FBI is Working with Biased Southern Poverty Law Center

The FBI this week confirmed it has been working with the controversial Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on domestic terror threats and other investigations. 

The SPLC is a legal advocacy group notorious for condemning right-leaning organizations as hate groups. 

“If you’ve been paying any attention at all, the SPLC is a fraudulent enterprise,” says Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. “It’s a leftwing political group that uses ‘hate crime’ designations to target its ideological enemies and to crush people.” 

An employee of the Christian Family Research Council was shot in 2013 after the SPLC labeled the group ‘anti-gay.’

In June, the SPLC reached a $3.3 million settlement with the Quilliam Foundation after condemning the organization as “anti-Muslim.”

In 2009, the FBI described the SPLC as a “well-known, established, and credible” organization. Last month, the bureau told reporters that it “continues to have a relationship with the SPLC.”

“This is surprising and worrisome, as the SPLC is known to use its platform in order to denigrate and disparage certain groups by labeling them ‘hate groups,’” wrote Rep. Matt Gaetz (FL-R) in a letter to the agency. “The SPLC’s conflation of mainstream political advocacy groups with legitimate hate groups and domestic terror groups is absurd, frequently indiscriminate and dangerous,” continues Gaetz.

In his letter, Gaetz asks the FBI for more information about its relationship to the SPLC – including how much weight the agency gives to its designations of ‘hate groups’ and what sort of information it provides to the organization. 

In the meantime, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has ordered the bureau to re-evaluate its relationship with the SPLC and any other organizations known to discriminate. 

Author’s Note: The FBI uses all sorts of people and organizations as sources; the question here is how the FBI uses them. Since the SPLC is about as biased as it gets, this could expose further political bias within the FBI.