Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
In April, the Trump administration announced a federal fraud case against the Southern Poverty Law Center, the well-heeled organization known for tracking what it calls hate groups. The group pleaded not guilty in July. Then, this month, the Justice Department announced charges against Heidi Beirich, a former senior SPLC official. Prosecutors allege that the SPLC’s long-running program that paid informants inside white supremacist organizations deceived donors and banks about money routed to those informants, including one with whom Beirich allegedly shared a home and bank accounts. Beirich and the SPLC deny wrongdoing, and the organization says the government is criminalizing a legitimate effort to penetrate extremist groups and provide information to law enforcement and the public.
Some critics contend the case nakedly weaponizes the Justice Department to go after an organization the Trump administration doesn’t like for political reasons. But Trump’s broadside against the SPLC isn’t emerging from nowhere. Some of what his administration argues actually echoes blistering criticism from civil rights lawyers who have railed against the SPLC for decades. I wanted help untangling that mess, so I called Stephen Bright, a longtime civil rights lawyer and Yale Law lecturer who was once one of the organization’s most prominent critics, particularly of co-founder Morris Dees’ relentless fundraising and what Bright saw as the SPLC’s failure to use its resources to help the people and causes it invoked to raise that money. I asked him to explain what was actually wrong with the SPLC, and how best not to conflate that with what the Trump administration is alleging now. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Aymann Ismail: Before we get to the current prosecution, I want to understand when you first started seeing problems at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Stephen Bright: I was in Atlanta with an organization called the Southern Center for Human Rights. Southern Poverty was down the road in Montgomery. And I sort of had a falling-out with Morris Dees [the co-founder of the SPLC, who was fired in 2019]. After the execution of Henry Hays, who was a guy that lynched a Black kid in Mobile, Alabama, Morris raised money on that case, talking about how the Ku Klux Klan is still running rampant in Alabama, which it was not. But basically what he did in a lot of cases was, he would be filing civil actions against the klan or the skinheads or whoever it was and getting a lot of discovery. And then he would be working with the DOJ or the state people or whoever. They got to where they were doing a lot of work with law enforcement. They saw themselves as quasi–law enforcement.
They never really wanted to do litigation. They sued a lot of people that didn’t have lawyers, like the klan and the skinheads and people like that, so litigating against them was like shooting ducks in a barrel. They’d win these big judgments. Of course, they weren’t getting any money. These people were judgment-proof. But it was great fundraising. And that’s what Morris was all about. He told me that: “Don’t waste your time on the death-penalty policy. You can’t raise any money on the death bond.” And I said, “Morris, I’m not doing this to raise money. I’m doing it because poor people, Black people, are getting sentenced to death with terrible lawyers. They need lawyers.”
I just always saw Morris as a flimflam man who talked about the klan and all that. You’d think it was the 1920s. Morris understood that these pictures of this child hanging in a tree in the Henry Hays case, and that these pictures of these guys on horseback with the crosses and all that, that you could send those to people and convince them that the greatest threat to Black people in the South was the Ku Klux Klan, which it wasn’t anymore. That’s what raised money. And he would send out all these mailings, test mailings, and see which one raised the most money. Then that’s the one he’d go with. It just kept going on from there.
Does that color how you see the Trump administration’s allegations?
I read the articles about this most recent thing. I don’t know these people. My guess is it’s monumentally bad judgment. I doubt if it’s a criminal act. The one thing that was so amazing about the SPLC was they just threw money around like it’s going out of style. They had so much of it. They had this fancy building we called “the Poverty Palace.” That was the first building.
“The Poverty Palace”?
It was called “the Poverty Palace.” And then they built the second building, “the Poverty Palace II.” I often told a story: People in my shop went to some program one time, and we were sitting back in coach, of course. And as we were getting on the plane, Morris and them, they’re all sitting in first class. They stayed in the best hotels. They just had more money than they knew what to do with.
And of course they have even more today, because they were so good at raising money and they weren’t spending very much. That was what I got so mad at them about: Come on, guys. You got all this money. Do something with it. Represent some people on death row, bring some prison-condition cases, do something about all sorts of issues. They call it the Poverty Law Center. Do something about what’s affecting poor people in Alabama or in the South. But they weren’t interested in that. They weren’t really interested in doing anything that didn’t raise money.
Attorney General Todd Blanche accused the organization of “manufacturing racism” to justify its own existence. That’s much more inflammatory language, but it also sounds like what you’re describing.
