(Headline USA) The Southern Poverty Law Center says it’s the subject of a criminal investigation by the Justice Department and faces possible charges over its past use of paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups.
The civil rights group made the announcement on Tuesday, saying President Donald Trump’s administration appears to be preparing legal action against it or some of its employees.
“Although we don’t know all the details, the focus appears to be on the SPLC’s prior use of paid confidential informants to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups,” CEO Bryan Fair said in a statement.
The Justice Department had no immediate comment.
The SPLC previously paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups and gather information on their activities, often sharing it with local and federal law enforcement, Fair said. It was used to monitor threats of violence, he said, adding that the program was kept quiet to protect the safety of informants.
“When we began working with informants, we were living in the shadow of the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators, and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system,” Fair said. “There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives.”
However, critics have noted that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have used the SPLC’s informant network to skirt constitutional restrictions on domestic surveillance.
The SPLC had informants embedded in Elohim City, where the OKC bombing is suspected to have been planned by McVeigh and others who were never charged. https://t.co/gQY09S4hq5 pic.twitter.com/r6dntHNKTR
— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) April 21, 2026
For instance, about eight years after the April 19, 1995, Oklahoma City bombing, a leaked FBI memo revealed in 2003 that the SPLC had its own informants operating in an Oklahoman white supremacist compound called Elohim City, where OKC bomber Tim McVeigh was suspected to have visited.
The leaked January 1996 FBI memo said: “Information has also been received through the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) that [NAME REDACTED] telephone call from [Oklahoma City bomber] Timothy McVeigh on or about 4/17/95, two days prior to the OKBOMB attack, when [NAME REDACTED], per a source of the SPLC, was in the white supremacist compound at [Elohim City].”
Citing a “highly placed confidential source in the DOJ,” the journalists who obtained the memo reported in 2005 that the FBI had been using the SPLC as a surveillance cutout. The journalists, J.D. Cash and Roger Charles, said the FBI was using a spy network operated by the SPLC to do what many in the bureau were afraid to do because of guidelines in place during the Clinton administration.
“Attorney General Janet Reno would not allow the FBI much latitude in developing intelligence inside the far-right due to concerns that such activities might violate existing departmental guidelines on ‘domestic spying,’” J.D. Cash and Roger Charles wrote in July 2005 for the McCurtain Daily Gazette.
“To skirt Reno’s policies, the FBI developed a relationship with cutouts such as the SPLC that could use their own spies to do what the FBI could not. These non-government agents then passed their intelligence products back to the bureau.”
Because the OKC bombing suspects who had resided at Elohim City were never arrested in relation to the attack—as Headline USA reported here—Cash and Charles wondered whether the SPLC was helping the FBI conceal information about the case. Cash and Charles—the latter who worked a brief stint on McVeigh’s defense team—were developing the theory that the FBI was trying to conceal the fact that one of its informants had gone rogue and helped carry out the bombing.
The two investigators confronted SPLC founder Morris Dees with their suspicions, but Dees reportedly declined to divulge information.
“Dees admitted that he had an informant at Elohim City as the [FBI] teletype said. However, the coy attorney refused to elaborate on the situation, except to say he had warned then-attorney general Reno, six months before the attack, that, ‘An attack on the government is planned by members of the far right,’” Cash and Charles wrote in 2005.
“Dees went on to say that after the attack he immediately called Reno to say the media had it wrong. ‘I told her the attack was domestic, not foreign,’ Dees said.”
Dees was reportedly also confronted about the matter during a conference at Southeastern Oklahoma State University in 2003, but he also declined to comment at that time.
“If I told you what we were doing there, I would have to kill you,” Dees reportedly said in 2003.
More recently, the SPLC came under fresh scrutiny after the assassination last year of conservative activist Charlie Kirk brought renewed attention to its characterization of the group that Kirk founded and led. The SPLC included a section on that group, Turning Point USA, in a report titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2024” that described the group as “A Case Study of the Hard Right in 2024.”
FBI Director Kash Patel said last year that the agency was severing its relationship with the SPLC, which had long provided law enforcement with research on hate crime and domestic extremism. Patel said the SPLC had been turned into a “partisan smear machine,” and he accused it of defaming “mainstream Americans” with its “hate map” that documents alleged anti-government and hate groups inside the United States.
House Republicans hosted a hearing centered on the SPLC in December, saying it coordinated efforts with President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration “to target Christian and conservative Americans and deprive them of their constitutional rights to free speech and free association.”
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
