Within days after the Department of Justice indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in April, three of the largest charitable giving platforms froze donations to the organization. Other platforms did not follow suit. The SPLC has not been convicted of any crime, and the IRS has not revoked the organization’s tax-exempt status. The decisions of those platforms to freeze the civil rights organization’s funding rest solely on the DOJ’s indictment and, presumably, their longstanding trust that the DOJ acted with a legitimate law enforcement purpose, in good faith, and in accordance with its own professional standards.
But the federal judiciary has increasingly refused to extend that same trust to the DOJ under the Trump administration. Federal courts and even grand juries across the country and across the ideological spectrum have found they cannot credit the DOJ’s representations, with judges citing false statements, pretextual justifications, retaliatory prosecutions, and other serious departures from longstanding norms.
The SPLC indictment did not arise in a vacuum. It is the DOJ’s latest move in the administration’s sustained campaign against the nation’s civil rights infrastructure. That campaign has progressed from dismantling federal enforcement, to turning civil rights law against their purpose, and now to targeting the private organizations that carry on the mission of civil rights enforcement.
Charitable giving platforms should not become agents of that effort by continuing to place automatic trust in Trump’s DOJ where the federal judiciary has repeatedly and emphatically declined to do the same. Doing so exposes civil society and civil rights groups to a loss of funding the moment the government levels an accusation, regardless of its merits. Indeed, the accusation becomes the punishment, imposed by private institutions rather than courts. The indictment against the SPLC illustrates why that trust is no longer warranted.
An Indictment Built for Headlines
On April 21, 2026, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced that the DOJ had obtained a criminal indictment against SPLC, a nonprofit organization that has spent 55 years fighting poverty and racial discrimination and tracking and exposing violent hate groups. SPLC orchestrated landmark civil litigation that dismantled major Klan organizations by holding them financially liable for their members’ violence. It also operated a domestic extremism monitoring program, generating intelligence that the FBI relied on for decades.
Months before the indictment, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, senior administration officials publicly vowed to crack down on what President Donald Trump calls the “radical left,” baselessly linking nonprofit organizations with violence. Some Republican members of Congress, a prominent conservative organization, and media allies named SPLC and other nonprofit organizations as targets. Soon thereafter, the administration formalized that campaign by issuing a National Security Presidential Memorandum entitled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” which directed the FBI, DOJ, and IRS to investigate nonprofits and funding sources whose viewpoints it opposes. Director Patel also cut the FBI’s ties with SPLC, calling it a “partisan smear machine” that had “inspired violence.”
The flaws in the DOJ’s indictment and the irregularities surrounding it were immediately apparent. The government’s central theory—that SPLC defrauded donors by covertly supporting the very hate groups it existed to dismantle—drew condemnation from former federal prosecutors. The former head of DOJ’s Fraud Section, Andrew Weissmann, called it “exceedingly far-fetched,” and a former leader in the DOJ’s National Security Division, Christopher Hardee, described it as “one of the most cynical criminal cases ever brought by the Department of Justice.” Both noted that the indictment contains allegations flatly inconsistent with the government’s own theory. The indictment and superseding indictment also omit the basic elements of a donor fraud case. It identifies no donor who claims to have been misled and, although it quotes from SPLC’s fundraising appeals which pledge to “dismantle” white supremacy and to “monitor and expose” hate groups, it never alleges that any of those statements were false.
Former prosecutors also quickly identified defects in the indictment’s false statement charges, which allege that the SPLC misled banks by opening accounts under “fictitious” company names to conceal itself as the source of informant payments. The charges, they noted, are conclusory. The indictment never explains what was actually false about the account paperwork, why the companies qualify as “fictitious,” or how the statements were made to “influence the bank,” as the statute requires. That gap is telling, because the indictment itself alleges that the bank investigated the accounts in 2020 and that, the following year, SPLC’s chief executive and board chair confirmed to the bank in writing that the accounts were opened for SPLC operations and operated under its authority. A prior federal investigation reportedly also found that at least some bank employees knew the accounts were connected to SPLC and had helped set them up. Given the chance to shore up the charges in a superseding indictment, the DOJ left these problems unaddressed. It did, however, delete language that had disregarded a 2025 Supreme Court ruling that the statute criminalizes false statements, not merely misleading ones.
The scale of the charged conduct is also striking. As Andrew Weissmann observed, although the indictment’s introduction describes more than $3 million flowing to informants over nearly a decade, the six wire fraud counts amount to a total of $13,905, consisting of six transfers made on a single day in April 2023. No explanation has been offered for this gap.
A whistleblower reportedly claimed, despite concerns about the weakness of the case, that DOJ leadership ordered federal prosecutors to “rush through” the indictment.