Yeah, I think there’s something to that. At one point, they were giving money to this person who was an infiltrator. They were even paying for materials to burn the crosses. You could argue that an informant has to participate to some degree in order to stay inside these groups. You’ve got to play games, or you’ve got to play ball with them. That’s ridiculous. I don’t know if that’s criminal. It could just be monumentally bad judgment.
[In response to these charges, the SPLC issued a statement that stated that it “did not lie to donors, did not mislead the banks it did business with, and its informant program prevented violence and saved lives.”]
This is the part I’m having trouble parsing. Donald Trump has called the SPLC “one of the greatest political scams in American history.” Do you think in this case he’s on to something?
Well, they exaggerate everything. You can’t believe anything that Trump and Blanche say.
But the president has also made claims that go much further—for example, that the SPLC was financing the KKK.
That’s obviously not true.
So where do you draw the line? There seem to be legitimate criticisms of the SPLC that are now being folded into a much broader political and legal campaign against it.
What I was saying before is that they were exaggerating the threat. They’re sending out mail saying the KKK is running roughshod on Black people in the South. It wasn’t true. It just wasn’t true. The klan was a handful of misfits who screwed up everything they tried to do. That was not the great threat to Black people in the South by then.
The allegations in these indictments apparently are that they went beyond exaggerating the threats and actually supported these organizations to make them bigger threats so they could then monitor them or do whatever they did. I don’t know whether that’s true. The case against the individual person doesn’t look terribly strong. But I don’t know all the facts, and it’s going to depend upon the facts.
Does any part of you feel strangely vindicated by all of this?
Oh, no, no, no, no, no. In 2019, when Morris got fired and Richard Cohen got fired, the hope was maybe some good would come out of it. I actually met briefly with the person who took it over there for a while. And I said, “You need to do two things. You need to quit sending out the mail, because it’s not true and you don’t need it. And secondly, you need to give away a lot of the money that you have because there are a lot of grassroots organizations all over the South that are really doing good work. And you could give $1 million here and $1 million there or $5 million here or $5 million there.”
The amount of money they’ve accumulated still seems central to your criticism.
The thing that’s so remarkable about Southern Poverty Law Center: They could give away $50 million, and they wouldn’t even miss it. They have so much money. What other organization can you say that about? They have almost $1 billion. They have so much money and yet they don’t do very much. Mostly what they do is raise more money. They have a lot of people on staff who are in the fundraising business, send out mail, and now they do TV advertisements and all sorts of things to raise money. They have no earthly need for it. They can live on the interest from now on.
The charges include conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to make false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. Do you think anything good could come out of all this scrutiny? Could it force the SPLC to change?
What I would say is, given all the money they have, is they certainly will be able to defend the lawsuit. This is not like suing somebody that’s judgment-proof or somebody can’t hire a good lawyer. Let me tell you, they’ll hire whatever it takes, and they’ll spend money like it’s going out of style to defend this case, because everything’s up for grabs. But whether any improvement will come, I don’t know.
What do you say to someone who is uncomfortable with the Trump administration’s rhetoric about the SPLC and potentially weaponizing the DOJ against political enemies but is also coming to terms with the organization’s very real problems?
As I said, flimflamming people to give them money is bad, but that’s not necessarily criminal. I’ve been critical of them. And I certainly think that what Morris was doing was bad, and I wish it had stopped. And maybe there even would’ve been a civil action against them to try to do those two things that I said, stop sending out money and give away the money they have. That’s what they really should do.
But I don’t know that much will be accomplished by this. A lot of money will be spent on this. The DOJ is a mess now. As I’m sure you know, a lot of people have quit. A lot of people have been fired. Really, I doubt if they have the horses to go at this, and I can’t imagine why they would want to. When you’ve got all the different cases that the DOJ, the United States, and the U.S. attorney’s office in Montgomery could be prosecuting, why you would want to be wasting lawyers and witnesses and all that on this is beyond me.
I think this is what makes the SPLC situation tricky for me. As a Muslim, it’s meaningful when lawmakers are calling us dogs and jihadists and an organization like the SPLC calls them out. How should I reconcile the value of that work with everything you’ve described?
You’re absolutely right. But let me tell you, the things that they were doing about that was so little in terms of what they had the capacity to do. That’s what’s so disheartening about it. What was really disheartening was the fact that day in and day out, they weren’t on the battlefield. They weren’t representing people in death cases. They weren’t dealing with discrimination in housing and all the kinds of things that were going on in Alabama and elsewhere that really needed attention.
And they had the capacity to do it. I mean, they could have hired 40 lawyers. They have hired more people lately. But again, considering how much money they have, it’s just pathetic.