Ted Cruz Slams Biden Justice Department’s Collusion With Southern Poverty Law Center

Conservative U.S. senators condemned President Joe Biden’s Justice Department for receiving a briefing on “hate” from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left group notorious for comparing conservative organizations with the Ku Klux Klan.

“It is sadly predictable that the Biden administration is echoing the anti-conservative activists at the Southern Poverty Law Center,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told The Daily Signal in a written statement Friday. “Even pretending to take them seriously demonstrates a serious lack of judgment.”

“Biden’s leadership at the DOJ are partisans using another partisan organization to legitimize prosecuting Biden’s political opponents,” he added.

Cruz was responding to documents unearthed by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, which show that the SPLC reached out to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division before releasing the 2022 version of its “hate map” in June 2023. The SPLC developed the “hate map” to track chapters of the Klan and other racist groups, but it has placed mainstream conservative and Christian organizations on the same map in recent years, suggesting they are hateful like the KKK. {snip}

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“The Southern Poverty Law Center is a corrupt and vicious tool used by far-left radicals to label anyone they disagree with as hateful or extremist to advance their own extreme political agenda,” McKinley Lewis, communications director for Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday.

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Despite these scandals, the Biden White House has hosted SPLC leaders and staff at least 11 times, and Biden nominated an SPLC attorney to a top federal judgeship.

Recently unearthed documents showed that a leading Education Department official met with SPLC staff in 2022, a year before the SPLC put Moms for Liberty on its “hate map.”

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In a 2021 call with donors, SPLC President Margaret Huang bragged that the Biden administration reached out to her organization for advice to “help shape” its domestic terrorism strategy. {snip}

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