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The Southern Poverty Law Center hit back at Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche over the indictment filed against the group last week — saying it has repeatedly sent info from its informant program to the Justice Department.
“The Department of Justice is well aware that the SPLC provided helpful information, through the use of its confidential informants, to law enforcement,” the group’s lawyers wrote in court papers Tuesday.
“Department of Justice also knows that these confidential informants helped law enforcement put violent extremists in jail.”
Last week, the DOJ announced a criminal indictment against the SPLC, alleging it hid from donors that it paid over $3 million to informants — many of them leaders inside hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
The DOJ said the SPLC actually helped the racist groups it vowed to take down.
That same day, Blanche went on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” and said the SPLC didn’t share information from its sources with the FBI.
“There’s no information that we have that suggests that the money they were paying to these informants and these members of these organizations, they then turned around and shared what they learned with law enforcement,” Blanche said on the program.
The SPLC said they reached out to the DOJ asking for Blanche to make a correction of that statement but their demands haven’t been met.
Now the group is asking a judge to force the DOJ to make a correction, claiming the information they shared with the FBI has led to two convictions in recent years and the group told the DOJ about all of the leads they’d given to law enforcement just two weeks prior to the indictment.
The group said that one of the people that informants helped the DOJ convict was a “member of white supremacist extremist group Atomwaffen Division” and that person “intended to engage in a major terrorist attack against Las Vegas citizens.”
And the indictment against that person “detailed specifically just how close Individual B got to executing a mass terror attack,” SPLC lawyers wrote in the papers.
That person pleaded guilty and is now in prison.
Just two weeks before the SPLC was indicted, the group’s lawyers “provided information to the government demonstrating unequivocally that the SPLC had shared information from its informants with law enforcement,” the filing claims.
Blanche’s alleged false statement raises concerns that the grand jury that returned the indictment against the SPLC was given incorrect information about the SPLC’s intel-sharing with law enforcement, the group claimed.
The DOJ didn’t immediately return a request for comment Tuesday morning.
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