Big-name donors to the Southern Poverty Law Center, including George Clooney and George Soros, have stayed silent amid allegations that the nonprofit funneled more than $3 million to the hate groups it claimed to fight.
The SPLC was charged with wire fraud, bank fraud and money laundering on Wednesday for allegedly bankrolling at least eight leaders and members of extremist groups — all behind the backs of their deep-pocketed benefactors.
The foundations of Clooney and Soros, along with MGM Resorts and other high-profile backers, haven’t spoken up about the Justice Department indictment.
They’ve also ignored The Post’s requests for comment about the SPLC’s indictment, in which federal prosecutors alleged that insiders from the extremist groups paid by the nonprofit helped spread hateful content.
Many of SPLC’s donors, including George Clooney’s foundation, former Apple CEO Tim Cook and JPMorgan, pledged to the organization after clashes at a 2017 “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in Virginia, which resulted in the death of one protester.
Little did those donors know that the SPLC was allegedly sending money to one of the people involved in organizing the “Unite the Right” rally, according to the DOJ indictment.
Other notable SPLC donors include George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, OpenAI and Chick-Fil-A.
Chick-Fil-A — which took heat from Christian groups for a 2017 donation to the SPLC — addressed the scandal to The Post.
“Our mention in this is based on a one-time $2,500 donation made nearly 10 years ago at the request of a former advisory board member. This isn’t an organization that Chick-fil-A is involved with or supports in any capacity,” the company told The Post.
The DOJ claims 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, Aryan Nations, and the Nationalist Socialist Party of American Nazis.
But the sheer amount of money spent on these efforts has caused civil rights activists to doubt their motives.
For example, the group paid about $270,000 over an eight-year period to a “Unite the Right” leader directly involved in organizing the notorious Charlottesville rally, in which attendees shouted racist slogans and waved Nazi flags.
Critics include activists like Bob Woodson, an 89-year-old civil rights champion who faced jail time for his advocacy in the Jim Crow South, and Curtis T. Hill Jr., the former attorney general for Indiana who now serves as an ambassador for Project 21’s black leadership network.
Hill told The Post that the SPLC should “be taken down brick by brick” if the DOJ’s allegations are true.
“The motive is raising money for self-perpetuation. Perpetrating hate costs money. If these allegations are proven true, they’re raising money to further their own existence,” he said.