When acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel, two men who have appeared a little too eager to make Donald Trump happy, announced a criminal indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center, it wasn’t long before legal observers took a closer look at the case and noticed its glaring flaws.
Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, an MS NOW legal analyst, explained, “Here’s the central thesis of the case: The Justice Department wants us to believe that one of the nation’s leading civil rights groups — the people who broke the Klan and continue to expose the white supremacist groups that crop up in its wake — is actually supporting racism and domestic terror, that they’re in fact responsible for whipping up the frenzy.”
The Trump Justice Department’s indictment, Vance added, predicates its wire fraud charges “on the assumption that people who donated to SPLC would be unhappy that their dollars were used to fund paid informants who obtained inside information about what white supremacists and other groups were up to.”
In other words, the case is rooted in the idea that SPLC donors might oppose the civil rights organization using resources to infiltrate extremists groups through a program the center has since shuttered. The organization has vowed to mount a vigorous defense and has accused the Republican administration of targeting it for political reasons — an accusation that’s difficult to discard given Team Trump’s recent pattern.
Under the circumstances, many have started to wonder if this dubious case isn’t really just a brazen political exercise, stemming from the president’s preoccupation with targeting his perceived political foes.
