there's nothing illegal there.
The SPLC may or may not have been ineffective when using this strategy, but little proof has been actually presented as specific fraud. "I think their strategy is dumb or counterproductive" is not it.
The fraud is in creating fake bank accounts and shell entities. That it's stupid and absolutely inappropriate behavior for an NGO are separate complaints.
I think we're too far apart in our respective biases on the topic and what kind of actions should be allowable for NGOs to commit.
It seems like the actual law is rather specific given that using other company names for billing is a not that uncommon practice (see tons of sex toy/porn/etc companies for instance). IDK whether or not the SPLC behavior qualifies for that specific violation or not, but it's clearly not a given.
These sorts of rules are highly technical, and given the poor track record of targeted lawsuits so far against other enemies of the admin, I think it's fair to expect not much difference here.
Ehh, fair example.
I still see virtually no difference between this case and the Trump "34 felonies" hush money. He paid someone to not talk, recorded it under the wrong header, and everyone raised a big stink. The SPLC pays people to talk, set up shell accounts for it, and... somehow that's fine? I don't get it.
Very little I've said has been about the actual success of the case, which I expect to fail even if the leadership team of the SPLC said, on video and broadcasted to the world, "Real hate groups basically don't exist any more except the ones we pay to keep cushy activist jobs." Success of the case has little to do with the law or the behavior of the SPLC, and everything to do with Trump.
Whether or not it's fraud by legal standards if you squint and stand on one foot and jump through the loopholes, I think it's bad behavior for an NGO to engage in.
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My fondness for Batman would change significantly if I learned that the Joker was a contractor being paid by Wayne Enterprises in order to justify the costumed crime fighting budget.
If Batman really cared about crime, he’d kill
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That was not my assumption, and I don't see how what I wrote would give you that impression. Can you explain why you are interpreting it that way?
But either way, how exactly would that change anything? My objection, and the DOJ's, is that the SPLC was telling donors that it opposed a white nationalist rally, while in reality they were secretly promoting and helping to facilitate that rally. That the SPLC was not solely responsible for the rally does not mean they didn't spend money they promised would oppose the rally to instead secretly promote and facilitate the rally. Can you explain otherwise? What am I missing?
Likewise with your other two points on informants - can you explain how a high up informant being more useful somehow refutes the fact that the SPLC paid for and promoted and facilitated things they explicitly told their donors they opposed? How does facilitating transport to the rally oppose it? How does paying someone and supervising their racist posts oppose that exact person's racist posting? To be honest I don't see a connection at all, can you point it out for me?
I agree that paying people to snitch is more effective than not paying people and expecting them to snitch. I agree that getting people to snitch can be an effective way to dismantle an organization. I can even maybe see how giving over a million dollars to a fundraiser for a group you are fighting might make sense, like there is at least something there. But that is not all of what the SPLC is accused of doing, so I am going to ask again - in what sense can the SPLC be said to be working against a man when they are directly funding him and indirectly funding his organization? The SPLC says "here is a bad guy we oppose", the SPLC says "here is the donate button to oppose the bad guy", and then the SPLC goes and gives that money directly to the "bad guy". Huh?
Also not seeing the relevance of law enforcement here. While law enforcement using a technique may be a testament to that technique's effectiveness, it does not follow from that statement that the SPLC should do the same. The SPLC is not a law enforcement agency, and there are a lot of things inherent to law enforcement agencies which are not inherent to the SPLC. Those differences preclude the SPLC from operating in an at all similar manner.
If you are just trying to convince me that it is effective to pay informants, you don't have to. That was never questioned by me and I apologize if I gave you that impression because we are in agreement on that point. But I am also going to point out that your link really undermines that position. Did read any of it?
Like here is a quote from Rep. Hice:
This is not a quote in support of CI programs.
Even looking beyond the contradictions I don't see the relevance of the point and I don't see how this supports anything else you have said. How exactly does a House Oversight Committee reprimanding law enforcement for "inadequate oversight over the CI program" and " fail[ing] to sufficiently review, authorize, and implement controls for CIs’ activities and payments" support your position on the acceptability of the SPLC's informant program? If it is at all applicable, would it not be directionally arguing that what the SPLC did was not acceptable? Actual law enforcement agencies with Congressional oversight clearly have huge issues with their CI program, and given that the SPLC has zero external oversight of any kind should we not be more skeptical of their CI program?
