Big-name donors to the Southern Poverty Law Center, including George Clooney and George Soros, have remained silent amid allegations that the nonprofit has funneled more than $3 million to the hate groups it claims to fight.
The SPLC was charged with wire fraud, bank fraud and money laundering on Wednesday for allegedly funding at least eight leaders and members of extremist groups — all behind the backs of wealthy donors.
The Clooney and Soros foundations, along with MGM Resorts and other prominent backers, have not spoken about the Justice Department’s indictment.
They also ignored The Post’s requests for comment on the SPLC’s indictment, in which federal prosecutors alleged that insiders at extremist groups paid by the nonprofit helped spread hate content.
Several donors to the SPLC, including the George Clooney Foundation, former Apple CEO Tim Cook, and JPMorgan, pledged to the organization after clashes at a 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Virginia, which resulted in the death of one protester.
These donors did not know that the SPLC was sending money to one of the people involved in organizing the Unite the Right rally, according to the Justice Department indictment.
Other notable donors to the SPLC include George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, OpenAI, and Chick-Fil-A.
Chick-Fil-A – which I took the heat From Christian groups to 2017 donation to SPLC — face of scandal to The Post.
“Our mention of this is based on a one-time donation of $2,500 made nearly 10 years ago at the request of a former board member. This is not an organization with which Chick-fil-A participates or supports in any capacity,” the company told The Post.
The Department of Justice alleges that the organization misled both donors and law enforcement by paying undercover “F” agents ostensibly tasked with gathering intelligence and conducting espionage within groups including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, and the National Socialist Party of the American Nazis.
But the enormous amount of money spent on these efforts led civil rights activists to doubt their motives.
For example, the group paid about $270,000 over eight years to a Unite the Right leader who was directly involved in organizing the infamous Charlottesville demonstration, in which attendees chanted racist slogans and waved Nazi flags.
Critics include activists like Bob Woodson, an 89-year-old civil rights advocate He faced prison time For his advocacy in the Jim Crow South, and Curtis T. Hill Jr., a former Indiana attorney general who now serves as an ambassador for the Black Leadership Network at Project 21.
Hill told the newspaper that the SPLC law should be “taken down stone by stone” if the Justice Department’s allegations are true.
“The motive is to raise money for self-perpetuation. Committing hate costs money. If these allegations prove true, they are raising money to further their existence,” he said.