When acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel, two men who have appeared a little too eager to make Donald Trump happy, announced a criminal indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center, it wasn’t long before legal observers took a closer look at the case and noticed its glaring flaws.
Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, an MS NOW legal analyst, explained, “Here’s the central thesis of the case: The Justice Department wants us to believe that one of the nation’s leading civil rights groups — the people who broke the Klan and continue to expose the white supremacist groups that crop up in its wake — is actually supporting racism and domestic terror, that they’re in fact responsible for whipping up the frenzy.”
The Trump Justice Department’s indictment, Vance added, predicates its wire fraud charges “on the assumption that people who donated to SPLC would be unhappy that their dollars were used to fund paid informants who obtained inside information about what white supremacists and other groups were up to.”
In other words, the case is rooted in the idea that SPLC donors might oppose the civil rights organization using resources to infiltrate extremists groups through a program the center has since shuttered. The organization has vowed to mount a vigorous defense and has accused the Republican administration of targeting it for political reasons — an accusation that’s difficult to discard given Team Trump’s recent pattern.
Under the circumstances, many have started to wonder if this dubious case isn’t really just a brazen political exercise, stemming from the president’s preoccupation with targeting his perceived political foes.
Then Trump decided to weigh in himself. Using his social media platform in the early hours of Friday morning, the president amplified anti-SPLC messages while adding some written thoughts of his own. Trump wrote:
The Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the greatest political scams in American History, has been charged with FRAUD. This is another Democrat Hoax, along with Act Blue, and many others. If it is true, the 2020 Presidential Election should be permanently wiped from the books and be of no further force or effect! Thank you for your attention to this matter.
By any fair measure, this is basically gibberish. The indictment is dubious, and it doesn’t accuse the civil rights organization of any actual “hoaxes.” What’s more, the indictment has literally nothing to do with the 2020 presidential election and doesn’t implicate the SPLC in having done anything wrong with regards to the 2020 race.
But Trump, in apparent desperation, started making ridiculous jumps anyway: The SPLC is facing dubious criminal allegations … and the SPLC is generally seen as a progressive organization … and progressive organizations opposed Trump in 2020 … and Trump lost in 2020 … ergo, the election results “should be permanently wiped from the books and be of no further force or effect.”
The chain of inferences barely tracks as word association, much less as logical reasoning.
The DOJ’s critics have suggested in recent days that the SPLC case was cooked up for political reasons. Trump just bolstered the accusations.
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