A federal indictment unsealed April 21 reveals the Southern Poverty Law Center had a paid informant inside the Unite the Right leadership chat — making racist posts under SPLC supervision, coordinating transportation to the rally, and collecting $270,000 over eight years. The lead Charlottesville investigator didn’t know this person existed. Biden’s DOJ investigated and walked away. Declassified FBI documents show the same informant program had an operative at Elohim City two days before the Oklahoma City bombing. The SPLC sat on $800 million in assets, including Cayman Islands hedge fund accounts, while telling donors their money was fighting the extremism its own operatives helped sustain.
Read first: The Man Who Wasn’t There: The Full Story of Andreas Strassmeir, the Oklahoma City Bombing, and the Cover-Up That Followed and then From Milford to Manhattan: The Jake Lang Terror Plot Has a NEPA Zip Code
A paid operative of the Southern Poverty Law Center was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The operative, designated “F-37” in a federal indictment unsealed April 21, attended the rally at the SPLC’s direction, made racist postings under the organization’s supervision, and helped coordinate transportation for several attendees. Between 2015 and 2023, the SPLC paid this person more than $270,000.
The rally left counterprotester Heather Heyer dead and more than 30 injured. Joe Biden cited it as the reason he ran for president. The SPLC’s revenue went from $51 million in fiscal year 2016 to $133 million in fiscal year 2017 — fueled by corporate donations from Apple ($1 million), J.P. Morgan ($500,000), and George Clooney ($1 million), among others.
One of the people organizing the event that generated those donations was on the SPLC’s payroll.
For context: Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute — the group most publicly associated with Unite the Right — brought in $170,000 total that year. The SPLC paid its single operative inside the rally planning more than Spencer’s entire organization generated.
Tim Heaphy, the former U.S. Attorney who led the official investigation into the Charlottesville violence, told Cville Right Now he didn’t know about F-37. “I saw the reference to the informant who provided information about Unite the Right,” he said. “I’m not sure who that is.”
The lead investigator didn’t know.
The Indictment
The F-37 detail is buried on page 9 of an 11-count federal indictment returned by a grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama. Six counts of wire fraud. Four counts of false statements to a federally insured bank. One count of conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.
The charges: the SPLC collected hundreds of millions from donors to fight white supremacy, then secretly paid more than $3 million to leaders of the KKK, Aryan Nations, National Alliance, National Socialist Movement, and the National Socialist Party of America — the same groups it featured on its website as threats to American democracy.
The payments moved through five shell companies — Center Investigative Agency, Fox Photography, North West Technologies, Tech Writers Group, and Rare Books Warehouse — then onto prepaid debit cards handed to Klansmen and neo-Nazis. The shell accounts were authorized by the SPLC’s chief financial officer and the director of its Intelligence Project.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said the SPLC was “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.” He’s saying it for political reasons — the Trump DOJ is targeting an organization that put Turning Point USA on its hate map before Charlie Kirk’s assassination. But the facts in the indictment, and the facts it leaves out, go well beyond partisan score-settling.
The Sines v. Kessler Problem
Roberta Kaplan’s Sines v. Kessler lawsuit named 25 defendants involved in planning and executing Unite the Right. The trial lasted weeks. Devices were imaged. Discord chat logs were entered into evidence. The jury returned a $26 million verdict.
At no point was it disclosed that a paid SPLC operative was inside the planning chat.
Cross-referencing the indictment’s list of extremist organizations against the Sines defendant list produces one match: National Socialist Movement. The government hasn’t released F-37’s name. But F-37 was in the leadership chat, helped plan logistics, and posted racist content — the same activity that formed the basis of the civil conspiracy claims.
If F-37 was among the defendants, the trial proceeded without disclosure that one of the “co-conspirators” was working for an outside organization. If F-37 wasn’t named despite being in the leadership chat, someone made a decision to exclude them — and the question is who knew enough to make that call.
Either way, every Sines defendant now has a basis to challenge the verdict.
Why Biden’s DOJ Killed It
Blanche confirmed the investigation started under the Biden administration. Biden’s prosecutors looked at the evidence and declined to bring charges. Blanche said he doesn’t know why.