Refer back to how informants are used elsewhere like the DEA. Federal officials paying a drug informant to give them information on drug deals is not interpreted as them "secretly promoting and helping to facilitate" taking drugs. Heck, even if the DEA helps an informant or cop stay undercover by providing drugs, we know contextually that this is not a pro drug action.
You can disagree with them as to whether or not the strategy is effective here, but "I don't think their idea works as well as they hope" isn't the same as fraud.
Again, whether or not it's actually effective is a different question. It's not fraudulent to do a dumb idea that you genuinely think could work. If Tom accepts money on Kickstarter to make a new indie movie sequel, tries out a new editing technique for it and it turns out the sequel sucks because of that, Tom didn't commit fraud. Backers can be upset that the movie sucked but unless it was caused by purposefully wasting the money for something else then there's nothing illegal there.
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No, it doesn't. I don't have to assume that a particular supporter was critical to an even to call him a supporter.
Yeah, glowies are also known for creating situations that would later allow themselves to swoop in, and call themselves heroes.
But if it would have happened anyway because he wasn't critical then having an informant on the inside doesn't meaningfully change much besides their access to information.
So you understand that it is a common strategy to use informants, and that doesn't indicate support of a particular policy. You can disagree on how effective the strategy is, but the DEA using drug informants isn't meaningfully supportive of drugs anymore than informants are here.
But if it would have happened anyway because he wasn't critical then did a supporter really "support" anything? I think this is just a fundamentally wrong way to analyze this.
In literally said these agencies often use entrapment, and you're trying to frame it as agreement with you?
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I think this highlights an interesting difference between some sort of moral intuition because it seems common among SPLC defenders that this is just a nonsense connection, but I don't find it a stretch at all. It strikes me as a perfectly reasonable conclusion! But I don't know how to phrase what that difference in intuition is, exactly.
34 felonies. But Alabama's probably not as corrupt and motivated as New York.
I don't think it's that surprising to begin with that they might pay some people tbqh. The SPLC would get leaks somehow after all. and paying people some money to leak information is not a new concept they invented. If you can't make a moral appeal to group insiders, you can often make a financial one.
I agree it's not surprising they pay people.
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Your argument proves too much: the Trump administration also had difficulty securing a grand jury in cases where they had video evidence of the crime.
Which case was this? The first thing that came to my mind was a vague recollection of the recent reported paper-bag-of-bribery-sting-cash video, but the suspect there (despite being first appointed to ICE by Obama) was considered "one of the president's top allies" and it was the Trump DoJ that dropped the case.
In addition to the other examples already presented, I'd point to the difficulties in DC enforcement in clear-cut cases, and, for a non-grand-jury indictment, Don Lemon through a magistrate judge.
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There was the sandwich guy in DC who threw his food at federal officers and was a found innocent of all charges, and within DC is now regarded as a local folk hero for standing up to the federal government or whatever.
Do you know what the precise charges were? I see news stories saying "assault", which, yeah, he was totally guilty by the dictionary meaning, but laws usually get much more fine-grained than that.
DC does allow juries to convict on a "lesser included offense" when the charge is for a greater offense that necessarily includes the lesser offense, so there's no way for a criminal-friendly or just-stupid DA there to let a criminal walk away free from a misdemeanor assault by mischarging them with felony assault instead.
But it might have mattered to the jury if prosecutors overcharged; jury nullification is so much easier to pull off if the DA pisses off the jury first.
Or ... does DC even define an appropriate level of assault charge? In Texas I think this would be a Class C Misdemeanor Assault, offensive contact without physical injury, but the weakest assault level I can find in DC is "Simple Assault" which requires there to be an attempt "to do injury to the person of another", and it wouldn't be crazy for a jury to decide that a short-range ballistic sandwich just wasn't possibly going to do any injury. Maybe there was no better charge possible than misdemeanor destruction of property, if the mustard stains just wouldn't come out?
(IANAL, IANYL, please don't throw food at anyone anywhere or encourage others to do so, etc.)
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That was kind of doomed from the start with a DC jury. In this case they were able to file in Alabama, which should have a more level playing field.
The outsized sway of DC and NY juries on federal law enforcement has seemed like a viable opportunity for reform, but I haven't seen any political operatives (conservative, presumably) actually talking about it.
