Jonathan P. Baird

One of the biggest tragedies of the Trump regime has been the havoc it has created in the Department of Justice (DOJ). Previously highly regarded, the DOJ has been emptied and partially repopulated. Many ethical and competent attorneys have exited the DOJ. What is left is a shell of its former self. Regime loyalists, opportunists and careerists trying to survive remain. Lawyers who remain have to wonder if their actions now at the service of a corrupt president will lead to disciplinary actions later, like disbarment.

The DOJ should be renamed the Department of Trump. Instead of its prior role as a law firm with commitment to serving the American people, the replacement version led by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is slavishly devoted to the whims of Dear Leader, no matter how absurd. Whether it is covering up Epstein files or advocating for the grandiose ballroom, the DOJ will do whatever is demanded.

If Trump wants to pursue his vendetta against his political enemies, DOJ falls into line. We have seen that with the prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Trump targets enemies and the DOJ attempts to create a case out of almost nothing.

The malicious prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a long-time leading civil rights organization, fits the pattern. The prosecution borders on the incomprehensible. Lawyers competing to advance their careers and gain Trump’s attention are willing to file trash lawsuits. A whistleblower has already come forward saying that a top official working in Todd Blanche’s office pressured prosecutors to file the SPLC case in spite of serious misgivings about the strength of the case.

To appreciate the evil of this prosecution, history is helpful. For almost 100 years, the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists terrorized African American communities in the South. The Klan’s murders, massacres, floggings, rapes and castrations were legendary. They were almost never stopped. In the South, white supremacy was an institutionalized way of life.

The Equal Justice Institute documented nearly 6500 racial terror lynchings between 1865 and 1950. Lynchings evolved from events carried out in the dark by night riders who were afraid of being recognized to public spectacles attended by huge crowds. In his book, Klan Wars, Fergus Bordewich wrote:

“Americans embraced a kind of vast willful forgetting, the mental erasure of an entire era, which in turn shaped the writing of a falsified history that influenced generations to follow. The replacement of fact with fiction was breathtaking.”

To this day, the Republican Party maintains that vast willful forgetting. Racism never happened. Well into the 20th century, the failure of American responsibility continued. Thousands of lynching victims never received justice and perpetuation of heinous crimes were almost never prosecuted. White supremacy maintained a position of dominance until the advent of the civil rights movement.

It was extremely dangerous to stand up against the racist terror but the SPLC did it. In 1971, lawyers Morris Dees, Joseph Levin Jr, and activist Julian Bond founded the SPLC. Bond was the first president. The SPLC filed many cases challenging racial and sexual discrimination in the South. In 1975, they successfuly defended Joanne Little, a black woman accused of murdering a white jail guard in North Carolina who had attempted to rape her. The SPLC filed tort suits holding the Klan financially responsible for acts of violence committed by its members.

Its biggest case was its role in 1981 in representing the mother of a 19 year old lynching victim, Michael Donald. Angry that an interracial jury had failed to convict a black man for killing a white police officer, two members of the United Klans of America abducted an innocent black youth, cut his throat and hung his body from a tree on a residential street in Mobile, Alabama. In 1987, SPLC attorneys won a historic $7 million verdict against the Klan members. The suit bankrupted the Klan, They were forced to turn over their headquarters to the victim’s mother.

For five decades the SPLC has tracked white supremacists and has monitored hate groups. They produced Teaching Tolerance, a program to provide free classroom materials on tolerance and diversity to teachers. The SPLC has won innumerable cases against hate groups. They did sometimes use paid informants to infiltrate hate groups, a practice that ended three years ago. This is a practice the FBI also used and SPLC previously shared information learned with the FBI.

The DOJ lawsuit against SPLC alleges that SPLC defrauded its donors by paying informants inside racist groups like the Klan and the Aryan Nation. But no donor to SPLC has come forward to complain about the covert informer program. In its pleadings, the DOJ names no name, a serious legal deficiency. The government actually alleged that SPLC is trying to manufacture racism. They are saying paid informants took money they received from SPLC and plowed it back into hate groups.

Anyone who knows Southern history would know that over the last 55 years the SPLC has been an effective legal advocacy group that had the courage to stand up to the Klan and white supremacy. Hardly any group had that courage for 100 years because Southern racists would harm or kill them.

The Trump regime doesn’t like the SPLC because it has investigated and pursued Trump allies on the Far Right like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and January 6 defendants. This prosecution is an attempt to put a political enemy out of business. They want to make it more difficult for civil rights organizations to track racist extremists and oppose hate. The SPLC prosecution is part of a racist project to turn back the clock to a time before the civil rights movement.