Independent media host Joy Reid blasted President Donald Trump’s Justice Department over their “absolutely insane” indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

This week, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced an indictment against the group alleging financial misconduct linked to its use of informants embedded within extremist groups, including one connected to the white nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville that resulted in the killing of Heather Heyer.

Well-known defense attorney Abbe Lowell is defending the SPLC in the case.

On Friday’s episode of The Joy Reid Show, the host traced the roots of the Trump administration’s animus toward the SPLC and ripped the indictment:

CHRIS WRAY: But let me also say, and I would also add to that, that racially motivated violent extremists over recent years have been responsible for the most lethal activity in the U.S. Now this year, the lethal attacks, domestic terrorism lethal attacks we have, have I think all fit in the category of anti-government, anti-authority, which covers everything from anarchist violent extremist to militia types. We don’t really think in terms of left-right. That’s not the way we look at the world.

JOY-ANN REID: We don’t look at it left, right. They look at who’s the danger. And it is racially motivated, violent extremists of the white supremacist variety. He’s just being clinical and saying it, right? And he’s a Republican.

And the Southern Poverty Law Center, and people went crazy, by the way, when he said that. They went absolutely batsh*t when he’s said that, just as they had in 2015 or 2011, actually, when the Department of Homeland Security under Janet Napolitano requested a, and a report on the domestic threats to the country that focused on white nationalist extremism.

Again, because it’s a Black president, and they were trying to see how much more intense that kind of domestic terrorism threat was going to get within there. They actually had to withdraw the report because the right went so crazy. And the man who did the report was Black, made it even more crazy on their side. Right.

And now you’ve got the Southern Property Law Center, which has also really p*ssed off the right by focusing on exactly the kinds of extremism. That the groups affiliated with them and therefore with Republicans engage in. They need those far right wingers in their voting base and they don’t want to alienate them and they’re p*ssed off when they get called out.

The SPLC has also produced reports which have p*ssed off Republicans because they have pointed out how many people in Donald Trump’s orbit were tying themselves to white supremacists. People like, I don’t know, Tom Homan, who was meeting up with the Proud Boys and associates of them about deportations.

Or people like Stephen Miller. Somebody who since college has been associated with Richard Spencer, the guy who organized the Unite the Right rally, though they claim that he wasn’t his mentor. He sure did seem like his mentor, Richard Spencer claimed to be his mentor!

And of course, there’s Trump himself, whose racist statements and his racist policies excited the far right, even before he went down that escalator in 2015.

His birtherism, all of his attacks on Obama is what made him, David Duke supported him. There’s a reason that a person like a David Duke would support you, right?

But when the FBI, out of nowhere, cut ties with the SPLC last fall, with the Southern Poverty Law Center last fall it was a signal of what was to come. And then came this very strange indictment naming no donors and no banks that were supposedly defrauded but charging something that is absolutely insane.

Watch above via The Joy Reid Show.

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