Washington, D.C. — The Trump administration’s case against the Southern Poverty Law Center is falling apart in real time, even as the White House doubles down on a conspiracy theory about Charlottesville that the actual white nationalists who organized Unite the Right have publicly rejected. Meanwhile, three of the country’s largest donor-advised fund sponsors have chosen to do the administration’s dirty work for it by cutting off donations to the SPLC before a single charge has been adjudicated.
Trump’s Charlottesville Lie Gets Fact-Checked
In a recent interview on 60 Minutes, Trump claimed that the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville was “a total fake” funded by the SPLC to make him “look bad.” The actual record could not be clearer. A coalition of violent neo-Nazis organized online and converged in Charlottesville in August 2017, culminating in a car-ramming attack that killed Heather Heyer and injured 30 other protesters. A civil lawsuit produced a jury verdict finding two dozen organizers and participants liable for a conspiracy to commit violence, with multi-million dollar damages awarded to the victims. Trump’s false claim is so detached from reality that the white nationalists who actually organized the rally pushed back publicly, with rally organizer Augustus Sol Invictus and white nationalist Richard Spencer both rejecting the SPLC-as-puppet-master narrative on the record.
The Administration Arraigns the SPLC
Yesterday, the Trump administration’s campaign of revenge and retribution reached a Montgomery federal courtroom, where the Southern Poverty Law Center was arraigned on fraud and money laundering charges. The 55-year-old civil rights organization did more than any other in American history to dismantle the KKK, forced the integration of Alabama’s state troopers, and spent nearly a decade sharing intelligence from its paid informant program directly with the FBI. The Trump administration is now prosecuting that intelligence-sharing as a crime, and doing it on behalf of the same movement the SPLC spent half a century fighting. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche went on television and told the country the government had “no information” that the SPLC had shared intelligence with law enforcement. SPLC’s attorneys have already had to ask the court to order him to retract those false and prejudicial statements. Legal experts say the prosecution faces steep obstacles, since the administration’s theory requires pretending the SPLC’s mission was a secret. Nobody should be fooled by the legal dressing. This is retaliation against a civil rights organization for doing its job.
Fidelity, Vanguard, and Schwab Block SPLC Donations
The decision by Fidelity Charitable, Vanguard Charitable, and Charles Schwab’s DAFgiving360 to stop processing donations to the SPLC did not happen in a vacuum. It follows the criminal prosecution of the SPLC and the Trump Treasury Department’s move to overhaul IRS Form 990 in ways designed to punish civil society organizations it views as political opponents. These three institutions are donor-advised fund sponsors. Their entire purpose is to direct charitable funds to organizations their donors have designated. By capitulating to politically motivated pressure before the charges against the SPLC have been adjudicated, they have abandoned that role entirely. Congressional Integrity Project has joined the call from major philanthropic networks, foundations, and individual donors for these three fund sponsors to reverse their decision immediately.
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