The Department of Justice indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center by paying informants to infiltrate extremist groups.
The Justice Department alleges in the criminal case brought last month that the Southern Poverty Law Center — which has drawn the ire of President Donald Trump and other Republicans for labeling right-wing organizations as hate groups — defrauded donors by not informing them of secret payments to hate group members to act as informants.
The Justice Department alleges that SPLC has funneled $3 million to hate groups like the KKK, Unite the Right, and the Aryan Nations. SPLC also listed Moms for Liberty as a hate group, and M4L said that SPLC should be shut down.
One of the specialties of SPLC is compiling a list of hate groups and individuals who spread hate.
As an organization that was created to oppose racial injustice in the South, SPLC became a natural target for the GOP vengeance campaign.
The odd thing about the suit is that SPLC paid infiltrators, not the groups themselves.
This is a brazen assault on a significant civil rights group that has tangled with hate-groups for more than 50 years.
It is also a demonstration of the Trump administration’s weaponization of the Justice Department, turning it into a partisan cudgel.
Some large corporations have paused their charitable gifts to SPLC, including a division of Schwab that manages charitable gifts, Fidelity, and vanguard.
It was noted on Twitter that Stephen Miller, Trump’s policy advisor, is in the SPLC list of extremists.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Everything Trump accused Biden of doing, he has done. He accused Biden of weaponizing the justice department because he knew he was going to do that very thing when he got back into power. He accuses the Democrats of fraud in elections because he is planning fraud himself.
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If you accuse Trump of weaponizing the DOJ to a MAGA person, the immediate response is still “like Biden did????”
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Biden did not weaponize the DOJ.
If he had, Jack Smith would have been appointed in 2021 and Trump would have been indicted an convicted.
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Flerp: this was anticipated all along. You know you are going to create a judicial system that breaks the law, so you accuse your opposition of doing what you intend to do. Trump knew Jack Smith would carry out a fair investigation. He knew he would get Supreme Court help, so his conviction would stall.
Diane is obviously correct. A weaponized judicial under Biden would have convicted Trump and had him behind bars within a year, but the Biden judicial branch played it clean, and they were bitten by a dirty Supreme Court.
The interesting thing about all of this is that Richard Nixon’s fall did not convince his supporters of his guilt. Years later, Nixon supporters would suggest to me that he was the victim of politics rather than criminal behavior. Then Reagan made an illegal deal with Iran and Congress failed to hold him accountable.
And we wonder how we got here.
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