Pearl River      The plot thickens as the accused finally speaks via court filings.  What am I talking about?  Well, I’m still bird dogging, as best I can, the accusations against the well-regarded and well-known civil rights organization the Southern Poverty Law Center.  I’ve never been a fan and cheerleader for lawyers, but right is right, and this whole think is smelling ripe and a long way from right.

The heart of the FBI and Justice Department’s allegation is that SPLC was paying informers to infiltrate far-right wing and hate groups.  You, just as much as me, might wonder, what’s the beef?  In the bizarre logic of Trump’s Justice gang and its FBI enforcement wing, they are arguing that in effect the SPLC was financially subsidizing the groups and keeping them sustainable.  Incredible!  Justice and FBI also claimed they knew nothing about what SPLC was doing.  It was a planet moving around a different sun.

So that’s their story, and we’ll see how long they stick with it, because the facts detailed in their filings with the court come from a different, but real, world.  First, the informant program was closed three years ago, so this isn’t exactly an immediate concern, but it also turns out that SPLC not only shared intel from their informants, it also made a difference.  For example,”…the work of an SPLC informant helped the Justice Department during Trump’s first term to secure a six-month prison term for a member of the white supremacist group Vanguard America….”  SPLC had also fingered a member of the neo-Nazi group, the Atomwaffen Division, who had discussed attacks against Jews, gay people and other in Las Vegas, who ultimately pled guilty to weapons charges….”  They even had provided a 45-page report to the FBI “warning that violence might erupt at the white nationalist ‘Unite the Right’ rally in 2018 in Charlottesville, Virginia.”  What is especially rich about the last example is that “Trump himself asserted that ‘Charlottesville was all funded’ by SPLC, and the young protester who was run over by a white supremacist car was “part of the rigging of the election.”  Wow!

Not surprisingly, since the SPLC is full of real lawyers, they are asking to see the bill of particulars presented to the grand jury to get this jerry-rigged indictment of their work.  It turns out the day before the public release of the attack against them, they had given Justice 15,000 “pages of records about its informant program” in answer to a Justice subpoena, but none of that submission was reflected in their charges.  It’s rare to get access to what is given to the grand jury, but in other Trump 2.0 revenge cases, like that of former FBI chief Comey, judges allowed it, because this hapless crowd made so many errors in front of the grand jury there.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is so clueless that he claimed the SPLC had not shared information with the government that was gained from informants.  In the face of all of their filings about their past work with the FBI and Justice, it looks like the Trump revenge tour abetted by both these outfits is not even bothering to do their due diligence before stepping over their own feet.

All of this surely looks at this point that we are dealing with nothing more than a weaponized FBI and Justice Department, but they may have picked the wrong fight with SPLC.  So far, they can use their press clippings to wipe the egg off their faces.