FBI Director Kash Patel described the indictments against the Southern Poverty Law Center this week in stark terms, saying the organization ran a methodical scheme to defraud donors of three million dollars, used shell companies and illicit banking structures to hide money, and funded at least eight hate groups it was simultaneously claiming to fight.
Professor William Jacobson, clinical professor of law and director of the securities law clinic at Cornell Law School, founder of Legal Insurrection, and someone who has been tracking SPLC’s activities since 2009, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to argue that the indictment almost certainly represents the beginning of a much larger reckoning rather than its end.
Jacobson said he believes the indictment is extremely detailed, names names, and describes conduct that is far more specific and far more serious than the crisis management line SPLC has been feeding to sympathetic media, which is that they were simply paying informants the way any organization fighting hate would do. He said the indictment describes shell companies, fictitious accounts, suspicious money transfers that triggered bank fraud detection systems, and alleged lies told to banks when those systems flagged the transactions. That is not a description of routine informant payments. It is a description of a deliberate financial concealment structure, and the bank fraud charges reflect that distinction.
His first piece on SPLC appeared in 2009, and by 2010 he had already identified what he described as a pattern of fabricating or vastly inflating the existence of hate groups for fundraising purposes. He investigated a Ku Klux Klan group that SPLC had listed on its hate map in Rhode Island, where he is from, and found no evidence the group existed. He called the state police hate crimes unit, which also said it had no knowledge of any such group. The same thing happened in 2012 with a neo-Nazi group SPLC listed in Rhode Island. He said over the following fifteen years he wrote nearly fifty pieces documenting how SPLC’s hate map, which is its primary fundraising tool, was built on inflated and in some cases apparently invented groups. The inflation methodology was straightforward: if a group listed on its own website claimed to have thirty chapters, SPLC would count each chapter as a separate hate group even if none of them had any verifiable existence beyond a line on a website. That is how the organization produced dramatic annual announcements of record-high hate group numbers that reliably triggered waves of donor contributions.
Jacobson said the SPLC’s business model was essentially designed by co-founder Morris Dees, who made his fortune in direct mail fundraising before co-founding the organization, and who understood from the beginning that creating the perception of an overwhelming and ever-growing threat was the mechanism for sustaining donor revenue. He said he was personally on SPLC’s mailing list as a college student in the late 1970s and donated small amounts because he genuinely believed the organization was focused on combating violent racist groups, which was its stated mission at the time. The pivot to listing organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom, Moms for Liberty, the Family Research Council, Rand Paul, and Ben Carson as hate groups or extremists came later, as the fundraising machine discovered that expanding the definition of hate was the most efficient way to expand the donor base and the revenue stream.
Proft raised the question of the FBI’s partnership with SPLC under the Biden administration and asked what accountability should look like for current and former bureau leadership who were working in concert with an organization that may have been engaged in criminal conduct for years. Jacobson said SPLC functioned essentially as a domestic political terrorist organization in the sense that landing on its list could be career-ending for individuals and company-ending for organizations, and that the terror the list created was amplified by the corporate partners who agreed to use SPLC designations as the basis for deplatforming decisions. He described being told by a client relationship management platform that it would expel his organization if it appeared on the SPLC list, calling that a vivid illustration of how the SPLC’s list functioned as a private extortion mechanism backed by the implicit threat of corporate enforcement. He said Amazon, PayPal, and other major companies participated in that enforcement network, and that the roughly eight hundred million dollars in total assets SPLC is believed to have accumulated could not have been built without significant support from corporate America alongside the celebrity and foundation donors who have received more attention.
He offered an analogy he said is not perfect but captures the essential fraud: it is like taking your car to a mechanic for a state inspection, being told something is broken and being charged to fix it, without being told the mechanic broke it himself. SPLC allegedly created or supported the very hate it was fundraising to combat, did not disclose that to donors, and pocketed the contributions. An arsonist collecting money to put out fires he set is another version of the same scheme, and the specific allegation that SPLC was funding an organizer of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, whose name became the central fundraising reference in SPLC’s donor appeals for the following several years, is the most explosive version of that dynamic if it is proven.
Jacobson said the question of what former FBI Directors James Comey and Christopher Wray knew, what former Obama officials including Tina Chen knew when she was brought in to conduct SPLC’s internal review in 2019, and what senior figures across the Biden Justice Department knew about the organization they were treating as a trusted partner and policy adviser, are questions that need to be pressed and answered. He said his own reporting from 2009 onward was publicly available and plainly documented the scam, and that any serious due diligence by anyone partnering with SPLC would have found it immediately. The failure to find it was not a failure of information. It was a failure of will.