Ranking Member Raskin Slams Republicans’ Sham Attack on the Southern Poverty Law Center
Washington, D.C. (June 9, 2026)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered opening remarks at a hearing slamming Republicans’ baseless assault on the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in the aftermath of a vindictive Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecution aimed at silencing civil rights defenders while emboldening extremist groups.
Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks at today’s hearing.
WATCH Ranking Member Raskin’s opening statement.
Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
House Judiciary Committee
Hearing on “The Southern Poverty Law Center: Manufacturing Hate II”
June 9, 2026
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Welcome to our witnesses.
Created in 1971, headquartered in Montgomery, Alabama, the Southern Poverty Law Center is one of America’s leading civil rights groups. It fights for voting rights throughout the South, economic justice and criminal justice reform. Like every major civil rights group in our history, it’s been subjected to serious white supremacist violence. Its leaders have been threatened and attacked since its founding, and SPLC headquarters were firebombed in 1983 by members of the Ku Klux Klan, who were convicted of conspiracy and federal court.
After this attack and escalating racial terror, SPLC added to its work a focus on the Klan and neo-Nazi groups and other purveyors of hate, violence and white supremacy. In 1988, SPLC litigated against the Southern White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and drove them intobankruptcy, winning $1 million damages verdict on behalf of more than 50 peaceful civil rights marchers in Forsyth County, Georgia who had been savagely attacked and injured by the Klan. It brought a $14 million judgment and won it against the neo-Nazi founder of the Daily Stormer for orchestrating an antisemitic troll storm harassment campaign consisting of more than 700 death threats and vile abuse against the Jewish woman and her family.
The SPLC has defended the rights of anyone and everyone targeted for hate, violence, oppression and murder. Today, it’s under attack by the Trump Administration and MAGA. Like the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the great legislative achievement of the modern civil rights movement, now dismantled by the Roberts court, the SPLC is an enduring institutional beacon of hope for millions of people seeking to create a more perfect union. The Trump Administration is thus naturally trying to tear it down.
I’ve heard three main arguments for this astonishing crusade. The first is that the age of racism and white supremacy violence is over in the 21st century, and so the SPLC’s work is unnecessary. Well, this is plainly ridiculous. We live in an age of resurgent racial injustice, profound economic inequality and relentless assaults on the right to vote. Racist violence still permeates our society. In recent memory, avowed racist and white supremacists have killed 23 people in the El Paso Walmart massacre, 11 people worshiping at the Tree of Life synagogue in the worst antisemitic attack in American history. Ten people who were killed shopping for groceries in the Buffalo supermarket massacre. Nine worshiping parishioners were gunned down at the Mother Emanuel Church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina. Eight people were killed at the Atlanta Spa Shootings, to name just five examples out of thousands.
In 2024 alone, the FBI recorded nearly 12,000 hate crime episodes in our country. Just a few weeks ago, three fathers died defending their mosque and 140 children at worship services in San Diego against two fanatical white supremacist teenagers up on white great replacement theory and far-right neo-Nazi ideology who took their own lives tragically after the attack.
But here’s the second argument they use. They say, well, even if there’s all this violence that we’re engulfed in, the Southern Poverty Law Center itself is responsible for the violence that we see around us. The basis for this outlandish claim is that for decades, at least since the 1990s, the SPLC has infiltrated and investigated the Klan, neo-Nazis and other groups by paying informants who go undercover. The purpose of these operations is obviously to derail and prevent white supremacist hate crimes and actions, both the kinds of hate crimes and shooting sprees we see all around us, but even more massive terrorist attacks like the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing, which took the lives of 168 Americans, many of them children who were in a daycare center when the white nationalists unleashed their terrorism on the people of Oklahoma.
In the course of their work to investigate the extreme right, the SPLC has worked closely with the FBI for decades and turned over to the Bureau voluminous information, tips, and leads from their field sources, sources for further investigation, criminal arrest and prosecution. In 2017, the FBI listed the SPLC as one of its partners on its website, where it remained for eight or nine years before this Administration. There’s nothing new about that work.
But now Todd Blanche and the Trump DOJ in Alabama have twisted and corrupted this proud history of cooperation with law enforcement to bring an 11-count criminal indictment against the SPLC, claiming that it was defrauding its own donors. This is amazing, given not only that the SPLC donors and supporters cherish and prize the group precisely for its ability to get information in this way to stop hate crimes, but also incredible because the FBI itself uses the exact same practices for its own investigative work, spending in the neighborhood of not $3 or $4 million on undercover informants, but more than $40 million a year on undercover informants. There’s nothing illegal about that. SPLC donors are not claiming fraud. They were proud to support this program. Even the extremist groups themselves understood they were being infiltrated and were constantly looking for the traitors, the spies.
Well, my friends, we know what a real fraud looks like. Consider a fraud called Trump University, a scam from top to bottom, where 9,000 victims joined three different class action lawsuits to complain about the fact that they were cheated out of thousands of dollars for a university that existed in name only, without a real curriculum, without real professors, without an actual campus, or any way to keep their extravagant and seductive promises to their students. The thousands of outraged victims were not silent. They came forward to complain, and they won a $25 million settlement against Donald Trump and the purveyors of this fraud. One former instructor at Trump University said it, “preyed upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money.” Another former instructor said the institution was “a total lie.” That’s what real fraud looks like.
