SPLC Warned Law Enforcement About Las Vegas Terror Plan, New Motions Say
Newly filed motions seek to determine what grand jurors were told by Trump administration prior to indictment of Southern Poverty Law Center.
Attorneys for the Southern Poverty Law Center fired back against the Trump administration Tuesday in a pair of filings that accuse prosecutors of ignoring critical evidence in its indictment of the civil rights organization, perhaps even misleading grand jurors who approved the charges.
In the filings, SPLC lawyers argue that the group helped thwart a potential terrorist attack in Las Vegas in 2019 and tried to warn law enforcement before the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
Defense attorneys are asking the court to unseal transcripts of grand jury proceedings to determine what grand jurors were told. The motions also ask for an order requiring Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to retract statements he made on Fox News and prohibiting Trump administration officials from continuing to wage a pre-trial PR campaign against the group.
“This prosecution is as unprecedented as it is irregular,” SPLC lawyers argue in one of the two motions. “Comments made by Administration officials and flaws in the indictment itself suggest the case results from misleading both the public and the grand jury that voted on the charges.”
‘Unite the Right’ warnings
As part of its efforts to prosecute the SPLC in the court of public opinion, Trump administration officials have accused the group of orchestrating the deadly “Unite the Right” rally.
President Trump himself has called the event “fake.”
Those accusations regarding Charlottesville are not contained in the indictment returned by a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama.
The indictment accuses the SPLC of fraud and money laundering in how it conducted an intelligence-gathering operation to dig up potential dirt on violent right-wing extremists.
Blanche told Fox News he had no evidence that SPLC ever shared information from those undercover sources with law enforcement.
In fact, defense lawyers insist that prosecutors knew that “the SPLC used the informant program to gather voluminous and detailed information about the risk of violence at Charlottesville.”
Here’s what the motion says about that effort.
“That information was memorialized and provided to law enforcement, including to the FBI’s Mobile, Alabama office—the very office leading the investigation of this case—in advance of the rally in the form of a 45-page “Event Alert.” That document warned the FBI of the specific individuals likely to attend the rally and foment violence, providing not only names and pictures, but specific details about associates, backgrounds, and criminal histories. For some of the individuals identified in this Event Alert, the SPLC even provided details about those individuals’ weapons of choice based on intelligence gathered through the informant program.”
While the Trump administration has argued the purpose of the informant program was to “manufacture racism,” defense attorneys say prosecutors ignored evidence that the SPLC shared intelligence with law enforcement “to thwart, stop, or otherwise help dismantle the activities of those racist groups.”
Individuals A and B
That motion identifies a person known as Individual A, a member of the extremist group Vanguard America who sought a security clearance as part of his work at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in 2018. According to that filing, SPLC passed along information from one of its inside sources. Federal prosecutors charged Individual A, who was convicted and sent to prison.
In 2019, SPLC warned law enforcement that “Individual B, a member of white supremacist extremist group Atomwaffen Division, intended to engage in a major terrorist attack against Las Vegas citizens,” defense attorneys say.
That motion continues:
“The press release issued later by the Department of Justice detailed Individual B’s planned violence: [Individual B] admitted that, during online conversations between May 2019 and July 15, 2019, he discussed setting fire to a Las Vegas synagogue, and making Molotov cocktails and improvised explosive devices. Individual B further admitted that he conducted surveillance on a bar that he believed catered to the LGBTQ community, located on Fremont Street in Downtown Las Vegas, in preparation for a potential attack. The complaint filed by the government against Individual B, signed under oath by an FBI Special Agent, detailed specifically just how close Individual B got to executing a mass terror attack….”
Individual B, according to the motion, was charged, pled guilty and sentenced.
“The Department of Justice is well aware that the SPLC provided helpful information, through the use of its confidential informants, to law enforcement,” defense attorneys argue. “The Department of Justice also knows that these confidential informants helped law enforcement put violent extremists in jail.”
Magistrate Judge Kelly Fitzgerald Pate gave the government until May 5th to file a response.