When and where does this idiocy end?
This administration won’t investigate Epstein. They would rather indict reporters and the people who track hate groups. On Tuesday, Todd Blanche, the AG who told Congress that the Epstein files “should not be a part of anything going forward,” held a press conference with FBI Director Kash Patel to announce 11 federal criminal charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Wire fraud. Bank fraud. Money laundering.
The charge: that the SPLC, a 55-year-old civil rights organization that has spent decades tracking and suing white supremacist groups, paid $3 million in donor funds to informants embedded inside the far-right organizations, and Aryan Nations affiliates.
The SPLC calls it exactly what it was: an intelligence operation. Their interim CEO said the program “saved lives” and that the information gathered was regularly shared with local and federal law enforcement.
The infiltration of violent extremist groups is standard investigative practice. The FBI has done it for decades. The difference is that the SPLC was doing it to white supremacists, and this administration considers that a crime.
By Thursday, Democracy Now was reporting that the FBI had opened a separate investigation into a New York Times journalist whose coverage of Kash Patel was unflattering.
The same Kash Patel who stood at that press conference two days earlier calling the SPLC a “partisan smear machine.” The same Kash Patel who severed the FBI’s longstanding working relationship with the SPLC the moment he took office.
Let’s be precise about what is happening. The Justice Department that will not touch the Epstein client list and blocked the DEA from releasing its full drug trafficking investigation is now using federal grand juries to go after the organization that monitors hate groups and opening FBI probes into reporters who cover its director critically.
They are not fighting crime. They are deciding who gets to be investigated and who doesn’t. They are protecting the powerful and prosecuting the people watching them.