SPLC asks court to toss indictment as political retaliation

The Southern Poverty Law Center filed a 47-page motion on May 26, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, asking the court to dismiss all 11 federal counts against it on grounds. The Fifth Amendment's Clause bars the government from bringing or escalating charges in retaliation for a defendant exercising constitutional rights, a doctrine the Supreme Court established in Blackledge v. Perry (1974) and refined in United States v. Goodwin (1982). SPLC's lawyers wrote: "This is the very definition of a vindictive prosecution. The Court should dismiss the indictment as a violation of due process."

The SPLC's roots are in Montgomery, Alabama, where Morris Dees and Joseph Levin Jr. founded the organization in 1971 as a small civil rights litigation clinic. Their founding strategy was to use civil lawsuits to hold racist organizations financially accountable rather than relying solely on federal prosecutors or legislation. The tactic worked: in 1987, Dees and the SPLC won a $7 million civil judgment against the United Klans of America on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald, whose son Michael was lynched by UKA members in Mobile, Alabama. The judgment forced the UKA to hand over its national headquarters building and effectively dissolved the organization. The SPLC went on to win similar civil judgments that dismantled the White Aryan Resistance and the Aryan Nations. For five decades, the organization also tracked hate groups through its Intelligence Project and shared that intelligence with local law enforcement agencies and the FBI.

The 11-count indictment returned by a federal grand jury in Montgomery in April 2026 charged the SPLC with six counts of wire fraud under 18 U.S.C. § 1343, four counts of false statements to a federally insured bank under 18 U.S.C. § 1014, and one count of conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. The DOJ alleged that between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in donated funds to paid informants embedded inside extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, while routing payments through fictitious bank accounts bearing names like "Fox Photography" and "Rare Books Warehouse." The SPLC acknowledged the payments but said the informant program gathered intelligence on planned attacks by white supremacist groups, and that it shared information with the FBI and local law enforcement, a fact Acting AG Todd Blanche later confirmed.

The SPLC reported $129 million in total revenue in fiscal year 2024, nearly all from private donations, and held $786.7 million in net assets, including a $731.9 million endowment built to support future civil rights work. The organization receives minimal federal funding; according to tax filings reviewed by ProPublica, federal grants have amounted to a small fraction of its annual budget. The DOJ's prosecution therefore doesn't threaten federal grant income, but a conviction could expose the SPLC to asset forfeiture, reputational damage that reduces future donations, and disruption of its ongoing civil rights litigation on behalf of Black and Latino communities in the South, immigrants facing deportation, and LGBTQ+ individuals subject to discrimination.

The motion's core argument was that the prosecution was political retaliation, not law enforcement. FBI and IRS investigators had probed the same informant program between 2019 and 2020 under the first Trump administration and closed it without charges. The investigation was reopened after the SPLC became a repeated public target of Trump administration officials. When prosecutors notified SPLC's lawyers that charges were forthcoming, they had not interviewed a single current SPLC employee and had sought no new documents. At a meeting SPLC's defense team requested to avert the indictment, DOJ officials said the decision to charge had already been made. The motion called this pattern of procedural irregularities evidence that the indictment was "a foregone conclusion" driven by political directive.

The motion catalogued specific statements from administration officials as direct evidence of retaliatory intent. Trump publicly called the SPLC "one of the greatest political scams in American History" and "a total scam run by the Democrats." Harmeet Dhillon, the DOJ's assistant attorney general for civil rights, said in a media interview that the indictment was "personal" to her because she had journalist friends and clients who were targeted by SPLC's hate-group designations. FBI Director Kash Patel announced on October 3, 2025 that the bureau was severing its relationship with the SPLC and called it a "partisan smear machine." The motion argued these statements, coming from the president, the acting attorney general's top civil rights official, and the FBI director, constituted direct evidence of the "genuine animus" that drove the prosecution.

Acting AG Todd Blanche's false public statement became a focal point of the broader litigation. At an April 21, 2026 news conference, Blanche claimed the government had "no information" suggesting the SPLC had shared intelligence from its informants with law enforcement. SPLC's lawyers filed motions showing this was false. Rather than issue a formal correction, the DOJ cited a later Fox News Sunday interview in which Blanche acknowledged it was "true that over the years they have selectively shared with law enforcement" and said "there's no dispute there." The SPLC argued that a false public statement from the nation's acting top law enforcement officer, retracted only under pressure, was further evidence that the prosecution's factual premise was built on bad faith.

Federal courts have recognized the selective and vindictive prosecution doctrine since Wayte v. United States (1985), where the Supreme Court held that prosecution decisions can't target defendants for exercising rights. The Court set a demanding evidentiary standard in United States v. Armstrong (1996), requiring defendants to show both discriminatory effect and discriminatory intent to obtain discovery. Legal experts noted that SPLC's case is unusually strong because the documented animus came not from line prosecutors but from the president, the acting attorney general's civil rights chief, and the FBI director, and because the 2019 investigation had already been closed without charges. Former federal prosecutor Kyle Boynton told CBS News he didn't think "any prosecutor with white-collar experience would look at this indictment and believe it makes out the elements of a crime."

The motion drew explicit parallel to the May 22, 2026 dismissal of federal smuggling charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia by U.S. District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. in Nashville, Tennessee. Crenshaw, nominated by President Obama and confirmed 92-to-0 in 2016, found that the DOJ's prosecution was vindictive because the government had closed its investigation of Abrego Garcia's 2022 traffic stop, then reopened it only after he won a civil lawsuit challenging his deportation to El Salvador. Crenshaw wrote that the prosecution was "an abuse of prosecuting power." SPLC's lawyers cited his ruling as persuasive authority for their parallel theory. The government had not yet filed its response to the SPLC motion as of May 26; a trial date of October 5, 2026 had been tentatively set at arraignment.

Bryan Fair, a University of Alabama constitutional law professor who had taught constitutional law for decades, took leave to serve as SPLC's interim president and CEO after former CEO Margaret Huang resigned in early 2026 amid staff tensions unrelated to the DOJ investigation. Fair said on May 26: "The government can't prosecute the SPLC as payback for its protected speech. It violates basic constitutional rights." The SPLC has continued filing civil rights cases during the prosecution on behalf of Black families in Alabama, immigrants detained at the southern border, and LGBTQ+ students and teachers in states with restrictive education laws. U.S. District Judge Emily C. Marks, nominated by Trump in 2019 and confirmed 89-to-5, will rule on the vindictive prosecution motion in the Middle District of Alabama.