The SPLC has denied the charges, vowing to vigorously defend itself.
Within days of the announcement, administration officials began making and amplifying claims that had no basis in the indictment or the facts. In violation of DOJ policies governing public statements on pending matters, Blanche, for example, falsely claimed on Fox News that the government had “no information” suggesting that SPLC shared what it learned from informants with law enforcement. In a court filing, the DOJ did not dispute that the statement was false, and Blanche later walked it back—conceding that SPLC had, in fact, shared its informants’ intelligence with law enforcement. He also accused SPLC of “manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” a statement the indictment does not support.
The White House amplified these falsehoods. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called SPLC “a criminal organization run by fraudsters who are paying for and inciting this very racism that they claim to stand against.” President Trump went further, blaming the SPLC for supposedly “financing the KKK” and funding the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville to make him “look bad,” calling the event a “total fake.” At that rally, a neo-Nazi drove a car into a crowd, killing Heather Heyer and injuring many others. A federal jury in Charlottesville later found the rally’s organizers liable for the violence, ordering them to pay the victims millions in damages.
The DOJ’s indictment occurs in the broader context of the Trump administration’s systematic and ongoing dismantling of civil rights protections. As documented by Red Line for Civil Rights, which two of us lead, DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has, since January 20, 2025, shut down at least 35 cases, investigations, and settlements it previously brought related to racial discrimination. It has worked to dismantle longstanding tools that address systemic racial discrimination, despite Congress’s deliberate expansion of those protections. Where career lawyers once used civil rights laws to expand equal opportunity in education, housing, and employment, and to ensure access to the ballot, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division now uses those same laws to attack efforts to do so, undercutting its original mandate.
After spending decades advancing precisely the kind of civil rights work the Trump administration is now moving to reverse, SPLC finds itself in the crosshairs.
Taking DOJ at Its Word
Within days of the SPLC indictment becoming public, three of the largest donor-advised fund (DAF) platforms, Fidelity Charitable, Vanguard Charitable, and DAFgiving360 (associated with Charles Schwab), suspended grants to SPLC. Together, these three platforms distributed over $30 billion for charitable causes in 2025, and SPLC has previously ranked among the top ten recipients on at least two of them. For an organization dependent on donations, losing that pipeline is no small matter.
A DAF contribution is, as a legal matter, a completed gift to the sponsoring organization, itself a public charity, which then owns and controls the funds. In exchange, the donor takes an immediate income-tax deduction and retains what the Internal Revenue Code calls “advisory privileges”— the ability to recommend grants from the account to qualifying 501(c)(3) organizations over time. In practice, sponsors follow those recommendations almost without exception when the recipient is a recognized public charity. Contributions to DAFs are irrevocable: Donors cannot withdraw assets once transferred; they can only recommend them to charities eligible under their DAF’s policies. As a result, many donors who front-loaded years of giving to maximize their tax deduction for a given year will now find that recommendations to support the SPLC will not be honored on three of the largest charitable giving platforms.
The suspensions by these three platforms are ultimately discretionary, governed by internal policies rather than legal obligations. Indeed, DAFs offered through Merrill Lynch and J.P. Morgan were not publicly reported to have suspended donations to SPLC. Under federal tax law, donors can rely on an organization’s public charity status unless the IRS issues a public notice of revocation. No such notice has been issued regarding SPLC. Its 501(c)(3) status, the qualification SPLC needs to receive grants from DAFs, remains fully intact.
What the suspensions rest on, then, is not any legal requirement, but the assumption that a federal indictment is a reliable enough signal of wrongdoing to override the IRS’s own determination of an organization’s charitable purpose. Whether that judgment holds turns on how much trust this DOJ has earned—a question the federal courts and grand juries have been answering with increasing skepticism and serious doubt.
“There’s No Credibility Left”
The presumption of regularity is a legal doctrine built on a foundational assumption: that the government can generally be trusted to properly discharge its duties. Absent clear evidence to the contrary, the presumption leads courts to take the government at its word and shifts the burden of proving otherwise to the opposing party. The doctrine applies with particular force to prosecutorial decisions, a deference the DOJ built with the courts through generations of professional, good-faith conduct, backed by rigorous internal review and, since Watergate, its Office of Professional Responsibility.
Under the Trump administration, however, the DOJ’s guardrails and expertise have all but collapsed. Career prosecutors have been purged, the Department’s top ethics officer and the head of its Office of Professional Responsibility were both terminated, and U.S. Attorneys were installed without Senate confirmation.