What have SPLC’s donors done in light of this criminal indictment? They’ve not lined up to file class action suits or to denounce the SPLC. They continue to support the SPLC’s works. Donations to the organization have gone up since this fraudulent indictment was brought down by the Trump Administration.
Well, the final complaint I’ve heard from members of this Committee speaking on behalf of certain groups who take exception to being called hate groups by the SPLC, so they’re mad that certain groups that they like are called hate groups. And I can appreciate why people don’t want to be called a hate group. I don’t like a lot of things that are said about me and the groups that I like. But Stephen Miller said, “The Democrat Party is not a political party; it is a domestic extremist organization.” I don’t like that either. Kristi Noem called Alex Pretti and Renee Good “domestic terrorists.” Donald Trump said that Democratic donors like George Soros and Reid Hoffman were funding a “conspiracy” to back domestic terrorists.
Look, under our First Amendment, love and hate exist in the eye of the beholder. Donald Trump has repeatedly said that January 6th was a “day of love,” when our police officers were bathed in hugs and kisses from the Proud Boys and the insurrectionists. For most of us who lived through that violent insurrection, it wasn’t a day of love. It was a day of hatred and sickening violence. But that’s the great thing about the First Amendment. It’s up to you. You can say whatever you want. If you don’t like the fact that someone’s called you a hate group, then you get up and then you rebut them. You denounce them.
I’ve heard Chairman Jordan say it a dozen times in our hearings, and I agree with him: the proper response to speech you don’t like is counter speech, not government prosecution, not government censorship. Counterpose honest speech to dishonest speech, the truth to the lies. Let the public figure it out. Whatever happened to, I disagree with everything you say, but I will stand with my life for your right to say it. We need less vendetta and more Voltaire.
All of this is a disgrace. When DOJ was founded in 1870, 156 years ago, it was to protect the newly freed African Americans against the Ku Klux Klan, which was rampaging violence throughout the south. Todd Blanche has capsized DOJ’s commitment to the rights of all and disgraced the Department. He has directed DOJ to savage the SPLC while he does everything in his power with the president to aid and abet the right-wing extremists who commit acts of violence against racial minorities.
Just two weeks after becoming acting AG, he moved to vacate the criminal convictions of the leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers for seditious conspiracy. They were convicted and sentenced to jail for many, many years. Seditious conspiracy means working to overthrow the government of the United States. These were crimes so toxic that President Trump wouldn’t even pardon them when he was pardoning, en masse, more than 1,600 other cop-beating racist January 6th rioters and insurrectionists. These are the people that the DOJ now protects. And now Todd Blanche wants to create a $1.776 billion taxpayer funded slush fund to turn the January 6th foot soldiers into MAGA millionaires.
And while Blanche was at it, he signed an outrageous Super Pardon to give not just Donald Trump, but his entire family and all their businesses, complete and total immunity from any investigation, audit, lawsuit or prosecution by any federal agency for any criminal or civil violation against the United States up until this point. And while systematically firing prosecutors and FBI agents who worked on the January 6th investigation, the largest criminal probe in American history, Trump and Blanche are putting January 6th rioters, violent extremists and their closest allies in key positions throughout the DOJ, like Jared Wise, who urged rioters to kill police officers on January 6th. Like Ed Martin, who defended violent cop-beaters both as a defense attorney and a federal prosecutor. He’s been given free rein now as DOJ’s pardon attorney, despite his long history of consorting with neo-Nazis. Donald Trump nominated Paul Ingrassia, three years out of law school, to run the ethics watchdog Office of the Special Counsel, and stood by him after it was revealed that he admitted to having “a bit of a Nazi streak in him.” And he wrote that the Martin Luther King holiday should be “tossed intothe seventh circle of hell.” And, the Department of Defense hired Elias Irizarry, an unqualified and inexperienced 24-year-old Trump loyalist and convicted January 6th rioter who was pardoned by the President, to work on “irregular warfare and counterterrorism.”
So, we understand that the extremist swamp that gave rise to this criminal indictment against the SPLC is just one more Orwellian attack on the civil rights movement and one more Kafkaesque prosecution designed to shame and ensnare the righteous and acquit and absolve the guilty. It is a tissue of lies that will join the pantheon of debunked fraudulent prosecutions that DOJ has been excoriated for by dozens of judges across the land appointed by all different presidents.
A few weeks ago, a federal judge in Rhode Island, Judge McElroy called the government’s submissions in a civil case “misleading, if not utterly false.” Another judge in that same district found, that DOJ attorneys submitted a “patently false” allegation to the court. Yet another federal judge in Massachusetts rejected Administration officials “testimony as disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable.” Another court found the Administration had provided a “highly misleading, if not intentionally false” sworn declaration “so disingenuous that the Court is left with little confidence that the [United States] can be trusted to tell the truth about anything.”
I predict it will not be long before another federal judge casts this obscene prosecution tothe winds. I’m only sorry the great name of the House Judiciary Committee has now been made an accomplice to this fraud against the court in the country. I yield back to you, Mr. Chairman.