#12 The SPLC Indictment: What the DOJ Actually Charged
For fifty years the Southern Poverty Law Center was the group Americans were told to trust when it came to identifying hate. On Tuesday the Department of Justice indicted them on eleven federal felony counts. The charity that claimed to fight the Klan was allegedly funding the Klan. Three million dollars of donor money sent to the leaders of the exact groups they told donors they were going to dismantle.
In Tehran the Iranian regime is splitting in real time. The Supreme Leader's son Mojtaba Khamenei is running the hardliners. The foreign minister just said on the record that negotiating under the current orders was a death sentence. Israel's defense minister has named the Khamenei dynasty as the next target and is only waiting on a green light from Washington. The war that supposedly ended is about to start again.
And the third story tonight is about a sitting United States Congresswoman. Ilhan Omar. The walls are closing in on her from six directions at once. A thirty million dollar financial disclosure that got amended to ninety-five thousand. Her husband's companies that went from fifty thousand dollars to thirty million in a single year. A two hundred fifty million dollar Somali fraud ring running through her own state. And a video from 2020 that just surfaced of her personally promoting the very restaurant whose owner is now a convicted felon for stealing from a program she sponsored.
Let's start with a name you have heard your whole life. The Southern Poverty Law Center.
For fifty years they were the group Americans were told to trust on hate. Their Hate Map. Their Extremist Files. Their press releases every time a Republican said something the left did not like. The mainstream media treated them as the final word on who was a racist, who was an extremist, and who was a threat.
On Tuesday the Department of Justice indicted them on eleven federal felony counts.
Six counts of wire fraud. Four counts of bank fraud. One count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The indictment is fourteen pages. The FBI investigated it jointly with IRS Criminal Investigation. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced it from the Justice Department podium.
Here is what they allege the SPLC actually did.
Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC raised money from donors by promising to dismantle violent extremist groups. The pitch was simple. Give us money and we will stop the Klan. Give us money and we will expose the Nazis. Give us money and we will fight white supremacy.
They took the donor money. Then they sent more than three million dollars of it to the leaders of those exact same extremist groups.
Stop there for a second. That sentence is the whole story.
The charity that claimed to fight the Klan funded the Klan. The charity that claimed to fight Neo-Nazis funded Neo-Nazis. They took donations from grandmothers, college kids, church groups, and corporations that wanted to look virtuous. They used that money to cut checks to the men those donors were trying to defeat.
Let me give you the names from the indictment.
An Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America. Paid for years.
A fundraiser for the neo-Nazi National Alliance. Paid nearly one million dollars. Court documents allege this man stole twenty-five boxes of documents from his own extremist group's headquarters and delivered them to the SPLC, which then used those stolen records as the basis for articles on their Hatewatch blog.
A participant in the online leadership chat group that organized the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. The same rally where a woman was killed. The SPLC paid him two hundred seventy thousand dollars between 2015 and 2023. The indictment alleges he was posting racist content at the SPLC's request while coordinating rides for other white nationalists to attend the rally.
An officer of the National Socialist Movement who was also a member of the Aryan Nations affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club. Paid more than three hundred thousand dollars.
A former chairman of the National Alliance. Paid one hundred forty thousand dollars while simultaneously being listed in the SPLC's own public Extremist Files. They were paying him and publicly profiling him at the same time.
A former director of the Aryan Nations who was also a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Seventy thousand dollars.
A national president of the American Front, a man previously convicted of cross burning by federal prosecutors. Paid nineteen thousand dollars.
A former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
Eight men named in the indictment. All of them real leaders of real hate groups. All of them cashing SPLC checks while the SPLC was telling donors it was fighting them.
Here is the part that makes this criminal instead of just disgusting.
The SPLC did not just cut the checks. They hid them.
According to the indictment, the SPLC opened bank accounts under the names of at least five completely fictitious organizations. Fake businesses with no real employees and no legitimate operations. Shell companies built for one purpose. To launder donor money to extremist group leaders without anyone being able to follow the trail.