Consider what prosecution would have required Biden’s DOJ to disclose: that a paid SPLC operative was inside the leadership structure of the event Biden built his 2020 campaign around. The event he cited at the 2024 Democratic National Convention as his reason for running.
Revealing that the SPLC helped staff the planning committee of Charlottesville would have detonated a founding narrative of the Biden presidency.
The Trump DOJ revived the case for its own reasons — the hate map, the Kirk assassination, the labeling of conservative organizations as extremist. But political motivation doesn’t make the underlying facts less real. It means a prosecution that should have happened years ago is happening now, for the wrong reasons, by people who will use it for the wrong purposes.
The Extremist Files Paradox
The SPLC paid $140,000 to the former chairman of the National Alliance and $70,000 to a former director of the Aryan Nations. Both were listed on the SPLC’s own “Extremist Files” webpage during the period they were receiving payments. The organization was fundraising off the threat these people represented while writing them checks through shell companies.
One informant — affiliated with the National Alliance — collected more than $1 million over a decade. That same informant broke into another extremist group’s headquarters, stole 25 boxes of documents, and shipped copies to an SPLC employee. The stolen material was later published on the SPLC’s Hatewatch website. A second informant was paid $6,000 to falsely take the blame for the theft.
Paying an informant to commit burglary. Paying another to take the fall. Publishing the stolen material as journalism.
The Bank Got Suspicious. The SPLC Got Busy.
In 2020, one of the two banks holding the shell accounts launched an internal investigation into the Center Investigative Agency, Fox Photography, North West Technologies, and Tech Writers Group accounts.
An SPLC employee responded by asking the bank to close all four and transfer the remaining funds into an account held directly in the SPLC’s name. The accounts were closed August 5, 2020.
A year later, then-CEO Margaret Huang wrote to the bank stating the accounts had been opened “for the benefit of Southern Poverty Law Center operations.”
Huang resigned in July 2025 after 92% of remaining staff supported a no-confidence motion against her.
$800 Million in Assets. Hedge Funds in the Caymans.
The SPLC controlled more than $800 million in assets at the end of 2024. It reported owning accounts in the Cayman Islands. Its two most recent Form 990 filings disclosed $57 million in “investments” in Central America and the Caribbean. Non-U.S. equity holdings ballooned from $44 million in fiscal year 2013 to $233 million in fiscal year 2021 — a 430% increase in eight years.
CEO Huang earned $466,934 in base compensation plus $55,806 in benefits. Most of the leadership earned north of $200,000. CharityWatch gave the organization an “F” for spending more on fundraising than on its legal program.
The $3 million in informant payments charged in the indictment amounts to 0.375% of total assets. The indictment covers a decade. There’s no reason to believe it captures the full scope of covert spending.
Before Charlottesville, There Was Elohim City
The indictment’s timeframe begins in 2014. The SPLC’s informant program began in the 1980s. What mainstream reporting on this case has ignored entirely is where that program was operating 30 years ago.
A declassified FBI teletype dated January 4, 1996 — drafted under the authority of FBI Director Louis Freeh — disclosed that the SPLC had an informant inside Elohim City, a Christian Identity paramilitary compound near Muldrow, Oklahoma.
Elohim City was home to Andreas Strassmeir, a former German military officer whose father served as chief of staff to Chancellor Helmut Kohl. (The Pocono Review’s full investigation into Strassmeir and the OKC cover-up is here.) Strassmeir ran weapons training at the compound. He shared a room with Michael Brescia, a member of the Aryan Republican Army bank robbery gang. Members of that gang were at Elohim City immediately before the Oklahoma City bombing.
The SPLC’s informant was at the compound on April 17, 1995 — two days before Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb that killed 168 people at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.
When investigative reporter J.D. Cash confronted Morris Dees about the SPLC’s presence at Elohim City, Dees said: “If I told you what we were doing there, I would have to kill you.”
