SPLC, FBI both pay outside informants
Feds' case against group baffles some experts
By: Will Carless
USA Today
..... The country's top law enforcement officials, FBI Director Kash Patel and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, announced on April 21 [2026] a slew of criminal charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization that has worked for decades to investigate, report on and combat While supremacist, neo-Nazi and other racist hate groups.
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The charges focus on the SPLC's use of paid informants, who, according to prosecutors, were given large sums of money to infiltrate some of the nation's most infamous and dangerous extremist groups. this tactic, Blanche said at a news conference, "was not dismantling these groups, it was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred."
..... The federal indictment against the SPLC states: "Unbeknown to donors, some of their donated money was being used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National alliance."
..... However, paying informants to infiltrate hate groups, the tactic at the heart of the SPLC indictment, has also been sued by federal law enforcement agencies ""for decades, if not longer," said Javed Ali, an associated professor at the University of Michigan and a former senior counter terrorism official at the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.
..... The FBI has long paid, and likely is still paying, confidential sources across the country to gather intelligence on extremist groups, including racist organizations like those named in the April 21 [2026] indictment, Ali said.
..... "There are, I would have to imagine, every day those kinds of operations," Ali said.
..... The federal indictment against the SPLC contents that it "explicitly sought donations under the auspices that donor money would be used to help 'dismantle' violent extremist groups," and that "donors were not told that some of the donated funds were to be used by the SPLC to pay high-level leaders of Violent extremist groups."
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"They used the fraudulently raised money, by lying to their donor network - thousandth of Americans - to go ahead and actually pay the leadership of these supposed violent extremist groups,: Patel said at the news conference.
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The indictment describes how the SPLC for years publicized its successes - including by disseminate information and documents provided by paid confidential sources - in articles and newsletters.
..... But confidential sources who have been paid by the GBI in the past also have included "high-level leaders."
..... One such source, David Gletty, spent years infiltrating anti-government militia groups and neo-Nazi and biker gangs for the GBI. He told USA Today he received "a lot of money" from the agency for his work, which he described as dangerous and exhilarating. But he also got into trouble while working for the agency, Gletty admitted.
..... "I was getting paid $1,000 a week at the beginning, that I went up to 43,000 a week after I did certain crazy stuff, but there were also bonuses," Gletty said. "But I got arrested one time working undercover and it cost me."
.....A 2022 USA today investigation detailed how the FBI had paid an informant, Joshua Caleb, Sutter, more than
$140,000. While he was on the FBI payroll, Sutter published and sold books glorifying torture, child abuse, rape, terrorism, mass murder ad more - all in the name of his racist and satanic beliefs.
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Sutter's self-published books became go-to texts for some of the most extreme and violent White supremacists across the world, and were required reading in a sinister satanist cult that spread to several countries and has inspired several known terrorist and would-be mass killers.
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Back in the 1990s and 2000s, paid operatives like Gletty had to option to work for law enforcement agencies or to hire themselves to organizations like the SPLC, he said. Operatives working for a private entity could actively "fish" for information by getting inside groups before any probable case existed to investigate them, a handy loophole for law enforcement agencies who would, invariably, eventually be handed the information gathered by the private group.
..... "I tried to work with the SPCE, but they were afraid of me!" Gletty said. "sometimes, they would give the FBI everything they needed on a silver platter. You do all the work yourself. You've got to go into some pretty dark places and be with some pretty dark people.
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"They were doing good," Gletty added about the SPLC. "This looks bad for them, but they were doing good.
..... The federal indictments lays out the SPLC's longstanding program of paying informants, claiming they funneled money through number of "clandestine" business entities that were cerated for the sole purpose of getting sources paid.
..... Paying people to take serious risks - and working with private organizations who pay their informants - is a tried-and-tested way to access the inner workings of criminal and extremist organizations, said Pat Cotter, a former public prosecutor who helped investigate and prosecute Mafia crime families in the 1990s.
..... "If you want to know what's going on in the sewer, you have to walk through a lot of [expletive]," Cotter said. "If you want to know what the Nazis are doing, you have to talk to a Nazi."
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the alleged use of fictitious business entities to pay informants makes perfect sense, he said, since it ensured the sources weren't receiving money directly from the SPLC tat could possibly be traced. Claiming the creation of such entires amounts to fraud is "a unique, if not perversely inventive, theory of fraud," Cotter said.
..... The Department of Justice and the FBI did not respond to a request for comment.
..... "We are outraged by the false allegations levied against SPLC - an organization that for 55 yeas has stood as a beacon of hope fighting white supremacy and various forms of injustice to create a multi-racial democracy where we can all live and thrive," S{LC CEO Bryan Fair said in a statement.
..... "Taking on violent hate and extremist groups is among the most dangerous work there is, and we believe it is also among the most important work we do. To be clear, this program saved lives."