The Department of Justice filed a superseding indictment in its case against the Southern Poverty Law Center on Tuesday.
Prosecutors allege the SPLC created shell bank accounts to give money to informants for hate groups. The organization was originally indicted in April on 11 counts of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering and bank fraud.
The superseding indictment, filed Tuesday, doesn’t include new charges or new defendants from the earlier version, CBS News reported. It does, though, change some of the language in it. In the April indictment, the DOJ alleged that an SPLC worker who opened the shell accounts made “false or misleading statements.” The new version of the indictment doesn’t include these words.
Experts who spoke to CBS and Bloomberg Law said a Supreme Court ruling that bank fraud only criminalizes false statements, and not misleading ones, could undermine the case.
Abbe Lowell, the SPLC’s lawyer, said in a statement to CBS News that the “apparent superseding indictment attempts to shore up the flaws in the initial charges, but it changes nothing.”
“The SPLC did not lie to its donors, it did not mislead banks it did business with, and its informant program prevented violence and saved lives,” Lowell said.
Lowell also said that the Justice Department appeared to share a copy of the updated indictment with members of the media before it was unsealed by the federal district court. This is something the SPLC noted in its response to the indictment, which it filed on Wednesday.
This move is “another example of the government’s troubling and unusual handling of this case,” Lowell said to CBS.
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