A senior Trump administration Justice Department official ordered federal prosecutors in Alabama to “rush through” a controversial indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center despite concerns about the strength of the case, according to a description of a whistleblower account obtained exclusively by MS NOW.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government, describe the whistleblower allegations in a letter sent Thursday to Kevin Davidson, the acting U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Alabama.
“According to whistleblower information provided to this Committee, Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh ordered your office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama, to rush through the indictment of the SPLC, despite serious concerns about the strength of the case,” the letter said.
The letter asks Davidson to turn over records regarding his office’s use of SPLC informants and information in criminal or civil matters from 1996 to 2026, as well as all communications — including emails, phone calls and text messages — among his office, Aakash Singh, Justice Department leadership and others from January 2025 concerning the investigation and indictment of the SPLC.
As the minority party, the Democrats lack the leverage to force the Justice Department to produce documents. They would gain subpoena power next year if they retake the House in the fall.
Raskin’s letter did not make clear who in the Alabama U.S. attorney’s office was raising questions about the SPLC case or how they did so.
A grand jury in Alabama’s Middle District indicted the SPLC last month on fraud and money laundering charges, alleging that it misled donors by paying more than $3 million to informants within the extremist groups it was monitoring. The indictment alleged that those informants furthered the hateful aims of the various groups, including the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi groups.
The SPLC denies wrongdoing and says it has for years funneled information from its informants to the FBI and the Justice Department.
Many legal experts are also questioning the premise of the case.
Former federal fraud prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, an MS NOW contributor, said the case “bears none of the indicia” of normal Justice Department charging review and called the theory “exceedingly far-fetched.”
The indictment does not specify what donors were told that was fraudulent, he said.
“DOJ’s exercise in gaslighting-by-indictment also requires America to bury its head in the sand and pretend SPLC’s payments to infiltrate white nationalist groups were meant to support them, despite evidence to the contrary presented in its charging document,” Raskin wrote in a separate letter to Singh, also obtained by MS NOW. That letter asks Singh, the official accused of pressuring prosecutors, to produce relevant documents to the committee.
Singh is a former Republican Senate staffer who also worked as a federal prosecutor. Current and former DOJ officials say he is known within the Justice Department as an “enforcer” for acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Blanche has made no secret about his desire to move more quickly on cases that are of interest to conservatives and to President Donald Trump.
Current and former officials tell MS NOW that Singh has played a key role in pushing U.S. attorney’s offices to bring cases of interest to Trump and to drop other cases that affect Trump allies.
The Justice Department did not respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.
In his letter, Raskin accused federal prosecutors under Singh of “bringing cases without probable cause or any reasonable expectation of winning at trial.”
“Instead, the clear purpose of your directive and the onslaught of bogus cases is to intimidate and stifle criticism of this Administration’s policies,” Raskin said.
Read Raskin and Scanlon’s full letters below.
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