The Southern Poverty Law Center announced Tuesday that the Department of Justice is investigating the organization and may be preparing criminal charges, a disclosure that came from the group’s own interim CEO.
Bryan Fair posted a video to the SPLC’s YouTube account Tuesday confirming the probe. “Although we don’t know all the details,” Fair said, “the focus appears to be on the SPLC’s prior use of paid confidential informants to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups.”
Fair said the SPLC had routinely shared intelligence gathered from those informants with local and federal law enforcement, including the FBI. He said the group has since discontinued that practice.
“We frequently shared what we learned from informants with local and federal law enforcement, including the FBI. We did not, however, share our use of informants broadly with anyone, in order to protect the identity and safety of the informants and their families,” Fair said.
The SPLC spent decades building relationships with federal law enforcement, positioning itself as the authoritative guide to domestic hate groups. Those relationships began breaking down in October 2025 when FBI Director Kash Patel cut all ties to the organization after it labeled Turning Point USA a hate group.
“The Southern Poverty Law Center long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine,” Patel said at the time. “Their so-called ‘hate map’ has been used to defame mainstream Americans and even inspired violence. That disgraceful record makes them unfit for any FBI partnership.”
The SPLC had published its Turning Point USA analysis in May 2025, calling the group a “well-funded, hard-right organization” whose “primary strategy is sowing and exploiting fear that white Christian supremacy is under attack.”
The newsletter targeting Turning Point ran September 9, one day before the organization’s founder, Charlie Kirk, was shot and killed. Charlie Kirk Show producer Andrew Kolvet questioned whether the SPLC’s coverage contributed to the circumstances of Kirk’s death.
“We may never know, but the swirl of extremist propaganda certainly played a role,” Kolvet wrote in October on X. “The SPLC has been credibly accused of corruption, mishandling of donations, union-busting, and covering up of sexual assault by senior leadership, all while sitting on nearly $1 billion in reserves.”
In December 2025, the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government held a hearing titled “Partisan and profitable: the SPLC’s influence on federal civil rights policy.”
