US civil rights organisation 'funded and promoted the same racist groups its own activists campaigned against'

In a statement, Bryan Fair, the SPLC’s chief executive, said the allegations were "false" and the justice department's action "will not shake our resolve to fight for justice and ensure the promise of the civil rights movement becomes a reality for all".

But an Alabama grand jury returned an 11-count indictment against the civil rights organisation, with charges including wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

It accused the group of "actively promoting racist groups at the same time that the SPLC was denouncing the same groups on its website".

Todd Blanche, acting US Attorney General, alleged the group was "doing the exact opposite of what it’s told its donors it was doing – not dismantling extremism, but funding it".

The indictment document alleges SPLC had a field source who played a "leadership and organisational" role in the 2017 "Unite the Right" event in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The source allegedly helped plan the event, attend it, "made racist postings under the direction of the SPLC" and helped bus in several attendees.

That rally has long been used as a way to tie Donald Trump and his supporters to neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups.

The field source was allegedly paid by the organisation through "bank accounts connected to a series of fictitious entities".

The indictment continued: "The covert nature of the accounts allowed the SPLC to disguise the true nature, source, ownership, and control of the fraudulently obtained donated money the SPLC paid the field sources.

"In order to keep the scheme going, the SPLC made a series of false statements related to the operation of the accounts."

Prosecutors alleged SPLC funneled more than $3million to sources between 2014 and 2023, with fictious entities "Center Investigative Agency", "Fox Photography", and "Tech Writers Group" established to conceal the transfer of funds.

In 2020, Joe Biden announced his candidacy for President in a three-minute long video, the large majority of which he spent condemning the Unite the Right rally and Donald Trump.

The then-77-year-old said the event made him realise the threat represented by Mr Trump was "unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime" and warned that consecutive terms would "fundamentally alter the character of this nation".

And in 2024, one month after Kamala Harris was endorsed by the SPLC Action Fund, she accused Mr Trump of coddling the attendees of the Unite the Right.

Mr Blanche was joined at his press conference by FBI Director Kash Patel, who described the paid informant programme as "a serious and egregious violation of a group that purported to dismantle violent extremist groups, but in turn, actually only fueled the hatred".

The SPLC produces an annual "Hate Map", documenting the locations of hate groups and classifying them into categories including "Radical Traditional Catholicism", "Male Supremacy", "Antisemitism" and "Conspiracy Propagandists".

SPLC provided information about hate groups to the FBI until October 2025, when Mr Patel cut ties to the advocacy group and said: "Their so-called 'hate map' has been used to defame mainstream Americans and even inspired violence."

That decision followed the assassination of Charlie Kirk, whose organisation was added to the Hate Map as an anti-Government organisation.

When asked if previous FBI leaders were aware of the field sources, Mr Blanche said the SPLC "never told anybody in law enforcement that they were paying off the Ku Klux Klan".

In a previous video statement, Mr Fair said the organisation "frequently shared what we learned from informants with local and federal law enforcement, including the FBI".

He added: "Today, the federal Government has been weaponised to dismantle the rights of our nation's most vulnerable people and any organisation like ours that stands in the breach.

"We will not be intimidated into silence or contrition, and we will not abandon our mission or the communities we serve."