Documents obtained through Jesse Trentadue’s FOIA lawsuits confirmed the FBI acknowledged the SPLC was “engaged in an undercover role where they monitored subjects for the FBI believed to be linked to executed bomber Timothy McVeigh, the white supremacist compound at Elohim City, and the mysterious German national Andreas Carl Strassmeir.”
Strassmeir was never arrested. He was escorted out of the country through Mexico by associates of his attorney, Kirk Lyons. The FBI told the court at McVeigh’s trial that all investigative leads regarding Elohim City had been exhausted. The Trentadue documents proved otherwise.
An operative at Elohim City before OKC. An operative in the leadership chat before Charlottesville. Both events generated massive political consequences and massive fundraising surges for the SPLC.
The indictment charges wire fraud for the period when financial records are still within the statute of limitations. The pattern is 40 years old.
The Provocateur Pipeline
The indictment describes a specific operational model: pay individuals inside extremist groups not just to observe, but to make racist postings “under supervision,” coordinate logistics, plan events, and fundraise for the organizations the SPLC then cites in its own donor appeals. Manufacture the supply. Sell the demand.
That model didn’t stop in 2023 just because the shell accounts got closed.
The SPLC’s Intelligence Project — the same unit whose director authorized the shell company payments — continues to publish monthly dispatches profiling far-right provocateurs. In December 2025, January 2026, and April 2026, those dispatches prominently featured Jake Lang, a pardoned January 6 defendant and self-described Christian nationalist who has staged inflammatory confrontations in Dearborn, Minneapolis, and New York City.
Lang’s public profile fits the operative template exactly: maximum provocation, maximum media coverage, activity that generates fundraising opportunities for organizations on both sides of the political divide. (The Pocono Review’s investigation into Lang’s NEPA connections and the Gracie Mansion bombing timeline is here.) His anti-Islam organization, Americans Against Islamification, reportedly had access to $2.3 million in funding, according to Hassan Nehme, former Michigan GOP Vice Chair, who said Lang’s associate Jayden Scott told Michigan College Republicans he was “with the Flynn network.”
Lang’s Senate campaign, by contrast, has raised $4,397.
Where $2.3 million comes from for an operation run by a man whose formal campaign can barely clear five figures is a question nobody in national media has asked. The SPLC indictment — which documents an organization paying provocateurs through shell companies and prepaid debit cards — provides a framework for understanding how that kind of funding gap works.
This does not mean the SPLC is funding Jake Lang. It means the infrastructure for funding provocateurs through untraceable channels existed, was used for decades, and was only discovered because a bank got suspicious in 2020. The question of who else was — or is — being funded through similar channels remains open.
What Happens Next
The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge Emily Marks, a Trump appointee, in the Middle District of Alabama. No trial date has been set. Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Committee has demanded documents by April 30. Blanche said the investigation is ongoing and could expand to include individuals.
Legal experts are skeptical the fraud charges will survive. Columbia Law’s John Coffee called the indictment “very thin.” Retired federal Judge Nancy Gertner called it “preposterous.” Georgetown’s Abbe Smith suggested the SPLC will mount a First Amendment defense.
They may be right. Wire fraud requires proving donors were materially deceived, and the SPLC will argue that anyone donating to fight extremism understood the money would fund operations against extremist groups, informants included.
But the legal weakness of the charges doesn’t diminish what the indictment confirmed. The SPLC paid people to do the thing it told donors it was fighting. It paid an operative who helped organize the most politically consequential white supremacist event in modern American history. It had an operative at a compound connected to the deadliest act of domestic terrorism before 9/11. It hid the payments through shell companies. It closed those companies when a bank asked questions. Its CEO wrote a retroactive explanation letter. And it sat on $800 million — including offshore hedge fund accounts — while telling donors the fight against hate required their continued support.
The indictment may fail in court. The facts underneath it aren’t going anywhere.
The Pocono Review has previously reported on the Andreas Strassmeir / Elohim City / Oklahoma City bombing connection and the operational profile of Jake Lang in Pike County and the broader NEPA region. This reporting builds on months of prior investigative work. Readers with information about SPLC informant activity or the funding sources behind far-right provocateur operations in Pennsylvania are encouraged to contact the Pocono Review newsroom.