The Wall Street Journal editorial board tackled the recent Trump Justice Department indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in a Friday editorial that both questioned whether the indictment was part of President Donald Trump’s campaign of retribution and offered a scathing indictment of the SPLC’s behavior.

“President Trump’s lawfare against his political opponents is destructive, but that doesn’t mean every case is unjustified,” began the editorial, noting that its hard to take the indictment out of the context of Trump’s blatant weaponization of the DOJ to target his political enemies. The WSJ has become a primary target of Trump’s vitriol against the media, as the paper has published leading scoops into Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein, his tariffs, and other unflattering stories.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced 11 charges against the SPLC earlier in the week, ranging from bank fraud to conspiracy to money laundering. The charges relate to accusations that the group paid some $3 million covertly to informants inside some of the country’s most notorious hate groups, which the SPLC monitors.

“The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred,” Blanche said of the indictment.

SPLC interim CEO and president Bryan Fair vowed to fight the indictment in a statement saying, “Taking on violent hate and extremist groups is among the most dangerous work there is, and we believe it is also among the most important work we do. The actions by the DOJ will not shake our resolve to fight for justice and ensure the promise of the Civil Rights Movement becomes a reality for all.”

The editorial board offered its take on the allegations:

Using informants to warn about threats of violence may be defensible. But the charges, if true, reveal a problematic symbiosis between the SPLC and its informant sources. One informant was allegedly the member of a chat group that helped plan the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va. The source, who was paid $270,000 between 2015 and 2023, “made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC,” the indictment says. The Charlottesville protests proved to be a great fund-raising event for the SPLC, with sizable donations from George Clooney, Apple Inc., and others.

The indictment also says at least two SPLC field sources, including a former chairman of the National Alliance and a leader of the National Socialist Party of America, were featured as “Extremist Files” on the SPLC website at the same time they received money from the SPLC. One received more than $140,000 between 2016 and 2023 while the second received more than $70,000 between 2014 and 2016.

The board concluded by noting the SPLC will certainly have its day in court to defend its practices, but added, “The donations to hate groups are all the more suspect because in recent years the SPLC has itself spread hate.”
The board hammered the SPLC for labeling “mainstream and nonthreatening conservative groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council and Do No Harm, which works against race preferences in medicine,” as hate groups.

“To the extent the money encouraged or sustained the racist groups, tacitly or otherwise, SPLC benefited from perpetuating racial division. A court will decide if that’s illegal, but it’s certainly disreputable,” concluded the Journal.

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