FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—A left-wing activist group known for putting its political opponents on a “hate map” with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan advised Justice Department prosecutors at a “hate crimes symposium,” newly unveiled documents show.
America First Legal obtained the documents via a Freedom of Information Act request and provided them first to The Daily Signal.
“All Americans should be shocked, appalled, and terrified that the Biden Justice Department was taking advice from a hate-filled, morally bankrupt organization like the Southern Poverty Law Center,” Ian Prior, senior counselor at America First Legal, told The Daily Signal in a statement Monday. “The SPLC’s agenda is anti-American to its core, and we must ensure that the SPLC never regains the power that it was so wrongly granted by the woke bureaucrats who ran this country until this past January.”
On Oct. 27, 2023, Robert Moossy Jr., deputy assistant attorney general at the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, sent an email to Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, head of the Civil Rights Division.
His email referenced a “Hate Crimes Symposium” at the National Advocacy Center at the National District Attorneys Association in Columbia, South Carolina, on Nov. 7-9, 2023. The Civil Rights Division’s Criminal Section “will hold a hate crimes symposium focusing on the investigation and prosecution of federal hate crimes.”
“More than 100 [assistant U.S. attorneys] and [criminal division] trial attorneys are anticipated to attend as well as agents from the FBI’s Hate Crimes/Domestic Terrorism Fusion Cell,” the email noted. “While the presenters will primarily involve [criminal division] attorneys, [assistant U.S. attorneys], attorneys from the National Security Division, and staff from the SPLC will also present.”
The schedule of events for the symposium listed R.G. Cravens, manager of research and analysis at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project (which publishes the “hate map”), as a speaker at 2 p.m. on Nov. 7.
“This presentation will provide an overview of important, disturbing trends and developments within the anti-LGBTQ movement, including the surge in threats and violence against transgender people, children, and their caregivers,” the schedule said of Cravens’ presentation. “By focusing on commonalities in rhetoric, symbols, locations, and actors involved in violent anti-LGBTQ attacks and targeted intimidation, this presentation will help investigators and prosecutors identify potential evidence and motivations for bias crime.”
The symposium had two similar speeches, one dedicated to “talking to victims in the LGBT+ community” and another focused on “overcoming hurdles to prosecuting transgender violence.”
The Justice Department repeatedly engaged with the SPLC during the Biden administration. DOJ staff seemed receptive to meeting with the SPLC shortly after the group put the parental rights group Moms for Liberty on the “hate map” in 2023. Clarke appears to have met with the SPLC in March 2023.
The FBI’s Richmond office cited the SPLC in its since-rescinded memo on “radical traditional Catholics.”
What Is the SPLC?
The SPLC gained its reputation by suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy in the 1980s, but by the 2000s, it had weaponized this history against conservatives. The SPLC publishes a “hate map” that plots mainstream conservative and Christian groups alongside Klan chapters, suggesting that the same kind of hatred and potential for terrorism drives conservatives.
The “hate map” includes parental rights groups like Moms for Liberty; religious freedom law firms like Alliance Defending Freedom; conservative Christian think tanks like the Family Research Council; pro-enforcement immigration groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform; and more.
The most recent version of the “hate map” added the largest conservative grassroots youth organization in America, Turning Point USA. It also added PragerU, which produces five-minute conservative educational videos, and the Christian nonprofit Focus on the Family.
The SPLC brands Focus on the Family an “anti-LGBTQ+ hate group.” Critics have condemned the SPLC’s “anti-LGBTQ+” accusations as “anti-Christian,” and the group called that accusation a “major misconception.” As evidence that it was not “anti-Christian,” SPLC noted that it did not put Focus on the Family on the “hate map.” Before the SPLC put Focus on the “hate map,” the language about the “major misconception” disappeared from its website.
The SPLC has faced numerous scandals over the years.
In 2012, a terrorist used the “hate map” to target the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. The SPLC condemned the attack but kept FRC on the map.
In 2019, the SPLC fired its co-founder amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal. In the wake of that scandal, SPLC staff unionized. Last year, the SPLC Union accused the center of “union-busting” for a rash of layoffs that included unionized staff.
The SPLC has paid millions in defamation settlements, and it currently faces a defamation lawsuit for branding a pro-enforcement immigration group in Georgia an “anti-immigrant hate group.”
As I wrote in my book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” these scandals did not prevent the Biden administration from welcoming the SPLC with open arms. President Joe Biden nominated an SPLC attorney to a top federal judgeship. The Biden White House welcomed SPLC leaders and staff at least 18 times.
Kristen Clarke
Critics fault Clarke for politicizing the Civil Rights Division, bringing charges against pro-lifers for protesting abortion facilities while largely ignoring the attacks on 96 pro-life pregnancy centers and 326 Catholic churches since the leak of the Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion overturning the abortion precedent Roe v. Wade. The Civil Rights Division only charged four people for violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act for such vandalism in 2023 (and zero in 2022), while it brought 26 charges against pro-lifers in 2022.
A former DOJ official told The Daily Signal that the department appeared to be “using the FACE Act to intimidate the pro-life population of the country.”
As my former colleague Mary Margaret Olohan exclusively reported for The Daily Signal, Clarke had been arrested for attacking her then-husband, Reginald Avery, with a knife, deeply slicing his finger to the bone in 2006. The pair finalized their divorce in 2009. Clarke had the arrest expunged from her record, and during her Senate confirmation, she denied ever having been arrested or having been accused of committing a violent crime.
Clarke admitted to her failure to disclose this arrest, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, called for her to resign.
Clarke joined the faculty of the Howard University School of Law in February.
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.