The shell companies have names now. One of them was called the Center Investigative Agency. It called itself the CIA. Another was named Fox Photography. Another was named Rare Books Warehouse. Another was called North West.
These were not real companies. They had no employees. No offices. No customers. They were bank accounts with fake names on them. The SPLC would deposit donor money into those accounts and then write checks out of them to the Klan leaders. The real SPLC name never appeared on the paper trail.
FBI Director Kash Patel laid out why that matters. At the press conference he said the SPLC set up those shell companies so the financial institutions that everyday Americans rely on were deceived into believing the money was not coming from the Southern Poverty Law Center at all, but from these fake entities. That is bank fraud by the textbook definition. You cannot lie to federally insured banks about the source of money flowing through their system. That is four separate felony counts right there.
And here is the part that makes your blood boil.
Director Patel said at the podium that the SPLC was not just paying these groups to watch them. He said donor money was allegedly used to have these hate groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes.
Read that sentence again. The SPLC allegedly used donor money to have the Klan commit crimes.
Now let me tell you the part the mainstream media is not telling you.
This investigation has been running for years. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said it at the podium. He said the investigation had been going on for a long time. He said the Biden administration shut it down. Trump's Department of Justice revived it.
Think about what that means. The FBI and IRS were building a criminal case against the Southern Poverty Law Center. Banking records, shell company documents, informant identities, payment trails. All of it was on a desk somewhere in the Biden Justice Department. And the Biden Justice Department buried it.
At the same time they were burying the investigation, the Biden DOJ's Civil Rights Division was consulting with the SPLC on federal cases. The FBI was getting hate crime analysis from them. They had access to federal hate crime databases. The very same organization being investigated for paying Klan leaders was working hand in hand with federal law enforcement on civil rights prosecutions.
That is not an oversight. That is a protection racket.
And then there is Chuck Schumer.
Within twenty-four hours of the indictment being announced, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called a press conference. His response to the SPLC being indicted on eleven felony counts for funding the Klan? He demanded that FBI Director Kash Patel resign immediately.
Not that the indictment was baseless. Not that the SPLC was innocent. Not that he wanted to see the evidence. Fire the investigator.
That is the tell. When the defense is attack the investigator instead of attack the charges, you know the charges have teeth.
The SPLC has been a Democratic fundraising and opposition research arm for decades. They label Republican organizations as hate groups. They feed talking points to the press. They testify in front of Congress as expert witnesses on extremism. Every Democrat campaign ad about right-wing extremism runs through SPLC talking points.
Schumer is not defending the truth. He is protecting an asset.
Now think about the scope of what this means if the allegations hold up.
The SPLC spent fifty years telling Americans who the hate groups were. They had a Hate Map that listed churches, veterans organizations, parental rights groups, Christian colleges, and conservative nonprofits as extremists. They had a business model that required extremism to exist. If the Klan ever actually went away, the SPLC's fundraising would collapse.
The indictment now alleges they had a financial incentive to keep those hate groups alive. To pay them. To fund their operations. To make sure the threat they claimed to be fighting never actually got defeated.
This is what happens when an industry is built on the existence of a problem. The industry cannot afford to solve the problem. It has to preserve it.
Follow the money. The SPLC needs the Klan. The Klan needs the SPLC. Without each other, neither one can sustain itself.
And for fifty years, American donors paid for both sides without knowing it.
If this indictment holds up in court, it is one of the biggest political scandals in American history. It is not just about one corrupt nonprofit. It is about how an entire generation of American politics was shaped by an organization that was allegedly paying the very villains it was claiming to fight.
Every Republican smeared by the SPLC as an extremist. Every conservative group blacklisted for appearing on the Hate Map. Every church called a hate group. Every veteran organization flagged as dangerous. Every one of those attacks came from an organization that the FBI now says was cutting checks to actual Klansmen.
