<p>The FBI this week confirmed it has been working with the controversial Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on domestic terror threats and other investigations. ;</p>
<p>The SPLC is a legal advocacy group notorious for condemning right-leaning organizations as hate groups. ;</p>
<p>&ldquo;If you&rsquo;ve been paying any attention at all, the SPLC is a fraudulent enterprise,&rdquo; says ;<em>Fox News&rsquo;</em> Tucker Carlson. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a leftwing political group that uses &lsquo;hate crime&rsquo; designations to target its ideological enemies and to crush people.&rdquo; ;</p>
<p>An employee of the Christian Family Research Council was shot in 2013 after the SPLC labeled the group &#8216;anti-gay.&#8217;</p>
<p>In June, the SPLC reached a $3.3 million settlement with the Quilliam Foundation after condemning the organization as &#8220;anti-Muslim.&#8221;</p>
<p>In 2009, the FBI described the SPLC as a &ldquo;well-known, established, and credible&rdquo; organization. Last month, the bureau told reporters that it &ldquo;continues to have a relationship with the SPLC.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;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 &lsquo;hate groups,&rsquo;&rdquo; wrote Rep. Matt Gaetz (FL-R) in a letter to the agency. &ldquo;The SPLC&rsquo;s conflation of mainstream political advocacy groups with legitimate hate groups and domestic terror groups is absurd, frequently indiscriminate and dangerous,&rdquo; continues Gaetz.</p>
<p>In his letter, Gaetz asks the FBI for more information about its relationship to the SPLC &#8211; including how much weight the agency gives to its designations of &lsquo;hate groups&rsquo; and what sort of information it provides to the organization. ;</p>
<p>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. ;</p>
<p><strong>Author&rsquo;s Note:</strong> The FBI uses all sorts of people and organizations as sources; the question here is<em> how</em> the FBI uses them. Since the SPLC is about as biased as it gets, this could expose further political bias within the FBI.</p>