DOJ Secures Updated Southern Poverty Law Center Indictment (1)

The Justice Department filed a superseding indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center in an apparent attempt to address deficiencies lawyers flagged with an earlier document levying fraud charges against the group.

The grand jury indictment filed Tuesday by the US attorney’s office in the Middle District of Alabama, adds more detail in defense of the Trump administration’s claim that the SPLC misled donors and banks by concealing payments to informants infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and other extremist groups.

DOJ alleges in the document, which replaces the earlier 11-count indictment returned by a grand jury in April, that the SPLC secretly funneled approximately $4.1 million in tax-exempt donor funds to a series of fictitious bank accounts between 2010 through 2023.

This money was used to help informants attend and host extremist group rallies, recruit new individuals to join the groups, purchase materials for cross burnings, among other activities, prosecutors argue in the indictment, which was reported earlier by CBS News.

The new indictment, publicly docketed Wednesday, also revises the April charging document’s interchangeable use of “false” and “misleading” in its description of the SPLC’s alleged violation of a federal bank deception statute to only reference “false statements” to financial institutions. Defense lawyers and former white-collar prosecutors previously told Bloomberg Law that the previous mention of “false or misleading” could undermine DOJ’s prosecution, citing US Supreme Court precedent that the statute doesn’t prohibit statements to banks that are misleading but not false.

The updated charging document marks an effort by President Donald Trump’s DOJ to build up its case against the SPLC, which faces charges of wire fraud, false statements to banks, and money laundering. The SPLC is attempting to get the indictment tossed, arguing that the charges are a form of vindictive prosecution in Trump’s campaign for DOJ to prosecute his political adversaries.

Abbe Lowell, one of the lawyers representing the SPLC, said in an email that while the new indictment “attempts to shore up the flaws in the initial charges,” the claims remain without merit.

“The SPLC did not lie to its donors, it did not mislead banks it did business with, and its informant program prevented violence and saved lives,” Lowell said.

The prominent defense lawyer criticized DOJ for appearing to share the indictment with media before it was unsealed, which he argued was “another example of the government’s troubling and unusual handling of this case.”

The SPLC is also represented by attorneys from Kropf Moseley Schmitt PLLC and Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP.

DOJ has defended the merits of the case and previously said following the April indictment that the department had additional evidence that had not yet been presented to a grand jury.

“This investigation remains ongoing, and the superseding indictment returned by the grand jury reflects the results of that continued investigative work,” Doug Howard, a spokesperson for the Montgomery US attorney’s office, said in an email Wednesday.

The new indictment fails to address the structural issues with the earlier charging document, said Gregory P. Rosen, shareholder at Rogers Joseph O’Donnell PC and a former federal prosecutor. These deficiencies include the absence of named individuals with specific fraudulent intent and the failure to establish relevance to any specific donor, Rosen said.

“Fixing those problems would require a fundamentally different indictment,” he said.

The removal of the phrase “false or misleading statements” from the bank deception statute charges is “an implicit acknowledgment that the original grand jury instructions may have been problematic,” Rosen said.

The SPLC suffered a loss in the case earlier this week when a federal magistrate judge denied the civil rights group’s motion that the court order DOJ to retract public statements by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche the group said were false.

The case is United States v. Southern Poverty Law Center, M.D. Ala., No. 2:26-cr-00139, superseding indictment filed 6/2/26.