The SPLC Allegedly Paid KKK Members $1,200 a Month to Stay in the Klan. A Federal Indictment Says It Also Covered the Cost of Cross-Burning Wood and Fuel.

• $4.1 million total allegedly paid to KKK members and white supremacist informants, per the superseding federal indictment filed June 2, 2026 — U.S. v. SPLC, 2:26-cr-00139-ECM-KFP (M.D. Ala.)
• $1,200/month allegedly paid to two active KKK members (designated F-31 and F-32 in the indictment) to remain in the Klan and serve as SPLC informants — reimbursements for cross-burning wood and gasoline included — Superseding Indictment, Count 3
• $270,000+ allegedly paid to F-37, identified in the indictment as the organizer of the 2017 Charlottesville 'Unite the Right' rally, through the same scheme — Superseding Indictment, Count 7
• $800 million SPLC endowment as of 2024 — the financial scale behind the organization the DOJ now alleges was manufacturing the racism it fundraised to fight — SPLC Form 990, FY 2024

The Southern Poverty Law Center — the Montgomery, Alabama nonprofit that accumulated nearly $800 million in total net assets by designating hate groups — has been charged in a federal superseding indictment with allegedly funding the very organizations it claimed to be fighting.

Filed June 2, 2026 in the Middle District of Alabama (Case No. 2:26-cr-00139-ECM-KFP), the 11-count superseding indictment names the Southern Poverty Law Center as the sole corporate defendant. The government’s theory, as stated by Attorney General Todd Blanche (R): the SPLC allegedly paid Ku Klux Klan members to stay active, remain identifiable as Klansmen, and perform acts of racial intimidation — then fundraised off the incidents those same payments produced.

The SPLC has retained Abbe Lowell, one of Washington’s most prominent defense attorneys, to represent the organization. The SPLC has denied all charges and is presumed innocent. The allegations in the indictment are unproven. What follows is a factual account of what the government has alleged in a public federal charging document.

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According to the superseding indictment, the scheme operated through a network of confidential informants the SPLC recruited from within active hate organizations. Rather than gathering intelligence and handing it to law enforcement, the government alleges, the SPLC paid its informants to remain active and operational — ensuring the organizations continued to exist and continued to generate the incidents the SPLC needed to justify its fundraising.

The indictment designates the informants with alphanumeric codes. Two of the most specific allegations involve F-31 and F-32 — described as active members of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama. According to the charging document, the SPLC paid each of them $1,200 per month not as a fee for providing intelligence, but explicitly to continue holding membership in the KKK, remain identifiable as Klansmen to outside observers, and participate in ongoing KKK activities — including cross-burnings.

The indictment further alleges that F-31 and F-32 submitted expense reimbursements to the SPLC for the purchase of wood and gasoline used in those cross-burnings — and that the SPLC approved and paid those reimbursements. The government contends that SPLC employees with signature authority reviewed and authorized these expense items.

“The SPLC was manufacturing racism to justify its own fundraising. They paid violent racists to remain violent so they could fundraise off those same racists.”

Attorney General Todd Blanche (R), DOJ press statement, June 2, 2026

A third informant, designated F-37 in the indictment, is described in terms consistent with the public profile of the organizer of the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally — one of the most widely publicized white supremacist events in recent American history. According to the indictment, F-37 received more than $270,000 in payments from the SPLC through the same scheme.

A fourth informant, F-9, is described as affiliated with the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi organization. The indictment alleges F-9 received more than $1.2 million in SPLC payments and maintained a personal relationship with a named SPLC employee. The National Alliance payments are covered separately in a sister indictment count.

The superseding indictment breaks the alleged payments into distinct streams. The government contends the total disbursed to KKK members and white supremacist-affiliated informants exceeded $4.1 million across multiple years. The charging document identifies at least four separate payment arrangements, each with its own informant designation:

The government’s theory requires proving that the SPLC knew these informants were active participants in the organizations — not merely observers — and that payments were structured to keep them active rather than to gather and transmit intelligence. That distinction is the crux of the case.

A legitimate informant-handler relationship involves paying sources for information already gathered. What the indictment alleges is different: monthly retainers conditioned on continued membership and participation, including expense reimbursements for the physical materials of cross-burnings. The government will need to prove those conditions were explicit and authorized.