The SPLC story is not a news story. It is a receipt.
Kash Patel and Todd Blanche brought it. Now the courts will decide.
But the story is already written in the money.
Now to Iran.
For the past two weeks I have been telling you on my X feed that Iran is not a country right now. Iran is a regime trying to hold itself together while three factions fight for control. I called it a soft coup.
This week the President of the United States confirmed it from the White House, and the Iranian foreign minister confirmed it from Tehran.
Here is what happened.
The United States and Iran were supposed to hold another round of peace talks in Islamabad this week. Pakistan's Field Marshal Asim Munir is the only mediator. Iran's negotiating delegation was led by Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. These are the men who wanted a deal. They are the moderates, at least by Islamic Republic standards. They understood the country was collapsing and that some kind of agreement needed to be reached.
The delegation was ready to board the plane to Islamabad. Bags packed. Flight manifest filed. And then a message came in from the office of Mojtaba Khamenei.
Mojtaba Khamenei is the son of the Supreme Leader. He is not a cleric. He is not a diplomat. He holds no official government title. He is the son. And his office, the Supreme Leader's inner circle, sent a direct order to the negotiating team.
The order banned any discussion of the nuclear file. And it formally rebuked Araghchi and his team for the concessions they had offered in the previous round of negotiations.
Iran International, the outlet that first reported this, quoted Araghchi responding to his own delegation. He said, quote, under the Supreme Leader's instructions there is essentially no point in participating in these negotiations, end quote. He called it a death sentence for the talks.
The Iranian foreign minister just said on the record that negotiating on behalf of his own government was a death sentence.
That is not a regime that is negotiating. That is a regime at war with itself.
Now here is the part that connects everything.
The same morning this came out, President Trump posted on Truth Social. His words. Iran is having a very hard time figuring out who their leader is. They just don't know. The infighting is between the hardliners, who have been losing badly on the battlefield, and the moderates, who are not very moderate at all but are gaining respect, and it is crazy.
Trump added that the United States has total control over the Strait of Hormuz. He said no ship can enter or leave without the approval of the United States Navy. He said it is sealed up tight until such time as Iran is able to make a deal.
Then he went on MSNBC. He said, quote, we wiped out three levels of leadership and anyone close to them. He said nobody wants to help them now because they have lost the fear factor. He said they are no longer the bully of the Middle East.
That is the American President confirming that Iran's leadership structure has been broken. And on the same day the Iranian foreign minister is telling his own delegation that the Supreme Leader's son is preventing them from negotiating a deal.
Let me put the three factions on the table for you so you understand what is happening inside Tehran.
Faction one. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. IRGC. This is the military wing of the regime. The current commander is Ahmad Vahidi. Vahidi spent decades building Iran's global terror network. He helped plan the 1994 Buenos Aires bombing that killed eighty-five people. He ordered proxy attacks on American troops in Iraq. Vahidi does not want a deal. The IRGC does not want a deal. They want the blockade lifted without giving up anything. They want to keep the nuclear program. They want to keep the Strait of Hormuz as a permanent weapon.
Faction two. The diplomatic and parliamentary wing. Araghchi and Ghalibaf. These are the men who understand Iran is running out of money, running out of food, running out of ships, and running out of time. Ghalibaf has privately called the IRGC hardliners extremists who will destroy Iran. He named Saeed Jalili specifically. He warned that these people are using state television to turn the public against any agreement. These are the men who want a deal. They have almost no power.
Faction three. The clerical power base. The office of Mojtaba Khamenei. The Supreme Leader's son. Mojtaba is not officially in charge of anything. But his office is where the killing orders originate. His office is where the nuclear program protection orders originate. His office just killed the Islamabad talks.
These three factions are fighting each other openly. The IRGC has one position. The foreign ministry has another. Mojtaba's office has a third. Every time the moderates get close to a deal, the hardliners and the Supreme Leader's son yank the leash.
