The Southern Poverty Law Center spent decades branding conservatives, Christians, Catholics, and pro-family groups as bigots and hate merchants.

On Tuesday it was the SPLC sitting in the witness chair, answering for itself.

The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing titled “The Southern Poverty Law Center: Manufacturing Hate, Part II” on Tuesday, June 9, 2026, at 10:00 a.m. ET in the Rayburn House Office Building.

Chairman Jim Jordan ran the questioning, with SPLC Interim CEO and President Bryan Fair in front of him.

The premise of the hearing was simple and brutal for the SPLC.

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According to the committee, the same organization federal officials leaned on to define extremism stands accused of secretly bankrolling extremists.

The official House Judiciary Committee hearing page laid out the purpose plainly:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on Tuesday, June 9, 2026, at 10:00 a.m. ET. The hearing, “The Southern Poverty Law Center: Manufacturing Hate, Part II” will examine the role that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has played in distorting civil rights policy in recent years.

Additionally, the hearing will explore recently released information revealing that the SPLC has funneled money to some extremists, raising questions whether the SPLC has been artificially elevating the domestic extremist threat and misleading its donors.

WITNESSES: Mr. Bryan Fair, Interim President and Chief Executive Officer, Southern Poverty Law Center; Dr. Alveda King, Chair of the American Dream, America First Policy Institute; Mr. Ryan Bangert, Senior Vice President for Strategic Initiatives and Special Counsel to the President, Alliance Defending Freedom; Ms. Mary McCord, Executive Director, Institute for Constitutional Advocacy Protection; Visiting Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center.

The numbers come from a federal indictment, not partisan chatter.

The Department of Justice announced on April 21, 2026 that a grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama returned an indictment charging the SPLC with 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.

The DOJ statement spelled out where it says the money went:

Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals who were associated with various violent extremist groups including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and National Socialist Party of America.

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A Grand Jury in Montgomery, Alabama, today returned an indictment charging the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) with 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.

According to the indictment starting in the 1980s, the SPLC began operating a covert network of individuals who were either associated with violent and extremist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, or who had infiltrated violent extremist groups at the SPLC’s direction.

Unbeknownst to donors, some of their donated money was being used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups at the same time that the SPLC was denouncing the same groups on its website.

According to the indictment, the objective of the scheme and artifice was to obtain money via donations through materially false representations and omissions about what the donated funds would be used for. The details contained in the civil forfeiture complaint are allegations only.

Those are allegations. No one has been convicted, and the indictment is the government’s accusation, not a verdict.

Jordan put a round number on it Tuesday. According to The Gateway Pundit’s transcript of the hearing, he told Fair the amount was actually $4 million, said the Biden DOJ knew about the problem, and claimed the SPLC tripled its donor income after Charlottesville.

Those specific claims are Jordan’s, made under the hearing’s framing.

This is where the story stops being about one nonprofit’s books.

Republicans have argued for years that the Biden-Harris machine treated SPLC labels as gospel and used them to point federal power at ordinary Americans.

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The committee says it found the receipts.

House Judiciary Committee Republicans laid out the coordination angle when Jordan first demanded documents in April:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent a letter to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) Interim CEO and President Bryan Fair demanding documents and communications regarding the SPLC paying sources and any coordination with the Biden-Harris Administration.

On April 21, 2026, a federal grand jury returned an indictment charging the SPLC with wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Alarmingly, between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC allegedly funneled more than $3 million in donor funds to individuals associated with violent extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, and the National Socialist Party of America (American Nazi Party), among others.

The Committee has been conducting oversight of the Biden-Harris Administration’s close coordination with the SPLC on federal civil rights matters. We have found that an internal FBI system contained at least 13 documents, including the Richmond memorandum that labeled traditional Catholics as “violent extremists,” that cited material from the SPLC.

The Richmond memo is the part that should make every churchgoing American sit up.

The FBI’s now-infamous document treated traditional Catholics as a domestic extremist concern, and according to the committee, it leaned on SPLC material to do it.

If donor money was flowing to actual Klan and neo-Nazi affiliates the whole time, as DOJ alleges, the SPLC’s authority to brand anyone an extremist collapses.

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Republicans on the panel made clear they see this as bigger than a fraud case.

The SPLC denies all of it.

In an April 28 statement, the Southern Poverty Law Center said it strongly denies the indictment’s allegations and argued that the government is mischaracterizing its informant program.

The group says the program helped prevent threats and attacks, stopped criminal activity, gathered information against extremist groups, and saved lives.

That is the group’s position, and the courts will test it.

What the hearing did was flip the table that the SPLC built.

For years it sat in judgment of conservatives and decided who counted as a hate group. Now it answers questions under oath about its own ledger, and Jordan is asking why the last administration looked the other way.

This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.

 

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