AMY GOODMAN: Maya Wiley, I want to ask you about another attack on civil rights. Last week, the Justice Department indicted the SPLC, the Southern Poverty Law Center, on an 11-count federal fraud case. The case centers on the center’s history of paying people to infiltrate white supremacist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation and the National Alliance. The Southern Poverty Law Center rejected the charges as politically motivated, saying its informant program was used to monitor threats of violence and that the information gathered was routinely shared with local and federal law enforcement.

On Sunday, President Trump spoke to 60 Minutes and claimed without proof that the deadly white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017 was, quote, “all funded by the Southern Poverty Law Center.”

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Yeah, you see these “No Kings,” which are funded just like the Southern Law was funded. You saw all that. Southern Law is financing the KKK and lots of other radical, terrible groups. And then they go out, and they say, “Oh, we’ve got to stop the KKK.” And yet they give them hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars. And it’s a total scam, run by the Democrats. It shows you that — like Charlottesville. Charlottesville was all funded by the Southern Law. That was a Southern Law deal, too. And it was done to make me look bad, and it turned out to be a total fake. It basically was a rigged election. This was a part of the rigging of the election.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Maya Wiley, you recently wrote an article headlined “Why I Support the Southern Poverty Law Center.” Can you explain the SPLC, what it is, and the significance of this indictment?

MAYA WILEY: I certainly can, and it’s connected to the conversation we just had. First of all, let me be candid. The Southern Poverty Law Center is a member organization of our over 200 national organizational coalition that is the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. I know them well. I work with them.

Let me just say this: Its history is founded on fighting racism, fighting hatred and fighting extremism. It is its mission. And it is one that it acquitted when people were bombed for demanding their civil rights, by racists, by extremists. It brought the Ku Klux Klan, after it lynched a Black man in the early 1980s — brought a civil civil rights suit that bankrupted it. It runs a tracking program to identify hate groups, track whether they’re growing or shrinking. They did this after January 6th. They had been tracking the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, the foot soldiers of the violence of January 6th. Remember, the Proud Boys are the ones that Donald Trump himself, when he ran for president, told to stand by, as if they were at his command. And that was before January 6, 2021. The “Unite the Right” rally was the very rally that Donald Trump had said, “There are good and bad people on both sides,” when they were chanting, “Jews will not replace us,” when their links to antisemitism, neo-Nazism and white supremacy was clear.

And the reason I’m saying this is, what Southern Poverty Law Center has done is, in addition to ensuring that people know about their rights to vote, in addition to fighting for voting rights in the South, in addition to doing all the things it can to ensure that people have a voice about whether or not they can see a doctor when they’re sick, or whether or not they have a fair wage for the work they do, that the other thing they do is track hate in this country. But that has exposed allies of Donald Trump. It has exposed people who are in its administration. It has exposed the very connections that he himself has publicly stated, or that people he is in close relationship have publicly been seen in relationship with.

The reason I say all of that is because when Todd — I stand by them, because I know what this is. It’s political persecution, because you have some power of advocacy in voice around the very civil rights we have been fighting for in this country, so that we have a democracy that serves all our needs. And they track hate across the board, not with political ideology, other than whether it’s extremism.

And it matters so much, because we’re watching a politics that is trying to erase the fact that racism exists. Todd Blanche, on announcing this indictment, said it out loud. He said, “They’re trying to — they’re trying to say that racism is real, when it’s not.” That’s basically what he said. Those aren’t his words, but those were the import of his words. Donald Trump has publicly said that the civil rights laws hurt white men. That’s actually a white nationalist trope and talking point, not to mention how many times we’ve seen white supremacy and neo-Nazism, rise of hate and antisemitism in this country. SPLC has been fighting it.

So, all I can say is there’s a pattern in the development of tyranny in countries across the globe where the person who wants to have that power finds ways to discredit the lawful advocacy of organizations that are fighting to ensure that democracy survives. But democracy doesn’t survive in lies, and everything we just heard was a lie.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 10 seconds. