Washington, D.C. — Today, as part of the Trump administration’s revenge and retribution tour, the Southern Poverty Law Center was arraigned in Montgomery federal court. The 55-year-old civil rights organization famously bankrupted the Ku Klux Klan, forced the integration of Alabama’s state troopers, and spent decades sharing intelligence from its paid informant program directly with the FBI. The Trump administration now says that intelligence sharing program was a crime, and the right-wing mediasphere that spent years painting a bullseye on the SPLC’s back is celebrating online.
In response, Congressional Integrity Project Senior Advisor Kyle Herrig released the following statement:
“This specious prosecution of a paper-thin case is part and parcel of Donald Trump’s weaponization of the Justice Department. SPLC’s attorneys have already had to ask the court to order Trump’s Attorney General to retract false and prejudicial statements he made on cable news about the case. The administration is hauling into court the organization that did more than any other in American history to dismantle the KKK, and is doing it on behalf of the same movement the SPLC spent half a century fighting. Nobody should be fooled by the legal dressing. This is retaliation against a civil rights organization for doing its job.”
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