Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche alleged at an April 21 news conference that the Southern Poverty Law Center, a decades-old Alabama nonprofit dedicated to dismantling white supremacy, defrauded donors by using their money to pay informants within white supremacist groups.
"Paying informants to then dismantle the organization seems like something that people would expect to be one of the tactics that are used, so that seems like a very weak case to me," Amy Markopoulos, a former federal prosecutor who spent years in the DOJ's fraud section, told USA TODAY.
In a statement to USA TODAY, DOJ spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre said the grand jury that indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on 11 counts only heard a portion of the evidence, and the government remains confident in its case.
Those counts accuse SPLC of seeking donations to "dismantle" violent extremist groups, without telling donors that some of the donations – more than $3 million over nine years – would be used to pay high-level leaders of such groups to be informants.
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