Juries drawn from the district the crime was allegedly committed in is in the Constitution, so de facto not reformable.
Sure, but plenty of crimes with ambiguous jurisdiction, especially international ones, are consistently tried in NY or DC. What did Maduro do in New York, specifically, that justifies a New York jury deciding his fate? Plenty of SDNY press releases include "across the United States".
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Grand juries have long been considered incredibly easy to get past, to the point a common joke is that you could even manage it with a ham sandwich. Given that nothing about the system has changed (they're still just made up of ordinary citizens through the jury selection process), the constant failings to convince ordinary people of crime seems to suggest a selection bias. Normal smart prosecutors would never try to indict a ham sandwich anyway so the grand juries never turn them down, similar to how Japan maintains their high conviction rates.
Several of the failures to indict have been -- and been clearly downstream -- of jury pools where a heavy and radicalized Blue Tribe lean is present.
Even the most partisan states are still generally around 60/40 like California and that's not including the rising number of independent aligned voters and nonvoters who are not "radicalized blue tribe". And a grand jury just needs a simple majority, it's famously easy to get past.
Now sure, maybe Trump is just so uniquely unpopular among the normies and independents now that even they are willing to sabotage their indictments against political opponents but I'm not sure the average American is that spiteful.
Do you not know, or not care, how fractions work?
Because I don't think you know, or care, about how jury trials work:
And I also notice that you haven't actually engaged with the point (or examples!) of clear video evidence of criminal behavior being no-billed by Dem-leaning grand juries, juries, and magistrates.
It's a little funny watching people accuse you of letting LLMs do your thinking, because if I wanted a Darwin clone, I could do better with 3B param and a couple hours with an nVidia 3060. But mostly because it's just sad.
Yes, I also understand that not everyone is partisan or political to begin with. Only about 60% of eligible voters turned out in California so even from the very start we have 40% of the population who is not particularly political. Then the remaining 60% of people are also split roughly 60/40 themselves, leaving only about 36% of the population who is Dem leaning. And that again is just leaning, they aren't all hyperpartisan. Some are swing voters, some are people who just vote what their spouse says, some just show up and pick randomly.
The large majority of randomly selected people in a grand jury, even in California, will not be that politically biased against the Trump admin. They're normies like the normies in basically every state. If you're losing them you either have a bad case, or you're despised among even the most apolitical normies.
Or perhaps you misunderstand the specifics of the law, the actual quality of evidence allowed in court (good evidence can get tossed because it was collected illegally or other procedural reasons) wasn't as strong, or plenty of other potential factors like that.
Considering you seemingly don't even know basic concepts like voter turnout not being 100% in the US, ignorance in the American legal field seems likely.
California, specifically, favors volunteer applications for grand juries. This selects directly for civic engagement, but if you think it's a random selection of political engagement, drop that estimate from 3B param to something that runs on a Raspberry Pi.
For Napa County, as the first example to come up on Google, the first random draw I could find was from 2016-2017, and that was still a tiny fraction. If we brought 2024's 65% Harris-voting Napa population and multiply it by the 17/19 that volunteered -- assuming without evidence that the 2 volunteers were just too apolitical to find an excuse -- you still get 58%. I'll leave the math for some place like San Francisco County as an exercise for the reader.
Which you will magnanimously avoid beating like a pinata, because you'd rather use the worst possible arguments instead. Just like you'll ignore the district matter.
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Jury trials have other issues than mere spite, especially when race gets involved.
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By treating ‘rights of the accused’ as a suggestion?
Probably in part, but they also don't bring the indictments in Japan to begin with. https://usali.org/comparative-views-of-japanese-criminal-justice/carlos-ghosn-and-japans-99-per-cent-conviction-ratenbsp-examining-japans-criminal-justice-system-from-a-comparative-perspective
There are some other differences including just weird statistical quirks like that, but being selective in only bringing high confidence cases is a good thing for both efficient use of taxpayer money and minimizing harassment of innocents.
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If his characterization of a specific case is correct, none of what you said is relevant. It's perfectly possible that on average things are more or less lime you describe, but people make an exception for Trump.
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This is the kind of thing that, if it turns out to be true, makes me angry at myself for ever doubting DOGE. Millions upon millions are spent on grift that only ever makes life worse for any conscientious law-abiding person. If it requires torching actually useful institutions because they're too enmeshed with the grift, well, too bad. Should have not done the enmeshing then.
