Anyway....here is the actual story:
The Southern Poverty Law Center has been charged with defrauding donors with payments to extremist informants.
apnews.com
The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted Tuesday on federal fraud charges alleging it improperly paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups without disclosing the payments to donors, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said.
The center’s CEO Bryan Fair said the payments went to confidential informants in order to monitor threats of violence from the extremist groups — and that the information the center received was frequently shared with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. The information gathered by the informants helped save lives, Fair said Tuesday.
“We are outraged by the false allegations levied against SPLC,” Fair said.
The Justice Department alleged that the civil rights group defrauded donors by using their money to fund the same extremism that it claimed to be fighting. The indictment says payments of at least $3 million went to informants affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, the National Socialist Party of America and other groups between 2014 and 2023.
The charges, filed in Alabama where the center is based, include wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. "
----
The piece continues:
Indictment alleges the center ‘fraudulently obtained’ donated money
The indictment says the center told donors the money would be used to help dismantle violent extremist groups, but did not disclose that some of the funds would actually be used to pay members of those groups. Some legal experts say it’s an unusual legal approach.
“That’s a new way of going after a charity — I’m somewhat surprised,” said Phil Hackney, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Typically, when a nonprofit group is charged with fraud, it’s because someone is accused of pilfering donated funds to line their own pockets, Hackney said.
But in this case, the government is targeting the method and intent in which a nonprofit used its money, he said.
The government is looking at the informant payments “as an intent to further hate — and I doubt Southern Poverty Law Center had that intent,” Hackney said.
The law has never required nonprofit groups to hand donors a line-item receipt for every sensitive operation, said Todd Spodek, a federal criminal defense attorney with Spodek Law Group P.C. in Manhattan.
“From a defense perspective, this isn’t a fraud case. It is a political attack on standard investigative tradecraft,” said Spodek. “We are talking about high stakes intelligence work where discretion isn’t a form of deception, it is a matter of survival.”
In order to win a conviction, the government will have to prove the center engaged in a deliberate scheme to lie, Spodek said.
“They simply cannot. Silence of tactical details is not a crime, and you don’t get to call it fraud just because the government dislikes the methods used to get results,” he said. He later continued, “The prosecution is trying to turn operational discretion into a felony, which is a massive overreach.”
Other organizations also have relied on undercover workers
Other nonprofit groups also have sent people undercover or used confidential informants to get information. For instance, the nonprofit conservative group Project Veritas, founded in 2010, is best known for conducting hidden camera stings that have embarrassed news outlets, labor organizations and Democratic politicians.
The anti-abortion organization Center for Medical Progress was behind secretly recorded videos of Planned Parenthood executives in California. The videos were then edited in a way to falsely suggest that the executives were selling fetal remains. The videos triggered several investigations, and Planned Parenthood was cleared of any wrongdoing but two of the activists with Center for Medical Progress were ultimately convicted of illegally recording someone without consent.
The center says the informants helped monitor threats of violence
Fair says the organization began working with informants to monitor threats of violence during a time of increased risk, and the program was kept quiet to protect informants’ safety.
“When we began working with informants, we were living in the shadow of the height of
the Civil Rights Movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators, and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system,” Fair said. “There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives.”
------
I predict a speedy “not guilty” verdict if it makes it to the jury.
www.breitbart.com
