(Ken Silva, Headline USA) When the Biden administration released its domestic terrorism strategy in June 2021, white supremacists and militia members were deemed the gravest threats to the country’s security.
It turns out, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a leftist organization with a long history of inflating the white supremacist terror threat, helped craft the Biden strategy. According to an article earlier this month from the Daily Signal, the SPLC’s president, Margaret Huang, recently bragged to her donors about how the SPLC helped steer the country’s counterterrorism apparatus.
“I think there’s no question that we are unparalleled in our abilities to track and monitor the hate and extremist groups in the country, and I can tell you that we’ve had many agencies in the new Biden administration reaching out to solicit our expertise and our knowledge and information to help shape the policies that the new administration is adopting to counter the domestic terrorism threat,” Huang reportedly said in a fundraising event video obtained by The Daily Signal.
The Biden administration’s partnership with the SPLC may explain why the Justice Department has targeted mothers protesting at school board meetings and traditionalist Catholics.
The SPLC lumps organizations such as Moms for Liberty with other “antigovernment groups” that are “part of the antidemocratic hard-right movement,” including “specific militia, sovereign citizens, constitutional sheriffs and conspiracy propagandist groups” that pose a threat to the country.
And last year, it was revealed that the FBI used SPLC “intelligence” to justify targeting traditionalist Catholics as potential domestic terrorists.
Additionally, DOJ emails made public in 2022 showed that federal prosecutors worked with the SPLC to stifle Georgia‘s efforts to maintain election integrity, Just the News reported at the time.
The Daily Signal noted the irony of the SPLC crafting a domestic terrorism strategy when one of its lawyers was charged with domestic terrorism last year in relation to his role in the attack on the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center—also referred to as “cop city.”
Perhaps the SPLC’s darkest scandal is its connection to the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in American history, the Oklahoma City bombing.
About eight years after the April 19, 1995, tragic attack, 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 suspects in the OKC bomb plot were known to have resided.
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.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