That is why there has been no unified Iranian proposal. Not because they are playing hardball. Because they cannot agree among themselves on what the proposal should say.
Meanwhile the people paying the price are Iranian citizens.
Iran's economy runs more than ninety percent through seaborne trade. The United States Navy blockade is costing the regime an estimated four hundred thirty-five million dollars a day. Inside the country, chicken is now three hundred forty thousand toman per kilo. A cup of coffee at a cafe runs two hundred thirty thousand toman. A family trying to buy cancer medicine for a sick relative is paying one hundred fourteen million toman for a single dose that cost sixty-five million toman three months ago.
Iran has gone fifty-five days with internet shut down to two percent of normal capacity. The regime just rolled out a new tiered internet program where wealthy citizens can pay a monthly premium and get real connection speeds while the rest of the country sits in the dark.
Iran Human Rights has documented sixteen hundred and thirty-nine executions in 2025. A sixty-eight percent increase year over year. The regime is executing its own people faster than it is losing ships.
And now Israel is moving.
Israeli Defense Minister Yisrael Katz stood in front of reporters this week and said Israel is ready to resume the war against the Islamic Republic. He said Israel is waiting on a green light from Washington. He named the target. The Khamenei dynasty. Katz said, quote, this time the attack will be different and deadly, striking the most painful points, end quote. He said targets have already been selected.
Israeli pilots have freedom of maneuver over Iranian airspace. The first round was measured. Deliberate. They hit what they planned to hit and they stopped. There is a reason they stopped. Targets remain on the list. And Katz just signaled to Tehran that Israel knows exactly what is left.
President Trump also issued a kill order this week. His words on Truth Social. I have ordered the United States Navy to shoot and kill any boat that is putting mines in the waters of the Strait of Hormuz. Small boats included. There is to be no hesitation. He also ordered U.S. minesweepers already operating in the Strait to triple their clearance tempo. British Royal Navy divers are joining the multinational operation.
Three Iranian-linked vessels have been boarded in six days. The Touska cargo ship. The M/T Tifani oil tanker with two million barrels of Iranian crude bound for China. The M/T Majestic X, intercepted by U.S. Navy operators fast-roping off helicopters in the Indian Ocean. CENTCOM has redirected thirty-three vessels since the blockade began. The Navy is running up the score while Iran runs out of ships.
Exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi stood in Berlin this week and told Western media the regime is importing foreign fighters from Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan to do the killing because its own agents are refusing. He said nineteen political prisoners have been executed in the last two weeks. He said twenty more are already sentenced and waiting. He asked the Western media one question. Do you know their names? Nobody in the press had an answer.
Minutes after the press conference ended a man attacked Pahlavi in front of the German federal press building and splashed red liquid across his back. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz responded with a statement praising the ceasefire extension. No word on the executions. No word on the twenty political prisoners waiting to die. No word on the assault on a guest in his capital.
That is where we are tonight.
The Iranian regime is no longer one country. It is three factions sabotaging each other in public. The Supreme Leader's son just killed the negotiations before the plane could leave the tarmac. The foreign minister is on the record saying his own government is killing him. Israel is loaded and waiting on a green light. Trump is giving shoot-to-kill orders in the Strait. And the people inside Iran are paying for it with cancer medicine they cannot afford and internet they cannot access.
Iran is not fighting a war anymore. Iran is imploding.
And the next strike may not be measured.
Last story tonight. Let's talk about Ilhan Omar.
The Minnesota Congresswoman. The one who has been in Congress since 2019. The one who has spent years telling Americans what we should think about our own country. The one who routinely accuses the United States of being racist, imperialist, and oppressive while collecting one hundred seventy-four thousand dollars a year in taxpayer-funded salary to insult us.
The walls are closing in on her from six different directions at once. Tonight I want to stack them all up for you so you can see the full picture.
Direction one. The thirty million dollar disclosure error.
