by WorldTribune Staff / 247 Real News August 9, 2026
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) bid to dismiss charges brought against it by the Trump Administration was rejected by a federal judge in Alabama.
U.S. District Judge Emily Marks ruled on Friday that the leftist nonprofit organization did not meet the bar to demonstrate the Justice Department was motivated by animus in bringing the case.
In April of this year, the Justice Department indicted the SPLC on 11 counts, including wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The charges allege the group misled donors by secretly funneling over $3 million to informants in extremist groups between 2014 and 2023.
“Federal courts are not the proper forum for airing political grievances. For that reason, the doctrine of vindictive prosecution places a heavy burden on the accused, and decades of precedent counsels against its application here. Two things can be true at once: critics are not constitutionally immunized solely because they speak frequently and prosecutorial decisions may be second guessed—if they evince some evidence of animus,” the judge wrote in the order.
“Missing here is the requisite objective evidence to show that the United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama (on its own accord or at the direction of others) prosecuted the SPLC for exercising its First Amendment rights.”
Shortly after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the FBI cut ties with the SPLC, severing a relationship in which the group passed along intelligence it says it gained from spying on extremists.
The SPLC placed Kirk’s Turning Point USA on its so-called “hate map.” TPUSA was listed alongside neo-Nazi groups in the leftist group’s 2025 “Year in Hate & Extremism” report.
“The Southern Poverty Law Center long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine. Their so-called ‘hate map’ has been used to defame mainstream Americans and even inspired violence. That disgraceful record makes them unfit for any FBI partnership,” FBI Director Kash Patel wrote at the time.
House Republicans have officially moved to revoke the tax-exempt status of the SPLC, though the measures have not passed Congress as a whole.
