The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has been charged with fraud for allegedly secretly funneling more than $3 million to violent extremist groups including the Klu Klux Klan (KKK). 

Located in Montgomery, Alabama, the left-wing non-profit has been accused by the Department of Justice (DoJ) of executing a shadowy scheme from 2014 until 2023.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the center improperly paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups without disclosing the payments to donors. 

However, the center's chief executive, Bryan Fair, said payments were only made to confidential informants in order to monitor threats of violence from extremist groups. 

He said the information the center received was frequently shared with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, and that it helps save lives.

'We are outraged by the false allegations levied against SPLC,' Fair said.

The SPLC was launched in 1971 to combat discrimination in the aftermath of Jim Crow-era segregation and it now aims to further the civil rights movement. 

Fair's organization specializes in filing civil suits for monetary damages on behalf of victims of hate group violence, with a history of targeting the KKK. 

As part of its agenda, the SPLC tracks extremist groups, white supremacists and anti-government militias. It publishes an annual 'hate map' locating each one. 

However, the DoJ has alleged that the civil rights group defrauded donors by using their money to fund the same extremism that it claimed to be fighting. 

On Tuesday, a grand jury in the Middle District of Alabama returned an 11-count indictment charging the SPLC with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. 

According to the indictment, payments of at least $3 million went to informants affiliated with the KKK, the Aryan Nations, the National Socialist Party of America and other groups between 2014 and 2023.

Fair said any payments made to extremists were used to monitor threats of violence, adding that some elements of the program was kept quiet to protect the safety of informants.

The non-profit is primarily funded through donor contributions. It received just under $732 million as of last October, according to the center.

Its 'Intelligence Project' has grown over the years, and the organization has faced criticism for some of the groups it has added to the tracker. 

Conservatives have said adding some groups unfairly maligns them because of their viewpoints. 

The conservative religious organization Focus on the Family was added in part because of its anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric, for instance.

This criticism escalated after the September 2025 assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a college campus in Utah. 

Kirk's death brought renewed attention to the center's inclusion of his group, Turning Point USA.

The center included a section on Turning Point in a report titled The Year in Hate and Extremism 2024 that described the group as 'A Case Study of the Hard Right in 2024.'

A month after Kirk's death, FBI Director Kash Patel announced that the bureau would sever its relationship with the center, asserting that the organization had been turned into a 'partisan smear machine' while criticizing its 'hate map.'

This marked a dramatic rethinking of longstanding FBI partnerships with prominent civil rights groups.

The DoJ's indictment claims that the center told donors the money would be used to help dismantle violent extremist groups. 

However, it did not disclose that some of the funds would actually be used to pay members of those groups. 

FBI Director Kash Patel accused the center of engaging in 'a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public.'

'They lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups, and actually turned around and paid the leaders of these very extremist groups - even utilizing the funds to have these groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes,' Patel said in a statement. 

'That is illegal – and this is an ongoing investigation against all individuals involved.'

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche accused the SPLC of 'manufacturing racism to justify its existence.'

'Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked,' he said. 

'This Department of Justice will hold the SPLC and every other fraudulent organization operating with the same deceptive playbook accountable. No entity is above the law.'

However, legal experts have said the DoJ's indictment is unusual. 

'That's a new way of going after a charity - I'm somewhat surprised,' said Phil Hackney, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. 

Typically, when a nonprofit group is charged with fraud it is because someone is accused of pilfering donated funds to line their own pockets, Hackney said.

But in this case, the government is targeting the method and intent with which a nonprofit used its money, he said.

The government is looking at the informant payments 'as an intent to further hate - and I doubt Southern Poverty Law Center had that intent,' Hackney said.

The law has never required nonprofit groups to hand donors a line-item receipt for every sensitive operation, said Todd Spodek, a federal criminal defense attorney with Spodek Law Group PC in Manhattan.

'From a defense perspective, this isn't a fraud case. It is a political attack on standard investigative tradecraft,' said Spodek. 

'We are talking about high stakes intelligence work where discretion isn't a form of deception, it is a matter of survival.'

In order to win a conviction, the government will have to prove the center engaged in a deliberate scheme to lie, Spodek said.

'They simply cannot. Silence of tactical details is not a crime, and you don't get to call it fraud just because the government dislikes the methods used to get results,' he said. 

'The prosecution is trying to turn operational discretion into a felony, which is a massive overreach,' he added. 

Fair said the organization began working with informants to monitor threats of violence during a time of increased risk and the program was kept quiet to protect informants' safety.

'When we began working with informants, we were living in the shadow of the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators, and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system,' Fair said. 

'There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives.'

Other nonprofit groups also have sent people undercover or used confidential informants to get information. 

The nonprofit conservative group Project Veritas, founded in 2010, is best known for conducting hidden camera stings that have embarrassed news outlets, labor organizations and Democratic politicians.

The anti-abortion organization Center for Medical Progress was behind secretly recorded videos of Planned Parenthood executives in California. 

Their videos were then edited in a way to falsely suggest that the executives were selling fetal remains. 

The footage triggered several investigations and Planned Parenthood was cleared of any wrongdoing, but two of the activists with Center for Medical Progress were ultimately convicted of illegally recording someone without consent.

The Daily Mail has contacted the SPLC for comment.