Federal prosecutors charged a former financial officer of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on Aug. 11 with three felony conspiracy counts for allegedly using donor money to pay informants of white supremacist groups, Ku Klux Klan members, and other extremist organizations to commit state and federal crimes.
Heidi Beirich, 59, of Palm Springs, California, was charged in a superseding indictment by a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama. The filing was added to an existing indictment filed against the SPLC in April.
Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the new charges after they were unsealed on Aug. 12 but didn’t name Beirich at the briefing.
“I believe she was part of the effort to open bank accounts in completely fictitious companies’ names and make payments to individuals for reasons that were not accurate as described,” Blanche said at a news conference in Washington.
The investigation into the case is ongoing, he said.
Beirich, an expert in extremism, started with the organization in 1999 and served as the director of the organization’s intelligence project and the SPLC’s chief financial officer before leaving in 2019.
She is accused of secretly funneling millions in donor funds through opened bank accounts using fictitious names, or shell companies, to allegedly hide from donors the fact that the group was supporting informants in extremist groups that then used the money to fund their activities, according to the indictment.
Beirich and her lawyer Michael Proctor didn’t return a request for comment. Proctor told The Associated Press his client was innocent of the charges and described the case as politically motivated.
Proctor accused prosecutors of trying to punish his client for her “decades-long record of success dismantling hate groups.”
“A free and fair society does not use the justice system to silence its political opponents,” Proctor said in a statement to The Associated Press.
Court documents filed by prosecutors in the case against the SPLC in April accuse the group of running a scheme to “obtain money via donations through materially false representations as well as by omissions of material facts about what some of the donated funds would be used for.”
Prosecutors claim the SPLC told donors their money would be used to help “dismantle” violent extremist groups.
Federal prosecutors allege that from 2007 through 2023, the civil rights organization used a portion of their donations to secretly funnel at least $4.1 million in tax-exempt donor funds through a series of bank accounts not affiliated with the organization.
The purpose of the accounts was allegedly to secretly pay field sources who were either leading or affiliated with multiple violent extremist organizations, prosecutors claim in the indictment.
The groups included the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi organization. Prosecutors allege Beirich knew donor money was used to pay an informant more than $1.2 million to help the group carry out its activities.
Prosecutors claim the SPLC also paid to publish extremist literature used in the recruiting of more extremist group members and paid the everyday living expenses for their field sources to allow them to focus on their extremist groups instead of seeking other employment.
The donors were allegedly unaware that a portion of their funds would be used by the group to pay “high-level leaders of violent extremist groups and others,” prosecutors wrote in the indictment.
“In addition, the SPLC never informed donors that some of their donated funds were to be used for the benefit of the violent extremist groups, or that some of the donated funds would be used in the commission of state and federal crimes,” the indictment states.
Beirich was served an arrest warrant Wednesday in California and was expected to make her first appearance in federal court that afternoon.
Her charges include conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to submit false statements to a federally insured bank.
The indictment also adds Beirich as a defendant to the previously charged count against SPLC of conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering and charges the organization with an additional count of concealment money laundering.
Beirich describes herself on her LinkedIn profile as an expert on the “American and European far right, including white supremacist, antisemitic, anti-immigrant, antigovernment and other extremist movements.” She lists her current position as co-founder and chief strategy officer at Global Project Against Hate & Extremism.
