Investigating the Good Guys

Excerpt from Joyce Vance's substack article on the DOJ indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center

At first blush, these allegations feel like an extension of the revenge docket and the attacks on universities and law firms, an effort to delegitimize and marginalize an organization that is pushing back against the administration. We’ll have a chance to study the charges as we learn more about the government’s evidence. The government’s core theory is that the SPLC paid high-ranking white supremacists, but they seem to ignore the reason—that the use of paid informants was essential to the intelligence the Center was gathering on the groups they were members of, including intelligence that was shared with the FBI.

Just like the federal government pays cooperating witnesses, including some within white supremacist domestic terror groups, in order to prosecute crimes those groups commit, the SPLC used paid informants to obtain information. "Klanwatch" refers to a project established in 1981 to monitor, investigate, and litigate against the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist hate groups in the United States. It focused on exposing extremist activity and curbing racist violence through legal action. There are obvious reasons for not publicizing the fact that you are recruiting sources, and that you’re paying them to accomplish your goals. But the proof is in the pudding, and this is a group that not only tried to take down white supremacist groups, but it was also highly successful. Suggesting that they were taking action designed to enrich the informants they were paying for some nefarious, unspecified reasons would be silly if the consequences here weren’t so serious.

In his announcement this morning, which you can watch here, Fair, the acting president of the Center, acknowledged that it had sometimes used paid informants. But he defended the Center’s work. “We will not be intimidated into silence or contrition, and we will not abandon our mission,” Fair said. “We will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff, and our work.” This Justice Department—as Kash Patel said during the press conference, this was Donald Trump’s Justice Department going after “fraud”—sees fraud. But if you’re trying to infiltrate one of those groups, the kind of people willing to affiliate themselves with successor groups to the Klan, like Aryan Nation, League of the South, and the Army of God, paying for information is the logical path forward.

Expect a flurry of pre-trial motions from the defense, including ones to dismiss. If this case goes to trial, it will be up to a jury—a trial jury that will hear both sides of the case, not just the government’s side, which was presented to the grand jury to obtain the indictment.

full article https://open.substack.com/pub/joycevance/p/investigating-the-good-guys