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Attorney General Todd Blanche (R) framed the indictment in unusually direct terms for a sitting AG: the SPLC, he alleged, had built a business model that required the continued existence of the very threats it claimed to be fighting. His statement at the June 2 press conference:

“The SPLC was manufacturing racism to justify its own fundraising. They paid violent racists to remain violent so they could fundraise off those same racists. Every dollar donated to the SPLC to 'fight hate' was potentially funding the hate itself.”

Attorney General Todd Blanche (R), DOJ press statement, June 2, 2026

The “manufacturing racism” theory is the most politically significant element of the indictment — and the hardest to prove. It requires the government to demonstrate not just that the payments were made and that informants remained active, but that SPLC leadership had a conscious intent to perpetuate the hate activity rather than simply monitor it.

The SPLC’s defense will almost certainly argue that paying informants to remain embedded in organizations is a standard investigative journalism and civil rights intelligence-gathering technique — and that the line between “monitoring an organization” and “subsidizing its activities” is genuinely ambiguous. Abbe Lowell, retained as lead defense counsel, is one of the most experienced white-collar defense attorneys in Washington and has handled politically charged federal cases for decades.

What the government has on its side are the expense reimbursements. Paying for intelligence is one thing; paying for wood and gasoline used in cross-burnings is an operational act — one a jury is likely to find difficult to frame as passive monitoring.

The Southern Poverty Law Center was founded in 1971 by attorneys Morris Dees and Joseph Levin Jr. in Montgomery, Alabama. It built its reputation on civil rights litigation in the 1970s and 1980s, winning landmark cases against the KKK that bankrupted several chapters. By the 1990s it had transitioned primarily to a fundraising and intelligence-gathering operation built around its annual “hate group” map and list.

That list became enormously influential. By 2024, the SPLC’s hate group designations were used by: major media outlets including CNN, MSNBC, and the Associated Press as authoritative references for whether an organization was extremist; federal agencies including the FBI and DHS in training materials; technology platforms including Facebook, YouTube, and PayPal for content moderation and account termination decisions; and corporate HR departments that screened job applicants for affiliations with SPLC-listed organizations.

The SPLC reported an endowment of approximately $800 million in its FY 2024 Form 990 — a sum that critics had argued for years was disproportionate to any plausible threat level the organization claimed to be monitoring. The SPLC raised over $100 million in donations in 2017 alone, the year of the Charlottesville rally that the indictment alleges was partly funded by an SPLC informant payment of $270,000+.

The SPLC’s internal problems predate this indictment. In 2019, the organization fired Dees and conducted an internal review after dozens of employees signed a letter alleging a workplace culture of racial and gender discrimination. President Richard Cohen resigned shortly after Dees was fired. The organization brought in external leadership and described the Dees firing as a reset. The indictment covers conduct allegedly occurring over a multi-year period — the charging document does not specify the precise start date, but grand jury subpoenas in the case reportedly cover activity from at least 2016 onward.

Set the legal standard aside for a moment and consider what the government’s theory, if proven, would mean for how Americans have processed public information about extremism for the last decade.

Every time a journalist, federal agent, corporate compliance officer, or platform moderator relied on an SPLC designation to make a consequential decision — deplatforming a speaker, firing an employee, labeling an organization as a hate group in a news broadcast — that decision rested on data produced by an organization that allegedly needed hate groups to remain active and visible. The indictment does not charge that any specific designation was fabricated. But the underlying premise of the SPLC’s authority — that it was an independent monitor of hate activity — would be directly undermined if the government proves the SPLC was simultaneously funding some of that activity.

That is the core irony that House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) flagged within hours of the indictment: the organization that called everyone else a hate group was allegedly writing checks to the Ku Klux Klan. Jordan has requested that the DOJ provide the House Judiciary Committee a full briefing on the investigation.

The downstream consequences of a conviction would extend well beyond the SPLC itself. Federal agencies that incorporated SPLC data into training materials and watchlists would face pressure to audit those lists. Technology platforms that relied on SPLC designations for content moderation decisions would face legal exposure from the deplatformed parties. News organizations that cited the SPLC as an independent authority would face credibility questions.

None of that happens automatically or immediately — the government still has to prove its case to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. The SPLC has Abbe Lowell. The Middle District of Alabama will take years to fully adjudicate this. But the superseding indictment is now a public document, and its 11 counts are on the record.

The bottom line, stated plainly: the organization that built an $800 million empire by designating hate groups has been indicted on 11 federal counts for allegedly paying those hate groups to stay in business. It is presumed innocent. The case will proceed. And the question of whether the SPLC was fighting hate or manufacturing it will now be decided in a federal courtroom rather than a fundraising email.

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