Southern Poverty Law Center accuses Trump DOJ of ‘prosecutorial vindictiveness’

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has asked a federal judge to toss out criminal fraud charges filed against it by the Department of Justice (DOJ), arguing that the case is part of a “top-down, retributive campaign” by President Donald Trump.

In a 47-page filing Tuesday, the storied Alabama-based civil rights organization cited as evidence a series of public statements from the president and other top administration officials on the DOJ’s case, including one in which Trump falsely accused the SPLC of helping “rig” the 2020 election against him.

The SPLC also stressed the DOJ should be forced to reveal the secret grand jury proceedings that led to the fraud charges after it was forced to drop other prominent criminal cases over prosecutorial misconduct before grand juries.

“The charges,” the center wrote, “were a foregone conclusion based on prosecutorial vindictiveness — driven by the White House and F.B.I. leadership’s retribution campaign — rather than the result of a good faith examination of the evidence.”

Last month, the DOJ accused the SPLC of defrauding donors by paying around $3 million for information from people associated with extremist groups between 2014 and 2023 — roughly $333,000 annually — as part of its intelligence gathering operations on hate groups. 

The indictment, which was filed only against the SPLC itself and none of its employees, also accused the organization of making false statements to a bank while opening accounts to mask payments to its informants.

The center vowed to fight the charges, which it rejected as the DOJ’s attempt to intimidate it from its mission to monitor and expose white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other extremist groups.

While hailing the indictment, Trump bizarrely attempted to link the charges to his false claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to former President Joe Biden. 

The SPLC is “another Democrat Hoax, along with Act Blue, and many others,” Trump said in a statement on social media last month. “If it is true, the 2020 Presidential Election should be permanently wiped from the books and be of no further force or effect!”

The center argued in its filing that this statement, as well as others from acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel, indicated that the department was seeking to punish it for exercising its First Amendment right to identify, report on and criticize extremist hate groups.

“This is the very definition of a vindictive prosecution,” the center wrote. “The Court should dismiss the indictment as a violation of due process.”

The SPLC is just the latest defendant to accuse the DOJ of abusing its immense law-enforcement powers to carry out Trump’s retribution campaign.

While vindictive prosecution dismissal motions are particularly difficult to win, several other prominent defendants targeted by the Trump DOJ have also pursued them — and some have won.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whom the Trump administration wrongly removed to El Salvador last year, won his vindictive prosecution motion last week. A federal judge in Nashville dismissed the DOJ’s human smuggling case against him after finding the charges to be “an abuse of prosecuting power.”

In addition to asking a judge to dismiss the charges, the SPLC has asked that transcripts from the grand jury that approved the indictment be unsealed to determine whether federal prosecutors withheld evidence to mislead jurors who voted on the charges.

To support its unsealing argument, the center alerted the court to the DOJ’s recent grand jury misconduct in a case against a group of people who protested Trump’s aggressive immigration raids in Chicago last year.

In that case, a judge reviewed the transcripts and revealed last week that prosecutors used improper tactics before a grand jury to obtain the indictment against the protesters. The department dropped all charges after the judge revealed the proceedings.

“The record in this case—false public statements of fact by Justice Department officials and facial flaws in the charges—would support the Court here doing the same review,” the SPLC argued.