The House Judiciary Committee expanded its investigation into the Southern Poverty Law Center’s relationship with the Biden administration after the left-wing civil rights group was indicted on fraud charges related to its use of paid informants within white supremacist groups.
The committee demanded documents and communications regarding the SPLC “paying sources and any coordination with the Biden-Harris administration” after a federal grand jury indicted the center on 11 counts of bank fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The indictment released Tuesday alleges that the SPLC paid $3 million from 2014-23 to informants who were members of extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi Party of America, as well as the organizers of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The explosive indictment “only raises further questions” about the center’s work with the Biden administration, the committee said in its Thursday letter to SPLC Interim President Bryan Fair.
“We’ve been investing in these guys for a long time. They were the group behind that whole targeting of pro-life Catholics,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican, told Fox News Channel. “By the way, the Biden Justice Department was using the Southern Poverty Law Center as a way to train prosecutors, for goodness sake, to deal with extremism. That’s how ridiculous and wrong this all was.”
He referred to the 2023 FBI Richmond field memo targeting “radical-traditionalist Catholic Ideology,” which relied in part on materials from the SPLC.
“In addition, other publicly available documents revealed how the Justice Department partnered closely with the SPLC during the Biden-Harris Administration, including scheduling regular meetings, giving the SPLC early access to federal law-enforcement data, and allowing SPLC employees to train federal prosecutors,” said Mr. Jordan in the letter. “The new information about the SPLC alleged in the indictment only raises further questions.”
SPLC: PRESERVE YOUR RECORDS
Chairman @Jim_Jordan is demanding documents and communications from SPLC regarding their payments to sources from extremist groups and any coordination with the Biden-Harris Administration.
Read more: https://t.co/GMeL2qFGKm pic.twitter.com/zg2Lbh72dJ
— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) April 23, 2026
Mr. Fair said the center paid informants to gather “credible intelligence” on violent extremist groups that was sometimes shared with law enforcement.
“While we no longer work with paid informants, we continue to take their safety seriously,” he said in a Tuesday video. “These individuals risked their lives to infiltrate and inform on the activities of our nation’s most radical and violent extremist groups.”
Meanwhile, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche accused the group of “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.”
The committee requested all documents and communications dating back to Jan. 1, 2017, between the center and its “field sources,” as the informants were called, and the phony companies created to funnel payments to the informants.
The panel also asked for any communications and documents between the center and the Justice Department or FBI during the Biden administration. The letter set a deadline for Thursday.