Well so far DOGE.... didn't do much, so even if there is lots of fraud out there, we can happily doubt DOGE by its total lack of accomplishment
How's the defect doing again? Oh right, bigger than ever
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Per Steve Sailer's extensive investigation of SPLC finances, very little of the money here is taxpayer money - the whole point of the SPLC was to maximise unrestricted donations from left-wing Jews so Morris Dees and Jo Levin could keep the money. DOGE wasn't going to find this one - it required old-school criminal investigation.
It's a tough web to disentangle because the reason you would donate your money to the SPLC over other groups is that the SPLC works with law enforcement and has federal connections.
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"Dangerous right wing hate groups" are so thin on the ground they literally can't hold a meeting without funding from the Deep State funneled through NGO cutouts like the SPLC. I'm reminded of the tale of the anarchist newspaper in which every one of the dozens of editors, employees and writers was an intelligence agent or informant for a different government. "Anarchy" groups were a whole thing for intelligence services to conceal their doings back in the early 20th century. If you've heard of a "white supremacist", odds are good he's being promoted by teh glowies.
Whether that's true or not, I don't think it applies in this case, since the SPLC's definition of "white supremacist" is probably so broad that it certainly includes large numbers of people who are not glowies.
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Yeah, I had an idea a few years back of starting a "militia group," charging each recruit a few thousand dollars, and having them meet every weekend to crawl around in the mud and do jumping jacks.
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This should add credence to the belief that e.g. the groypers are "controlled opposition". But it likely won't; the lesson of ECHELON, AT&T Room 641A, and the Snowden revelations is that conspiracy theories are never credible even when there's precedent.
The only ways I can think of in which groypers help any elite groups is that they stir infighting among right-wingers and make it easier for some groups to raise money under the guise of fighting extremism.
However, both of those things could also be explained by the simpler theory that the groypers are genuine in their political beliefs, so I don't know why the theory that they are controlled opposition would be more credible.
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The Man Who Was Thursday?
It wasn't an anarchist newspaper, but the gist of that is correct. And so, let me quote:
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It’s very telling that the mainstream left-wing media is completely ignoring this story as I type these words.
I have little compassion for the SPLC. They were one of the first people to accuse RooshV of starting a hate group in an era when RooshV’s forum was one of the few online spaces where men could feel supported, in an era that was so “woke” and man-hating that Al Franken’s career was ruined for putting his hands above a woman’s breasts in a picture which was obviously intended to be a joke.
The problem the SPLC and similar institutions which call out men for being “misogynistic” is that they have become leftists who look the other way, ignoring the widespread misandry coming from the left.
They also went after Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz for being anti-Islamic extremists/racists (they eventually settled this with an apology).
Harris I can get even if I wouldn't defend it. He dared to defend Charles Murray after all.
The Nawaz one was just particularly grating . Reminded me of a lot of leftists who don't actually know or care about Islam but feel justified in taking a stance on it based on how it fits their own domestic political battles (this is actually my charitable take: the alternative is that they got taken in by anti-reform Muslims). Absolute no sense of care in how they use their supposed expertise.
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I heard of it last night on one of those NPR news summaries (yesterday's NPR), and this morning it's everywhere: AP, CBS, ABC, NBC.
It finally got some attention. On the New York Times it was buried, placed under the fold, and the headline is deceptive: “Justice Dept. Charges Prominent Civil Rights Group With Financial Crimes”.
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The meme "The demand for racism outstrips the supply" is being validated in the most hilarious way possible.
Is it a meme if it's true?
I would also even change "racism" for "hate" in general. The demand for hate of all kinds vastly outstrips the supply in the west.
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How is paying informants a sign of demand outstripping the supply? Seems like pretending the story is about something else to dunk.
There's a thin line between informants and agitators.
Plus an informant could easily just make up random salacious shit and bang both parties are helped
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Fair.
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KKK meetings made up of 1 FBI guy, 1 CIA guy, 1 SPLC guy and 1 undercover journalist.
You left out the "borderline retarded 16 year old guy looking for a friend."
It would be hilarious if it wasn't tragic, the feds tried to entrap a literal retard (like literally) with a fed fem agent who pretended to be his girlfirend, egging him on to do a terrorism. Poor sod.