Every member of Congress has to file an annual financial disclosure. It is federal law. Omar's 2024 disclosure listed the value of her husband Tim Mynett's companies at between six million and thirty million dollars. Two companies. A winery in California called eStCru. A venture capital firm registered in Delaware called Rose Lake Capital.
This week Omar amended that filing. Her new disclosure puts the couple's entire joint net worth at somewhere between eighteen thousand and ninety-five thousand dollars.
Those numbers cannot both be true. She either lied the first time or lied the second time. Or she lied both times and the real number is something else. Her office blamed it on their accountant.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer appeared on Hannity and asked the question out loud. Who makes a multi-million dollar mistake on a financial disclosure form? He said either her accountant went to one of those Quality Learning Centers in Minnesota or she lied about it. And if she lied about it, that is a felony. Eighteen U.S. Code 1001. False statements in a matter before the legislative branch. Up to five years in federal prison.
Direction two. Her husband's sudden wealth.
Tim Mynett is Omar's third husband. Before he married her, he ran a political consulting firm called E Street Group. Between 2019 and 2020, Omar's own congressional campaign paid E Street Group two point nine million dollars in consulting fees. Then Mynett divorced his wife and married Omar.
After that, he started the winery and the venture capital firm. Rose Lake Capital had forty-two dollars and forty-four cents in its bank accounts in late 2022. Forty-two dollars. By 2024 Omar's disclosure listed it at up to twenty-five million dollars. The winery eStCru went from fifty-one thousand dollars in 2023 to as much as thirty million in 2024.
House Oversight Chairman Comer has Mynett in his sights. He has already sent a formal letter demanding records from both companies. Comer's staff is reportedly weighing a subpoena for Mynett to testify under oath.
Direction three. The Feeding Our Future fraud ring.
Minnesota is home to the largest Somali-American community in the United States. Minnesota is also home to the largest pandemic fraud case in American history. A two hundred fifty million dollar scam called Feeding Our Future. Federal prosecutors have charged seventy-nine people so far. Most of them members of Minnesota's Somali diaspora. Most of the money is gone. Spent on luxury cars, real estate, and overseas travel.
In 2020, during the COVID pandemic, Ilhan Omar personally sponsored a federal bill called the MEALS Act. The Maintaining Essential Access to Lunch for Students Act. That bill gutted the eligibility requirements for food distributors to claim federal child nutrition reimbursements. It opened the door for restaurants and non-school entities to cash federal checks for claiming they were feeding kids during the pandemic.
Once Omar's rules took effect, a Minneapolis restaurant called Safari Restaurant became Minnesota's largest non-school-based food distributor under her waiver. Safari Restaurant pulled in more than twelve million dollars in federal reimbursements between 2021 and 2022. Its owner is Salim Said. Salim Said is now a convicted felon for stealing from the MEALS Act program that Omar sponsored. Safari Restaurant was the top meal site sponsor in the entire Feeding Our Future network.
Two of Said's business partners donated directly to Omar's congressional campaign.
Direction four. The 2020 video.
This week the Minnesota House Fraud Prevention Committee held a hearing on Feeding Our Future. They played a video. The video was filmed in 2020 inside Safari Restaurant in south Minneapolis. In the video, Ilhan Omar speaks to Somali-language television in Minnesota. She personally thanks Safari for giving out meals. Her exact quote with English subtitles. I am very thankful for Safari for being part of those places where food is being given out.
She filmed it herself. Inside the restaurant. Promoting the location. Two years before the federal indictments came down against the owner.
Direction five. She ghosted the committee.
Minnesota State Representative Kristin Robbins, the chair of the House Fraud Prevention Committee, invited Omar to appear and testify at the hearing. Omar did not show up. Did not send a representative. Did not respond.
