SPLC 2025 indictment
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The SPLC 2025 indictment is the federal criminal case that FBI director Kash Patel and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche unveiled against the Southern Poverty Law Center on multiple felony counts. John Kiriakou said his first reaction on seeing the push notification was dismissive, "Oh, come on, we have nothing better to do", but that reading the underlying article changed his mind: "These are real crimes. The kind of crimes where they're documentary. You either did it or you didn't do it. And if they've got documentary evidence that they did it, this could be the end of the SPLC."

The alleged conduct

Kiriakou characterises the underlying allegations as "giving money to the Ku Klux Klan, giving money to Nazi groups, you know, laundering money." He calls the money-laundering statutes "very clear" and "very specific" and dismisses the SPLC's public rebuttal, that any payments were the equivalent of a journalist buying a share of stock to attend a shareholder meeting, as "weak."

Scale

Kiriakou recites the SPLC's 2024 balance sheet, total assets of $786.7 million, with some reports putting the figure at $822 million, and $106 million in donations that year, and names among the donors Tim Cook at a million dollars, George Soros, George Clooney, the Charles Schwab Charitable Foundation and Fidelity Charitable. He draws a wider lesson about the drift of endowments away from their founders' original causes and says the case underscores why he read Form 990 disclosures obsessively as chief investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "the 990s will tell you everything you need to know about an organisation that you're targeting."

Hate map coverage

Kiriakou notes that the SPLC's hate map has included Moms for Liberty, Moms for America and Turning Point USA among its listed groups while excluding Antifa, and credits the libertarian commentator John Stossel with early reporting on SPLC's use of offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands drawn from its Form 990.

See also

- FBI
- Senate Foreign Relations Committee
- John Kiriakou