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"Isn't anybody here a real sheep?"
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relevant Far Side
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The Man who was Thursday
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And broken up when the undercover FBI agent starts suggesting actual serious criminal activity and the undercover journalist calls the local cops on him.
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If they're not all aware of each other's status, that just looks like an earnest Klan meeting. Didn't it come out that a majority (or near majority) of the Malheur occupiers were informants, including some of the leaders?
Honestly, some required coordination of this sort of thing might make some sense, but I'm sure it's a confidentiality risk to investigations.
Except that everyone's constantly hinting at doing illegal stuff but nobody wants to be the first person to explicitly suggest it. You can bet there's a lot of "We need to DO something" combined with ample hemming and hawing. I bet it's pretty funny.
Oh my God. Every committee I've ever been in has been has been run by the CIA! How could I not see it?!
Have you read the WWII CIA sabotage manual? Starting on page 28 sounds a lot like what you're suggesting. Of course, it's meant to plausibly sound like normal organizational issues.
True. I’m just tickled by the idea.
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Depending on the day it could have been the majority. The prosecution admitted to 15, defense said it was higher.
Malheur Trial Defense Team Seeks More Info On Government Informants
Similar many if not most of those in the kidnapping plot of Gretchen were feds. The feds admitted to at least 4 defense says 12.
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I am dying. The meme is that the demand for racism vastly outstrips the supply leading to things like the Jussie Smolet situation. The reality is so, so, so much more entertaining. It's pretty well-established that the going rate for bribing American politicians is shockingly low (according to the US Sentencing Commision, median amount is $45k-65k). From the indictment, between 2014 and 2023 the SPLC paid an informant more than a million dollars to steal documents for them. Oh, and also they paid somebody else a measly $6k to be the fall guy for the first informant's theft. Wonder how he's gonna feel knowing he could have held out for so much more?
I believe that the demand for active, violent white racism probably outstrips the supply here in the US. However, I don't see how that applies to the SPLC case. Paying informants money with the hope of getting information is not the same thing as paying them money with the hope that their racism justifies your existence.
Money is fungible, and the difference between the two is a perforated line of intent. If you want information, you need your stool pigeon to stay in the group and keep participating.
That said, the SPLC probably has more money than every group they "track" combined, and nobody really cares that much if they just make shit up or fall for 4chan trolling. It does suggest they're trying to find something real rather than just continue justifying their existence, though I do suspect it's mostly in their heads.
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In the case of the SPLC, they are the same thing. The organization only exists as long as donors can be convinced the big scary evil hate organizations actually exist in any meaningful way. When the SPLC was founded, the KKK was an actual social force that had real political heft in the South. They are now a joke in internet memes. The biggest "racist gathering" in recent memory, Charlottesville's "Unite the Right" appears to be at least partially funded and organized by the SPLC themselves. There are functionally zero active, violent, White race groups in the US, and thats a big problem for the SPLC, because thats their entire raison d'etre. Its not that demand outstrips the supply, its that the supply is entirely fictional.
Would it be fair to say the views of “Unite the Right” people is just the median or center left view of an under 35 voter today? The worst thing they chanted was “The Jews will not replace us” which it feels like the majority of people share that view now.
It was specifically organized to protest the then-planned removal of General Lee's statue. I'm guessing it's maybe fair to go as far to say that current Democrats would prefer to just memory-hole the entire leftist activist wave of vandalism and removal that (mostly) targeted Confederate monuments and lasted many years, coinciding with BLM-adjacent acts of vandalism and arson. In that sense, I think you're correct.
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I guess if by “Jews” you mean Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Mark Zuckerberg then yes.
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Mind you, what a politician risks when taking a bribe is a tiresome lawsuit and some PR damage. What an informant risks when leaking an extremist militia's secrets is a bullet to the brain. In theory, it makes sense that the latter would demand greater hazard pay.
The US actually throws politicians in jail fairly regularly for corruption and bribery. Not often enough for my tastes, but it happens. Just yesterday a congress critter resigned minutes before being expelled by a bipartisan vote, and the federal charges are probably going to stick.
The informant the SPLC paid 7 figures for was fundraising for the most milquetoast-ass Nazi group possible who seem to be decades removed from any convictions for violent crimes. Safe? No, but La Cosa Nostra or the cartels they are not.
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