CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – The Southern Poverty Law Center filed a motion to dismiss the indictment it is under in the Middle District of Alabama on Tuesday, citing “vindictive prosecution.”

The SPCL cited comments made by President Donald Trump and Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon in its bid to get the Department of Justice’s 11-count indictment of the firm thrown out.

“The statements of Administration officials and the government’s discovery establish that the government acted ‘with genuine animus toward’ the SPLC and that the SPLC ‘would not have been prosecuted but for that animus’,” the motion said.

SPLC attorneys argue in the motion government prosecutors noted the possibility the indictments could be construed as vindictive, so they pivoted into alleging financial crimes involving wire fraud, making false statements to banks, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The government claims the SPLC set up shell accounts, and paid informants from money donated for anti-racist causes for those informants to create racist violence.

Included in the allegation is the SPLC paying $270,000 to an informant to plan and coordinate Unite the Right activity in Charlottesville in 2017.

The SPLC has replied that they use informants all the time to infiltrate hate groups to know what they’re doing, and donors are fully informed of it.

Charlottesville City Councilor Lloyd Snook, when asked after the April indictment, said he’s one of those donors.

“My reaction — as one who has contributed annually to the SPLC — is that this is a MAGA effort to undermine one of the most successful opponents of racism and racist organizations,” Snook wrote in an email to Cville Right Now. “The news that there were infiltrators into the leadership of the Unite the Right rally should not be surprising, and if doing this kind of intelligence gathering is a necessary step to shut down racist and Nazi groups, so be it.  Let’s look at the long view — these organizations are on the run, and the SPLC is part of the pack of hunting dogs.  I don’t have a problem with that.”

The SPLC attorneys in the motion wrote that President Trump has subsequently “accused the SPLC of funding the Unite the Right rally in 2017 to make him ‘look bad’ and to ‘rig’ the 2020 election against him. And he claimed that if the SPLC were to be convicted of a crime, then his electoral loss would disappear.”

Claiming the DOJ indictment was “vindictive prosecution” and about quashing the SPLC’s First Amendment rights, the motion declared, “Claiming the SPLC made the President “look bad” or that the SPLC’s statements influenced the 2020 election also are not allegations of financial fraud.”

The motion also addresses Dhillon, a UVA Law grad, and said she had, “stated that the charges against the SPLC were ‘personal’ to her because she had seen friends ‘targeted’ by the organization. Putting aside the inappropriateness of a DOJ official admitting a case was brought for ‘personal’ reasons, this too is not an allegation of financial fraud.”

Although Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said this investigation was started during the Biden Administration, the SPLC filing claims during discovery they’ve determined the investigation was actually started in 2018 during the first Trump Administration when Jeff Sessions was Attorney General.

CBS News reported back in May of this year that at the time, there were some tax issues that were being investigated, an investigation that continued into the Biden Administration when the FBI and IRS lawyers determined there were no tax laws violated.

The investigation at the time also found the bank accounts in question were created with bank employees who knew they were associated with the SPLC.

The motion contends that although the DOJ had closed the investigation after those determinations, the DOJ reopened the investigation as early as October 2025.

The motion also alleges a month before that happened, several conservative groups that had been included on the SPLC’s “Hate Map” sent a letter to Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller seeking help from the Executive Branch.

Although the SPLC has found no direct link of Miller contacting the DOJ, SPLC attorneys asserted, “The (FBI) Incident Summary and Miller Letter closely track each other, sometime word-for-word.”

The motion includes an exhibit displaying the parallels in a table.

“To put it succinctly, the Justice Department’s justification for opening a ‘Full’ investigation into the SPLC in October 2025 — that led to the indictment in April 2026 — appears to be a rehashing of a letter sent by conservative groups to Stephen Miller complaining about being designated as hate groups by the SPLC,” the motion said. “Equally troubling is whether the investigation into the SPLC lacked independent predication altogether and instead was based upon copying or common sourcing from a political advocacy letter seeking Executive Branch action.”

“This showing is more than sufficient to dismiss the indictment or, at a minimum, order that the government provide discovery to explain the real origins for this investigation and the criminal charges,” the SPLC said in both the opening and closing of the motion document.

The government’s response to a “vindictive prosecution allegation,” in a filing, said, “The defendant’s motion to dismiss is an attempt to fit a square peg into a round hole. The Government is afforded broad prosecutorial discretion. For this reason, a defendant raising a claim of vindictive prosecution faces a heavy burden and may meet that burden only in the narrowest of circumstances.”