Key civil rights group indicted for paying informants. But FBI does it too
The nation’s top law enforcement officials, FBI Director Kash Patel and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced a slew of criminal charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization that has worked for decades to investigate, report on and combat White supremacist, neo-Nazi and other hate groups.
The charges focus on the SPLC’s use of paid informants, who, according to prosecutors, were given large sums of money to infiltrate some of the nation’s most infamous and dangerous extremist groups. This tactic, Blanche said at a news conference, “was not dismantling these groups, it was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”
The federal indictment against the SPLC, unveiled April 21, states: “Unbeknownst to donors, some of their donated money was being used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance.”
Paying informants to infiltrate hate groups, the tactic at the heart of the SPLC indictment, has, however, been used by federal law enforcement agencies “for decades, if not longer,” said Javed Ali, associate professor of practice at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan and a former senior counterterrorism official at the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.
The FBI has long paid, and probably is still paying, confidential sources across the country to gather intelligence on extremist groups, including organizations like those named in Tuesday’s indictment, Ali said.
“There are, I would have to imagine, every day those kinds of operations,” Ali said.
‘They were doing good’
The federal indictment contends that the SPLC "explicitly sought donations under the auspices that donor money would be used to help ‘dismantle’ violent extremist groups," and "donors were not told that some of the donated funds were to be used by the SPLC to pay high-level leaders of violent extremist groups."
“They used the fraudulently raised money, by lying to their donor network − thousands of Americans − to go ahead and actually pay the leadership of these supposed violent extremist groups,” Patel said at the news conference.
The indictment describes how the SPLC for years publicized its successes − including by disseminating information and documents provided by paid confidential sources − in articles and newsletters.
Confidential sources who have been paid by the FBI have included “high-level leaders.”
One such source, David Gletty, spent years infiltrating anti-government militia groups and neo-Nazi and biker gangs for the FBI. He told USA TODAY he received “a lot of money” from the agency for his work, which he described as dangerous and exhilarating. But he also got into trouble while working for the agency, Gletty acknowledged.
“I was getting paid $1,000 a week at the beginning, then I went up to $2,000 a week after I did certain crazy stuff, but there were also bonuses,” Gletty said. “ But I got arrested one time working undercover and it cost me.”
A 2022 USA TODAY investigation detailed how the FBI had paid an informant, Joshua Caleb Sutter, more than $140,000. While he was on the FBI payroll, Sutter published and sold books glorifying torture, child abuse, rape, terrorism, mass murder and more – all in the name of his racist and satanic beliefs.
Sutter’s self-published books became go-to texts for some of the most extreme and violent White supremacists across the world and were required reading in a sinister satanist cult that spread to several countries and has inspired several known terrorists and would-be mass killers.
Back in the 1990s and 2000s, paid operatives like Gletty had the option to work for law enforcement agencies or to hire themselves to organizations like the SPLC, he said. Operatives working for a private entity could “fish” for information by getting inside groups before any probable cause existed to investigate them, a handy loophole for law enforcement agencies that would, invariably, eventually be handed the information gathered by the private group.
“I tried to work with the SPLC, but they were afraid of me,” Gletty said. “Sometimes, they would give the FBI everything they needed on a silver platter. You do all the work yourself. You’ve got to go into some pretty dark places and be with some pretty dark people.
“They were doing good,” Gletty added. “This looks bad for them, but they were doing good.”
The federal indictment lays out the SPLC’s longstanding program of paying informants, claiming they were funneled money through a number of “clandestine” business entities created for the sole purpose of getting sources paid.
Why are paid sources used to investigate hate groups?
Paying people to take serious risks − and working with private organizations that pay their informants − is a tried and tested way to access the inner workings of criminal and extremist organizations, said Pat Cotter, a former public prosecutor who helped investigate and prosecute Mafia crime families in the 1990s.
“If you want to know what’s going on in the sewer, you have to walk through a lot of s---,” Cotter said. “If you want to know what the Nazis are doing, you have to talk to a Nazi.”
Cotter decried the SPLC indictment, calling it “ludicrous and idiotic.”
The alleged use of fictitious business entities to pay informants makes perfect sense, he said, because it ensured the sources weren’t receiving money directly from the SPLC that could possibly be traced. Claiming the creation of such entities amounts to fraud is “a unique if not perversely inventive theory of fraud,” Cotter said.
“The idea that people who contribute to the Southern Poverty Law Center would have objected that some of their funding was going to pay people who infiltrated extremist far-right groups like the Ku-Klux Klan is ridiculous on its face,” Cotter said. “It’s stupid. It doesn’t pass the laugh test.”
The Justice Department and the FBI did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
“We are outraged by the false allegations levied against SPLC – an organization that for 55 years has stood as a beacon of hope fighting white supremacy and various forms of injustice to create a multi-racial democracy where we can all live and thrive," SPLC CEO Bryan Fair said in a statement. "Taking on violent hate and extremist groups is among the most dangerous work there is, and we believe it is also among the most important work we do. To be clear, this program saved lives.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: SPLC indicted for paying sources. The FBI pays them all the time
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