Robbins sent a formal letter on April 22 demanding Omar turn over all emails, texts, and meeting records between Omar's office and the principals at Feeding Our Future, the Minnesota Department of Education, and any of the charged co-conspirators. Robbins is specifically asking for all communications related to the Safari Restaurant video and the MEALS Act rollout.
Omar's response. Silence.
Direction six. Vice President Vance and the immigration fraud question.
Vice President JD Vance has publicly accused Omar of committing immigration fraud when she entered the United States as a refugee from Somalia. The accusation is not new. There is a long-running question about whether Ilhan Omar at one point married her own brother in order to help him obtain immigration status, then later divorced him, then later married her current husband. Omar has denied it for years. Vance has called for a federal investigation.
That is six directions. Six separate federal, state, and political pressures all closing on her at the same time.
Now let me tell you what happens next if any one of them lands.
If Comer's federal investigation produces evidence that the thirty million dollar disclosure was intentional, she can be charged under Title 18, Section 1001. Five years in federal prison per count.
If the Feeding Our Future investigation traces fraud proceeds back to her campaign donations or her husband's companies, she can be charged with conspiracy. Wire fraud. Money laundering.
If the immigration fraud case is ever opened by the Department of Justice and she is found to have lied on immigration forms, she can be stripped of United States citizenship. Denaturalized. Deported.
Any one of those outcomes ends her career. All three ends her life in this country.
And here is what bothers me the most.
This woman has spent years standing in front of cameras lecturing the rest of us about systemic injustice. About privilege. About the immorality of the American project. About how corrupt and broken our institutions are. While allegedly pulling down millions of dollars that do not belong to her through her husband's companies, while her own sponsored legislation allegedly funneled federal money to fraud rings in her own state, while donors and business partners of convicted felons cashed checks with her name on them.
There is a word for somebody who lectures everyone else about morality while doing the exact opposite in private. Hypocrite does not cover it. Fraud does not cover it either. What the federal indictments will call it if they come, is criminal.
She is lucky she is a member of Congress. If Ilhan Omar did what she is accused of as a private citizen, Secretary of State Marco Rubio would have her visa yanked and Kristi Noem's ICE officers would have her in a cell waiting on a deportation flight. The only thing protecting her right now is the United States House of Representatives, a congressional seat, and the slow pace of federal investigations.
That protection does not last forever.
Congressional seats end. Immunity ends. Investigations close. And when the paperwork finally lands on Todd Blanche's desk, there will not be any more accountants to blame.
The walls are closing in.
Three stories tonight.
The Southern Poverty Law Center indicted on eleven federal felony counts for allegedly funding the Klan with three million dollars in donor money, hidden through shell companies with names like CIA and Fox Photography. Biden shut the investigation down. Trump's Justice Department revived it. Chuck Schumer responded by demanding Kash Patel resign. When the defense is fire the investigator, you know the charges have teeth.
The Iranian regime is tearing itself apart in public. Three factions fighting each other while the foreign minister says negotiating is a death sentence. The Supreme Leader's son just killed the Islamabad talks from a back office. Israel's Defense Minister is waiting on a green light from Washington. Trump has ordered the Navy to shoot and kill any boat laying mines in the Strait. The regime is executing its own people faster than it is losing ships. And the next strike may not be measured.
Ilhan Omar has six federal, state, and political investigations closing in on her at the same time. A thirty million dollar disclosure that became ninety-five thousand overnight. A husband whose companies went from forty-two dollars to thirty million in two years. A pandemic fraud ring operating through legislation she sponsored. A 2020 video of her personally promoting a convicted felon's restaurant. A subpoena potentially coming. And an immigration fraud investigation the Vice President has publicly called for.
That is Everyone Knows. The hard truth, the stuff nobody else will say, and the thing that keeps you going.
I'm Brian Bullock of Starborne Studios. Find me on X at EveryoneKnws1. If this hits you share it with somebody who needs to hear it. Subscribe. Leave a review. Come find us at brianbullockwriter.com.
Because Everyone Knows. Your silence is your consent.