Attacks on the Southern Poverty Law Center: Ranking Member Raskin Opening Statement

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Welcome to all of our witnesses. For decades, the Southern Poverty Law Center shared information about racist terror plots with the FBI gleaned from their informant program. The FBI was happy to receive it, and this practice frequently led to the disruption of dangerous conspiracies by the KKK and neo-Nazi groups to commit violence against synagogues, churches, African Americans, Jews, and other targeted minorities. So why is the Department of Justice under Trump and Todd Blanch now prosecuting the Southern Poverty Law Center? The DOJ says that the SPLC defrauded its donors by paying undercover informants to infiltrate and collect intelligence on these racist groups. But where are all the donors complaining about having been defrauded? Where is the evidence of the fraud? Where are the civil lawsuits that always follow in the wake of a fraud, a scam, or ripoff? DOJ has offered no evidence that anyone was actually deceived or defrauded by this perfectly lawful, well-known, and accepted practice that the FBI itself approved for many years. Using informants and undercover agents was indeed the basis for the FBI's own efforts to investigate racist extremist groups when that was a priority before the targets of the FBI became instead the perceived political foes of Donald Trump. In fact, what its donors love about the Southern Poverty Law Center is how effective it's been getting on the inside of extremely dangerous racial terrorist groups to find out what's going on to try to stop the reign of terror of bombings, assaults, lynching, and arson, the violent price of white supremacy that goes back centuries in our country. Why are there no civil fraud lawsuits? Why has no one sued the Southern Poverty Law Center? From my experience as a former state assistant attorney general and a congressman who deals with constituents who get defrauded frequently, and now I'm the co-chair of the bipartisan Stop the Scams Caucus, I can assure you that victims of fraud are usually enraged after a period of being embarrassed and they come forward to complain and to sue the fraudsters. What does a real fraud case look like? How do the victims respond? Well, let's take this well-known, long-running fraud case called Trump University, which was shut down by the New York Attorney General's Office when it determined that Trump University was systematically deceiving and ripping off its students and cheating them of a real education they paid for. Over 8,000 swindled students brought three different class action lawsuits that were certified by the courts against Trump. They tried for years to recover the lost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition for a completely bogus education, and they finally won a massive settlement for $25 million. So that was more than 8,000 desperate young people who told their stories to the world. So far, to my knowledge, there's not a single donor to the Southern Poverty Law Center who's come forward to say that he or she was defrauded, much less thousands of them. And they have many thousands of donors. Everybody can see what's happening with this outrageous, scandalous prosecution in Alabama, an outrageous, scandalous persecution here on Capitol Hill. If anyone has flip sides to join the racist extremists, it's not the SPLC. It is the FBI itself. And if a fraud is being perpetrated in the public right now, it's not an SPLC fraud. SPLC's been an enemy of the Klan and neo-Nazi groups for more than a half century. It's been unswerving and steadfast, which is why their offices were bombed and why they get an unending stream of violent death threats, something which makes this prosecution and persecution all the more appalling. No, what we're witnessing is a Trump administration fraud on a vast and shocking scale. President Trump has coddled and cultivated the extreme right for as long as he's been in politics. After the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August of 2017, when neo-Nazis marched on a synagogue in the University of Virginia, chanting Jews will not replace us, when a homicidal extremist drove his car into peaceful counter protesters and killed Heather Heyer, Trump could only bring himself to say that there were some very fine people on both sides. In 2020, when he was directly asked in a nationally televised presidential debate to condemn white supremacists, he told the proud boys to stand back and stand by, which they immediately adopted as their official motto and emblazoned on their t-shirts. In office, the Trump administration has dismantled the anti-domestic terror infrastructure at the FBI, at DOJ, at the Department of Homeland Security, constantly shifting resources away from monitoring racially motivated violent extremism into immigration enforcement. He's gutted the Civil Rights Division, which is charged with prosecuting hate crimes, defunded the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, which had helped prevent more than a thousand violent terror plots since 2020, and installed a 22-year-old with zero national security experience, except for model United Nations his junior year of college, to run what remains of our Terrorism Prevention Office. He's redirected the Civil Rights Division to focus on so-called anti-white discrimination instead of the actual hate crimes devastating communities across America. He fired the federal prosecutors and FBI agents who investigated and convicted the extremists who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. And just this month, the Trump administration released a new national counter-terror strategy that literally erases right-wing violent extremism from the record. The strategy identifies drug cartels, Islamist terror, and violent left-wing extremists as the nation's top threats, but makes no mention whatsoever of far-right extremism, white supremacist violence, or domestic neo-Nazi terror. This despite a decade of data from the Nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies showing that right-wing extremists carried out 152 attacks in the United States and killed 112 Americans, compared with 35 attacks and 13 deaths attributed to left-wing extremists. Again, he just blames his enemies for what his side is doing. Trump's real relationship to the extreme right was on full display January 6, 2021, when the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters, all in Roger Stone's sphere of influence, led the violent assault on the Capitol and our police force as Trump exhorted a crowd of thousands to go out and fight and fight like hell or you won't have a country anymore. That mob not only chanted hang Mike Pence, referring to Donald Trump's then-vice president, and tried to shut down the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in American history, but brutally assaulted our police, wounding, injuring, disfiguring, and disabling more than 150 officers, terminating many careers in the process. But what has President Trump done to support, praise, or even just thank the police officers who saved members of the House and Senate and his own vice president from the rampaging mob he had incited? Nothing. What's