Attorney General Todd Blanche said former Southern Poverty Law Center official Heidi L. Beirich participated in the group’s alleged scheme to fund extremism.
SPLC indictment reignites debate over paid informants
The DOJ indicted Southern Poverty Law Center for paying informants in hate groups without telling its donors. The FBI has also long paid informants.
A former top official of a civil rights group targeted by the Justice Department for allegedly funding the extremism they were supposed to dismantle has been arrested, Attorney General Todd Blanche announced.
Heidi L. Beirich, a former intelligence director at Southern Poverty Law Center, was arrested in California on Aug. 12 in connection with the federal government’s case against the anti-extremism group, the Justice Department said in a statement. Blanche, speaking about the case at an unrelated news conference, said the 59-year-old furthered the organization’s alleged scheme by helping open bank accounts that funneled money back to extremist organizations.
Beirich’s arrest is the latest in the Justice Department’s case against the civil rights group long seen as an essential foil to the Ku Klux Klan and which historically worked with federal authorities to build cases against extremists. But Justice Department leaders under President Donald Trump dismantled that partnership and in April first announced their case against the group.
According to federal prosecutors, the group took donations and used them to fund the extremist groups they had promised to dismantle. Leaders at the group slammed the accusations as “false.” People familiar with the SPLC’s tactics have said the group used donations to pay informants within extremist groups, a tactic also used by the Justice Department.
The SPLC in a statement Aug. 12 blasted the DOJ’s latest set of accusations.
“Taking on violent hate and extremist groups is among the most dangerous work there is, and we believe it is also among the most important work we do. The actions taken by the DOJ will not shake our resolve,” the group said in a statement shared with USA TODAY. “We remain steadfast in our fight for justice and in our commitment to ensuring the promise of the Civil Rights movement becomes a reality for all. We are confident in our position and look forward to presenting the evidence and making our case in court.”
USA TODAY has reached out to the Justice Department and Beirich for comment.
What to know about the DOJ case
In previous court filings, the Justice Department alleged that the Southern Poverty Law Center committed wire fraud when it sought donations to dismantle violent extremist groups. The fundraising efforts were fraudulent, according to the DOJ, because the center allegedly didn’t tell donors that some of the money would be used to pay high-level group leaders to be informants.
In a new charging document that adds Beirich as a criminal defendant in the case, the DOJ alleged that Beirich oversaw payments to informants, including to one with whom she had a romantic relationship.
The DOJ also specifically alleged that Beirich paid one extremist about $6,000 in donors’ money to falsely take responsibility for stealing, copying and returning documents that belonged to an extremist group.
In reality, according to the document, the theft-and-return was carried out by the person with whom, for some period, Beirich allegedly had the romantic relationship. That person isn’t named in the document.
Beirich used the copies for a story in the center’s “Hatewatch” publication, which by its own description “monitors and exposes activities of the hard right in the United States.”
SPLC responds, experts question DOJ case
Leaders at the law center at the time of the earlier indictment slammed the DOJ over the accusations.
“We are outraged by the false allegations levied against SPLC – an organization that for 55 years has stood as a beacon of hope fighting white supremacy and various forms of injustice to create a multi-racial democracy where we can all live and thrive,” SPLC CEO Bryan Fair said in a statement. “Taking on violent hate and extremist groups is among the most dangerous work there is, and we believe it is also among the most important work we do. To be clear, this program saved lives.”
Some legal experts have questioned the strength of the DOJ’s fraud case against the center, given that paying for information on extremist groups is arguably helpful to combatting those groups.
“Paying informants to then dismantle the organization seems like something that people would expect to be one of the tactics that are used, so that seems like a very weak case to me,” Amy Markopoulos, a former federal prosecutor who spent years in the Justice Department’s fraud section, previously told USA TODAY.