Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate and Democrat superstar Stacey Abrams defended the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) after the Department of Justice (DOJ) charged the organization with fraud.

Last week, a federal grand jury in Alabama charged the SPLC with several counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering, per Breitbart News.

Speaking with Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt, Abrams defended the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “legal organ that was founded in the south” to combat authoritarian rule.

“Often what you see on the national stage got incubated in the south, and so we know, in the south, we’ve always needed, for example, litigation as one of the tools to fight back against authoritarianism,” she said. “Whether that was Jim Crow, the KKK, the antisemitic behaviors that were manifest in the deep south.”

“The anti-Asian, anti-Latino. If there’s anti-community, it probably had some genesis in the South. And the SLC has spent its decades fighting back,” she continued. “It recognizes what hate groups are and says we’re not going to let you get away with it, we’re gonna tell people about you. It invests in communities and says we’re not just going to say this is wrong, we’re going to help invest in what makes it right.”

The SPLC is alleged to have operated ” a covert network of individuals who were either associated with violent and extremist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan,” according to a press release from the Office of Public Affairs for the DOJ:

According to the indictment starting in the 1980s, the SPLC began operating a covert network of individuals who were either associated with violent and extremist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, or who had infiltrated violent extremist groups at the SPLC’s direction. Unbeknownst to donors, some of their donated money was being used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups at the same time that the SPLC was denouncing the same groups on its website.

The SPLC also allegedly “funneled more than $3 million donated funds to individuals who were associated” with groups such as the National Socialist Movement, United Klans of America, and the Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, between 2014 and 2023.

“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked.”