Lawyers for the Southern Poverty Law Center asked a federal judge on Tuesday to throw out charges accusing it of defrauding its donors, saying that the case was part of a \u201cretributive campaign\u201d by President Trump to use the Justice Department to go after groups and people \u201cdeemed to be his political enemies.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a motion<\/a> filed in Federal District Court in Montgomery, Ala., the center\u2019s lawyers said that a fraud investigation looking into whether the center had cheated its donors by paying secret informants inside extremist networks had essentially been lying dormant since Mr. Trump\u2019s first term in the White House. The inquiry was only reawakened and an indictment filed, the lawyers said, after Mr. Trump returned to office vowing to seek vengeance on his adversaries.<\/p>\n \u201cThe charges against the S.P.L.C. were a foregone conclusion based on prosecutorial vindictiveness \u2014 driven by the White House and F.B.I. leadership\u2019s retribution campaign \u2014 rather than the result of a good faith examination of the evidence,\u201d they wrote.<\/p>\n The motion in the center\u2019s case was the latest in a growing series of similar efforts by defense lawyers across the country to accuse the Justice Department under Mr. Trump of vindictively using its vast law-enforcement powers to prioritize the president\u2019s political imperatives above the pursuit of actual justice.<\/p>\n Vindictive prosecution motions are notoriously difficult to win, requiring the defense to show that prosecutors brought criminal charges out of a genuine animus for a defendant who was merely seeking to exercise their rights. But there have been some notable recent successes, including one last week in Nashville where a federal judge dismissed a human smuggling indictment against the immigrant Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia<\/a>, calling the case \u201can abuse of prosecuting power.\u201d<\/p>\n Bryan Fair, the center\u2019s interim president and chief executive, said the civil rights group would continue to defend itself against the charges.<\/p>\n \u201cFor weeks, we have been arguing against these false allegations levied against the S.P.L.C. \u2014 an organization that for 55 years has stood as a beacon of hope fighting white supremacy and various forms of injustice to create a multiracial democracy where we can all live and thrive,\u201d Mr. Fair said. \u201cThe government can\u2019t prosecute the S.P.L.C. as payback for its protected speech \u2014 it violates basic constitutional rights.\u201d<\/p>\n The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.<\/p>\n The claims by lawyers for the Southern Poverty Law Center were a reminder of how often Mr. Trump\u2019s own words have been used against him in court and in court filings<\/a>.<\/p>\n In their motion, the lawyers told Judge Emily C. Marks, a Trump appointee who is handling the case, how Mr. Trump, in a social media message shortly after the indictment was returned, had accused the center of being \u201cone of the greatest political scams in American History\u201d and somehow connected the group\u2019s work to his defeat in the 2020 election.<\/p>\n A few days afterward, Mr. Trump appeared on television, saying that the center had funded the entirety of a violent far-right rally that took place in Charlottesville, Va., nine years ago, calling the demonstration a \u201ctotal fake\u201d event \u201cto make me look bad.\u201d In reality, the indictment accused the center of making payments to a single member of a single group affiliated with the rally who had helped coordinate transportation for some of the people who attended.<\/p>\n The lawyers asserted that some of the most senior officials in the Justice Department had also disparaged the center.<\/p>\n At a news conference announcing the indictment, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, appeared to go beyond the scope of the charges, saying that the center would often \u201cpay sources to stoke racial hatred\u201d and \u201cmanufacture racism to justify its existence.\u201d<\/p>\n That same day, Mr. Blanche, one of the president\u2019s former defense lawyers, told Fox News that the department had no information to suggest that the center had shared any of the information it gleaned from its informant program with law enforcement. But in fact well before the charges were filed, lawyers for the center informed Kevin P. Davidson, the acting U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Alabama, about two cases in which the center had provided tips from informants to the Justice Department<\/a>, resulting in criminal charges.<\/p>\n The center was formed in 1971 in Alabama and is best known for investigating the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacy organizations. In recent years, Republicans have accused it of unfairly targeting more mainstream conservative and Christian organizations, labeling them as extremists.<\/p>\n