Some days the White House Information Minister, Karoline Leavitt, is beginning to sound more and more like Baghdad Bob, dontcha think? She's off on maternity leave now so we're gonna score a break from it.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has been indicted. An indictment is not a conviction it is
simply the Department of Justice's (DOJ) allegation that donor disclosures around its informant
program were misleading. The organization’s defense is that it used
confidential informants in extremist groups as part of legitimate
intelligence gathering to prevent violence; a practice that overlaps
with standard law-enforcement practices all day long. The legal question is not
whether informants were used, but whether donor communications were
sufficiently transparent to meet nonprofit fraud standards.
Until trial, claims that this proves intentional wrongdoing or “funding
extremism” remain unproven allegations, not established fact.
This is the same DOJ that indicted James Comey and Letitia James, only
to have those indictments dismissed once they made it to the legal
system. The John Brennan and John Bolton indictments are also stuck in
the mud.
In my view, the odds are better than even that this is just
another poorly-conceived retribution indictment. It alleges that the
SPLC was supporting the Ku Klux Klan by paying confidential informants who happened to be members
of those organizations. I am not a lawyer but the entire premise seems a stretch.
As for their donor disclosures, since SPLC has used CIs before, I
think they'll be able to successfully argue they're not actually "supporting" the Klan, Nazi or White Supremacist organizations. I think the hypothetical reasonable person
would expect that this practice would continue - unless the SPLC
explicitly promised in the solicitation that it wouldn't (which also
seems unlikely.) Time will tell.
Any good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.
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