20 State AGs: ‘SPLC Has Been Utterly Discredited as a Reliable Source’

In a Feb. 10 letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray, 20 state attorneys general note that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) “has been utterly discredited as a reliable source.”

The letter concerns the FBI’s targeting of traditional Catholics as potential “violent extremists” and its reliance on “hate group” information crafted by the SPLC as detailed in a Jan. 23 FBI memo {snip}

The memo explains how the FBI Richmond Virginia office is assessing an alleged increase in the association of “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic (RTC) ideology.”

The letter from the attorneys general states, “After defining which Catholics are the dangerous ones, the [FBI] memorandum proposes dealing with those Catholics through ‘the development of sources with access,’ including in ‘places of worship.'”

{snip}

“To allocate these ‘sources,’ the document includes an appendix with a list of Catholic ‘hate groups’ that was assembled by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC),(9) apparently without any independent vetting from the FBI(10),” reads the letter {snip}

For the SPLC reference there is a footnote, number 9. The footnote reads, “The memorandum’s reliance on the SPLC is particularly disappointing, given that the SPLC has been utterly discredited as a reliable source.

“Its founder is said to have ‘viewed civil-rights work mainly as a marketing tool for bilking gullible Northern liberals,’ and former staffers have confessed that the SPLC has been ‘ripping off its donors’ {snip}“

{snip}

The footnote concludes: “Indeed, the FBI at one time recognized this reality, having reportedly dropped the SPLC as a hate-crimes resource in 2014.  {snip}”

{snip}