SPLC asks court to force an apology out of Todd Blanche

The Justice Department responded Tuesday after the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a complaint in federal district court demanding an apology from acting Attorney General Todd Blanche for making allegedly false statements.

Last week, a federal grand jury indicted the SPLC on wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy charges for allegedly paying members of the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nations while claiming to be dismantling these groups. The indictment also claims the SPLC set up shell companies to hide these transactions. The SPLC, for its part, claims it had paid informants for information that “saved lives.”

The SPLC claimed that Blanche lied about the informant program by denying knowledge of the center turning over information to law enforcement.

“A grand jury heard only a portion of the evidence against SPLC and chose to indict on 11 counts,” a Justice Department spokesperson told The Daily Signal on Tuesday. “These issues will all be litigated in court and the government remains confident in its case.”

The Justice Department was responding to a filing the SPLC made Tuesday with the U.S. District Court in the Middle District of Alabama. The center requested an order “directing the government to (1) retract the false and unfairly prejudicial statement that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche made on Fox News regarding the allegations against the SPLC; and (2) refrain from making any further false or otherwise prejudicial statements that compromise the SPLC’s fair trial rights.”

The SPLC flagged two statements Blanche made on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” last week.

Blanche said, “There’s no allegation or information in the indictment that suggests [the SPLC] shared [the information from the informants] with law enforcement,” and, “There’s no information that we have that suggests that the money they were paying to these informants and these members of these organizations, they then turned around and shared what they learned with law enforcement.”

“To the contrary, or else we would have known, from their own words, that they had given money to these guys,” he added. “And we didn’t know.”

The SPLC maintains, however, that its attorneys “provided information to the government demonstrating unequivocally that the SPLC had shared information from its informants with law enforcement.”

The SPLC’s attorneys sent a letter to the U.S. attorney, asking that Blanche “publicly retract the statement.” The SPLC also claimed that the statement “gives rise to the concern that the grand jury heard evidence which incorrectly represented that the SPLC never shared information from informants with the government.”

The legal document goes on to reveal more about the case, including a Feb. 25 meeting between federal prosecutors and the SPLC discussing the informant program.

On April 6, the SPLC’s lawyers shared information about the program, highlighting that it resulted in an indictment against a member of the extremist group Vanguard America. The individual in question received a prison sentence.

The SPLC letter responding to Blanche’s statements cites another case, in which the center provided information to law enforcement leading to the 2020 arrest of a member of the white supremacist group Atomwaffen Division, who had intended to carry out a terrorist attack in Las Vegas, targeting a synagogue.

“The Department of Justice is well aware that the SPLC provided helpful information, through the use of its confidential informants, to law enforcement,” the SPLC motion states.

The motion cites the Alabama Rules of Professional Conduct for attorneys, suggesting Blanche broke them and demanding the court require the government to apologize. The motion also suggests that Blanche’s statements aimed to influence the outcome of a potential trial.

The SPLC motion also cites statements from President Donald Trump, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, and others.

“Whether by design or independently, these communications are being published and amplified on platforms that are widely consumed by the jury pool that will be called upon to adjudicate the actual allegations against the SPLC that are contained in the indictment.”

Neither the White House nor the SPLC immediately responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]