he done to help Sergeant Connell, whose brutal injuries forced him to retire from the Capitol force? Nothing. What's he done to help Officer Harry Dunn, who was taunted with racial slurs throughout the day on January 6th? Nothing. Officer Michael Fanone, who wasn't even on duty, but came down to join his brothers and sisters in the blue to defend our democracy and was nearly ripped to shreds by the mob and had a heart attack. What's he done for him and his family? Nothing. No. Trump praises the J6 criminals, calling them heroes, martyrs, patriots, even hostages. He pardoned and commuted the sentences of more than 1,500 of them on his first day in office. Both the violent felons who attacked our officers with Confederate battle flags, baseball bats, and steel pipes, and the organizers behind the scenes who were convicted of seditious conspiracy, the deliberate and coordinated effort to put down and overthrow the government of the United States. Trump wasn't interested in the specific criminal backgrounds of any of the criminals he pardoned, whether they were child abusers, armed robbers, or drug traffickers. Nor was he interested in whether they'd shown any contrition or remorse for the worst mob attack on the Capitol and the police in the history of the capital city. Nor was he interested in whether they paid off their fines or restitution for the millions of dollars in damages inflicted. He just pardoned them all, en masse, overriding the pardon attorney in the DOJ and liberating his private militia from jail. Many of these pardoned convicts have already gone out to commit more crimes since Trump let them out. Take, for example, Andrew Paul Johnson, who Trump let out of jail and then promptly went out and sexually attacked and molested two 12-year-old children, one boy and one girl. He is now back in prison for life. But Trump's stupid, blundering decision-making forever altered the lives of those children. Oh, and by the way, last year, Andrew Paul Johnson, in a desperate bid to get these children not to turn him in to the police, told them that because he had stormed the Capitol on January 6th, he was going to be, quote, awarded $10 million for his work and would be able to split the money with them if they agreed not to talk to the police. Now, that brings us to the real fraud underway this week. Donald Trump has withdrawn his bogus $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS because the judge in the case, Kathleen Williams, doubted there was even a case for controversy and whether Trump had proper standing to bring it, and there was clearly no adverse relationship between Trump and the IRS. In any event, he withdrew it. He knew he was going to lose. Now Trump is claiming that he and the IRS have a so-called settlement, which is not possible because the case was dismissed. This fraudulent settlement involves not only an agreement by the IRS and the DOJ not to investigate or prosecute him, his family, and his businesses forever for tax frauds that he may have committed in the past, but the establishment of a $1.776 billion political slush fund in the DOJ called the Anti-Weaponization Fund that will be used to reward his friends and foot soldiers. This is lawless. To begin with, Trump doesn't establish federal programs and appropriate money for them. We do that. That's the power of the purse, which belongs exclusively to Congress. We never set up this political slush fund to be run out of the DOJ, and we never would. We have a judicial system to hear authentic cases in controversies. Not a single J6er has had charges thrown out because of a false, malicious, or retaliatory prosecution. Not a single one has had their criminal conviction reversed on appeal because of a false, malicious, or retaliatory prosecution. The idea that they were falsely or maliciously prosecuted has not been found by a single judge, Republican, Democratic, or independent appointee, and this is a defamatory slur on law enforcement and the serious civil servants at the DOJ who have been under attack since this nightmare of mega-weaponization began in January of last year. False, malicious, and retaliatory prosecutions are how Donald Trump and his DOJ operate, not real law enforcement, not real prosecutors. We would never set up a political slush fund to compensate the J6ers for their imaginary injuries because it's blatantly unconstitutional. Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, which I commend to all of my colleagues, it's in the Constitution, provides that the United States shall not assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States. All such debts, obligations, and claims shall be held illegal and void. So, everybody who thinks they're getting a big payoff this week, a million dollars per J6er is the word on the street, should understand this. This payment is illegal and void, meaning that the money belongs only to the taxpayers of America, the people of the United States, and we will get that money back if any insurrectionist gets any. My friends, the Southern Poverty Law Center is not perpetuating a fraud. Today, the Trump administration is perpetuating a fraud against America by taking nearly $1.8 billion of our money from the U.S. Judgment Fund for the payment of actual court judgments and damages, and without any legal authorization from Congress, purporting to use it to pay off his once and future private militia. No one is fooled by all the counterfeit outrage about the S.P.L.C. and finger-pointing at the people who have actually been combating violent racism in America. Mr. Chairman, the threat is not the S.P.L.C. The real fraud is coming from the White House. Just yesterday, the New York Times reported that the career lawyers in the IRS Chief Counsel's office believe that Donald Trump's lawsuit is deeply flawed and could be easily defeated, and they drafted a memo advising the DOJ to dismiss it. Of course, instead, the DOJ entered the $1.8 billion settlement. The General Counsel for the Treasury Department, Brian Morrisey, the top lawyer, resigned on the same day this settlement was announced. We've got many questions for everybody involved in this brazen and corrupt transaction. Mr. Chair, pursuant to Clause 2K6 of Rule 11, I move that the committee now immediately subpoena those involved in the creation or execution of the nearly $1.8 billion slush fund. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanch, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, IRS Chief Executive Officer Frank Bisignano, and Treasury Department General Counsel Brian Morrisey. Mr. Blanch orchestrated this outrageous slush fund as part of the settlement with Donald Trump, which was also signed by Mr. Woodward, and Mr. Besant will oversee the payout of these funds. Mr. Bisignano signed off on this settlement for the IRS, and Brian Morrisey remarkably resigned as this deal was being announced. These individuals all possess critical insights into Trump's self-dealing scheme with his own agencies to create this fund and reward his supporters and friends. So I move that they be subpoenaed right now. I second. The gentleman has not been recognized for that purpose. We will hold any motion to subpoena in abeyance until the conclusion of today's hearing.