In April 2026, a rumor spread online that the Southern Poverty Law Center — a group focused on civil rights litigation since its founding in 1971 — improperly funneled donor money to the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups in a covert informant operation that lasted
Social media posts, including one by tech billionaire Elon Musk (archived), amplified the claim that the SPLC "funded" extremist organizations and their leaders. Dozens of Snopes readers searched the site for answers regarding the SPLC's alleged financial ties to these groups, particularly the KKK (archived).
(X user @elonmusk)
Although many people online appeared to conclude that the U.S. Department of Justice and FBI had revealed the SPLC funded or paid the KKK and other groups, there was no evidence it directly gave money to these organizations. However,
We reached out to the SPLC to ask whether the organization has any way of knowing how much, if any, of the money it gave to informants ended up going to extremist organizations such as the KKK and will update this story if we learn more.
The indictment against the SPLC handed up by a federal grand jury on April 21, 2026, did not allege that the KKK as an organization received any particular dollar amount — only that the SPLC funneled more than $3 million to individual informants who were associated with "various violent extremist groups."
The indictment did not take issue with the existence of the paid informants but rather targeted the way the SPLC allegedly concealed the "nature, source, ownership, and control" of its handling of money related to the operation. Specifically, the charges included wire fraud, lying to banks and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
Controversy over the indictment
"The conduct at the core of the indictment, paying confidential sources inside violent extremist groups to gather intelligence, is something federal law enforcement does as a matter of course," the Alabama Reflector reported Cassandra Burke Robertson, director of the Center for Professional Ethics at Case Western Reserve University Law School, as saying. "Charging a civil rights organization criminally for doing the same thing, in this political context, strikes me as an abuse of the criminal law."
Kyle Boynton, an attorney and former FBI agent who previously worked as a federal civil rights prosecutor, said, "It's not a valid indictment," CBS News reported.
After the indictment, the SPLC's interim president and CEO, Bryan Fair, made a statement accusing the government of "blatantly mischaracterizing" the group's efforts:
We strongly deny the allegations in the indictment and their falsity is already being exposed in our court filings. The government is blatantly mischaracterizing our efforts to successfully fight hatred and violent extremism, something we have done for decades. At one moment, they are appreciating our work in destroying the Klan and now, they are saying the SPLC funded and promoted the Klan.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel gave a news briefing on April 21 in which they also claimed that in at least one of "these matters," their investigation revealed that SPLC funds fueled further state and federal crimes, a claim echoed in the indictment.
Experts have said the charges against the SPLC, which the government filed in a federal court in Alabama, are weak, according to CBS News. While it is true that the SPLC had a now-defunct informant program in which it paid a network of informants to gather intel on extremist hate groups, the U.S. government's allegations of fraud remain unproven.
SPLC response
The SPLC did not deny the existence of the informant program or contest whether it used its donor network to raise money to purportedly dismantle violent extremist groups while actually paying the leaders and organizers of said groups, including the KKK.
Within days of the indictment, the group fired back with legal action, claiming it provided information paid field sources ("Fs") gathered with law-enforcement agencies, including the FBI's Mobile, Alabama, office ahead of the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
The SPLC filed two motions on April 28 outlining this response. In one motion, the SPLC demanded the U.S. government retract the statement Blanche made on Fox News regarding the allegations against the SPLC and refrain from making further statements it deemed false. The second motion requested the U.S. government disclose the full transcript of the case's grand jury proceedings.
According to a SPLC news release, its attorneys met with prosecutors before the indictment and presented "specific information and documents of scenarios in which the SPLC shared information from the informant program with law enforcement," contradicting a claim Blanche made on Fox News on April 21. He said:
There's no information that we have that suggests that the money that they were paying to these informants and these members of these organizations, they then turned around and shared what they learned with law enforcement.
In a video statement released before the indictment, Fair said (at 1:13):
The SPLC faced increasing pushback from conservatives leading up to the indictment. In October 2025, Patel announced that the FBI severed ties with the SPLC, claiming it "long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine."
On May 1, cable news outlet MS NOW reported that a whistleblower told Democratic lawmakers that a DOJ lawyer pressured prosecutors to file the charges, despite concerns about the strength of the case.