Jim Jordan, Image via CNN / Screengrab.
President Donald Trump's administration is going after the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a legal advocacy organization that tracks extremism, on what many think are trumped-up charges. Now one Trump ally is trying to make a link between the SPLC and the gunman who rushed Secret Service officers outside of the White House Correspondents' Association dinner on Saturday.
Jordan, who wants to have a hearing to go after the SPLC through Congress, tried to connect the two by insisting it "shouldn't be lost on anyone" that the Department of Justice indictment against the SPLC dropped the same week as an assassination attempt against Trump and top administration officials.
"And it's no accident, I don't think, and it shouldn't be lost on anyone that the same week that there's a third assassination attempt on the president, the Southern Poverty Law Center gets indicted for all this baloney they were doing, dividing the country," said Jordan.
The CNN host fact-checked Jordan to make it clear that there was no connection between the gunman and the SPLC. Jordan conceded that point, but then repeated the same line.
"There's no connection, I'm not saying that, but it shouldn't be lost on anyone that they happened the same week. I think that sort of tells us, you know, what's — what's going on out there that contributes to these, you know, three assassination attempts on President Trump," Jordan stuttered.
The allegations against the SPLC are that the group paid informants who were either part of,or spying on, the hate groups the government flagged. The charges allege the SPLC is a funder of domestic terrorism.
The SPLC then coordinated with law enforcement, including the FBI, to ensure that any information they had in advance of possible terrorist attacks, public acts of violence or violence against the U.S. government went to the proper law enforcement channels.
Joyce Vance, who previously served as the federal prosecutor for the Northern District of Alabama from 2009 to 2017, wrote last week about the charges filed in Montgomery, AL.
"The Justice Department wants us to believe that one of the nation’s leading civil rights groups, the people who broke the Klan and continue to expose the white supremacist groups that crop up in its wake, is actually supporting racism and domestic terror, that they’re in fact responsible for whipping up the frenzy," Vance wrote. "This indictment tells a story, and the story is that SPLC engaged in material support for domestic terrorist groups."
The problem, she said, is that the case relies on one major "faulty premise: that you should look only at one piece of SPLC’s work to infiltrate these dangerous groups, not at their overall efforts to dismantle them."
Jordan and the DOJ assume that donors to the SPLC wouldn't want their money going to pay informants who gathered inside information about white supremacist and hate groups that were then handed over to law enforcement.
Vance noted that the indictment goes on to suggest that somehow the SPLC is responsible for the "Unite The Right" in Charlottesville, VA, during Trump's first term.
As Vance explained, "If you want to learn about white supremacists, you have to go and talk to them."
Jordan believes that the real hate group is the SPLC because its money contributed to people who may have contributed to such groups.