The consequences are increasingly visible in federal court. For instance, after the U.S. Attorney’s office for D.C. dismissed “an unprecedented number of cases” in the span of ten days, U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui, a former federal prosecutor, questioned whether the office was still adhering to DOJ’s policy requiring prosecutors to charge only when they believe the evidence is sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction. Faulting the office for needlessly holding people and bringing charges that do not belong in federal court, he concluded: “there’s no credibility left.”
Across the federal judiciary, judges have observed DOJ’s norms erode. A comprehensive study published by Just Security documented 90 instances since January 20, 2025, in which courts found they could not trust the government’s information and representations across a range of civil and criminal cases, identifying false sworn declarations, pretextual justifications, and contradictions between the record and what the DOJ told courts. Courts found the government had not complied with judicial orders in 34 cases, often prompting contempt warnings. These numbers do not include the more than 750 immigration habeas cases in which courts identified these same issues. This trend extends to the government’s use of investigative and charging tools. As one of us has documented, since January 2025, grand juries—for which refusal is ordinarily nearly unheard of—have refused to indict in at least 18 publicly reported instances, and at least 16 grand jury subpoenas have been quashed or withdrawn when challenged.
These concerns are not confined to politically charged cases. In one case, a federal court dismissed a felony indictment after a DOJ prosecutor conceded that a sworn statement by an officer had “misrepresented what was going on.” The court criticized the “largely fictional” affidavit and the government’s “ever-shifting positions,” concluding that prosecutors had “manufactur[ed] a felony” and that this was “the rare case in which the Government’s conduct is so ‘shocking to the universal sense of justice’ that it should be deprived of the opportunity to prosecute the Defendant.”
The courts’ skepticism has been especially pronounced where the DOJ has exercised its prosecutorial powers against individuals or institutions that the Trump administration has identified as political adversaries or obstacles to its agenda. In May, for example, a federal judge dismissed criminal charges against Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, ruling that Blanche had reopened a closed investigation to punish Abrego Garcia for challenging his wrongful deportation. The court highlighted the government’s “narrow, self-serving interpretation” of the evidence and rejected the government’s assertion that the decision to prosecute was made without political influence because “the persuasive, credible, objective evidence shows otherwise.”
A recent New York Times review of more than 550 assault prosecutions arising from the administration’s immigration enforcement found that nearly half of the resolved cases collapsed, with juries acquitting, judges dismissing, or prosecutors withdrawing the charges. Judges criticized prosecutors or agents in more than 30 instances for conduct including destroying or withholding evidence and making false or exaggerated claims, some of them disproved by video.
Courts have also refused to afford the substantial deference typically extended to the DOJ’s subpoena power. Quashing subpoenas issued to investigate Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Chief Judge James Boasberg concluded that there was “a mountain of evidence” the subpoenas were intended not to advance a legitimate criminal investigation, but to pressure Powell into lowering interest rates or resigning. The court found the government’s asserted justifications to be “mere pretexts,” observing: “the President spent years essentially asking if no one will rid him of this troublesome Fed Chair. He then suggested a specific line of investigation into him … The President’s appointed prosecutor promptly complied.”
SPLC has long been a target of President Trump and his allies, making this precisely the type of case in which those concerns are most acute.
When Trust Is Gone, Deference Becomes Complicity
Automatically suspending donor-directed grants based solely on government action against groups it has politically targeted risks conscripting independent stewards of charitable giving into the administration’s campaign against its perceived enemies.
That risk is especially acute because DAFs are not deciding how to spend their own charitable dollars. They hold funds that donors irrevocably dedicated to charitable purposes, often years earlier, with the expectation that those funds could be directed to qualified public charities. As Harvey Dale, Daniel Hemel, and Jill Manny explain, donors could move their accounts to sponsors “with more coherent grantmaking criteria.” But ultimately, suspending grants based solely on an indictment allows the DOJ, at least in the first instance, to determine where those charitable dollars may go.
From documenting Jim Crow-era abuses to litigating the landmark civil rights cases that reshaped American law, civil society organizations have held the government to account because they remained financially independent of the public institutions they challenged. Any DAF policy that automatically treats government enforcement action as disqualifying for charitable giving should be changed. Otherwise, DAFs surrender that independence at precisely the point where it matters most.
SPLC is the first civil rights organization to face a federal indictment by this DOJ. But, as others have warned, policies like these hand prosecutors a tool that works whether or not their cases do: bringing charges, even charges that ultimately fail, is enough to dry up an organization’s funding for the years a case takes to resolve. Blanche has already vowed to go after “every other” purportedly “fraudulent” group the DOJ claims is “operating with the same deceptive playbook.” If DAFs allow prosecution alone to sever access to donor-directed charitable funding, the government no longer needs to prove guilt to inflict debilitating penalties. Private institutions will have recklessly imposed them first.
