The politically motivated indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center is an alarming sign of how corrupted the U.S. Justice Department has become since President Trump returned to power.
The accompanying lies and gaslighting from Republican officials and right-wing media demonstrate how dishonest MAGA leaders can be when demonizing their political opponents — or pretending that racism doesn’t exist.
The Southern Poverty Law Center may be best known for bankrupting a Klan organization by securing a multi-million-dollar judgment for the mother of a Black teenager who had been abducted and brutally lynched by Klansmen in Alabama in 1981. As part of its efforts to infiltrate the Klan and other violent extremist groups, the organization sometimes used paid informants — something the FBI does routinely when investigating criminal organizations.
The Trump administration claims that the organization was somehow defrauding donors by using paid informants to help expose and dismantle hate groups. This makes no sense. Multiple donors have told The Intercept “that by using its money to root out information on hate groups, the [Southern Poverty Law Center] was doing exactly what they hoped it would with their dollars.”
The indictment is even more ridiculous when you learn that the organization repeatedly shared information gained from its informants with law enforcement agencies, including the FBI. In fact, during the first Trump administration, information from one of its informants was reportedly used by the Justice Department in its prosecution of someone who had lied to federal agents about his ties to a white supremacist group during a security clearance background check.
Court filings by the organization urge Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to stop lying about the government having been aware of its use of informants. But lying is central to the Trump White House’s political strategy.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt falsely claimed the indictment proves that the deadly “Unite the Right” gathering in Charlottesville was a “hoax.” Even for Leavitt, that’s a lulu of a lie — enough to anger the actual white supremacists who are proud of organizing the event. But it was a popular lie: Pizzagate conspiracy theorist and MAGA pundit Jack Posobiec claimed that “Charlottesville was staged” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
And during Trump’s embarrassingly incoherent interview with 60 Minutes — in a part that was not included in the edited broadcast —Trump claimed that Charlottesville was “all funded by the southern law,” adding, “And it was done to make me look bad” as “a part of rigging the election.”
This rhetoric contributes to a Big Lie being promoted by MAGA: that the bogus indictment somehow proves that racism and violent right-wing extremism aren’t real.
“I’ve never met anybody who hates somebody because of the color of their skin,” Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) told the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, while calling for Southern Poverty Law Center staff to be “thrown in jail for life.”
Blanche, on behalf of the Justice Department, claimed that the Southern Poverty Law Center “is manufacturing racism to justify its existence.”
That is both ridiculous and dangerous. Racism is very real. The proponents of racism, white nationalism, white supremacism and antisemitism are more visible, vocal and connected to powerful politicians than they have been in decades. Armed hate groups target people for violence while preparing for a broader civil war.
That makes it all the more outrageous that the MAGA majority on the Supreme Court used the myth that racism is no longer a problem to justify dismantling the Voting Rights Act.
Generations of Americans fought, bled and died to win passage of the Voting Rights Act, which was a defining step toward making the promise of American democracy real for people who had long been shut out of the halls of power. With the Republican justices completing its demolition, politicians in the former Confederate states are moving with lightning speed to abolish Black-held political offices.
At the same time, Trump’s Justice Department has destroyed its voting rights section and turned the Civil Rights Division’s mission on its head, driven by the fiction that white Christian men face more discrimination and persecution than any other group in America. And Trump issues orders accusing anti-fascist activists of being “domestic terrorists” and threatening to punish opposition to “traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
It’s all part of a larger corruption of truth, law and history.
Trump set the stage the moment he was sworn in last year and pardoned supporters who had stormed the U.S. Capitol in 2021. Right-wing media is flooded with propaganda designed to turn those violent criminals into heroes and martyrs.
And that set the stage for the Justice Department seeking to expunge the convictions of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys convicted of the most serious charges from Jan. 6. Think of it as a new Lost Cause myth for a new Jim Crow era.
Whatever this Justice Department is devoted to, other than submission to Trump’s whims, it is not the rule of law. Whatever the Supreme Court’s MAGA majority is seeking to accomplish, it is not equality under law.
We have a lot of repair work to do. Let’s begin with truth-telling about Trump’s Department of Injustice. And let’s use this year’s elections to start holding Trump and his destructive team accountable.
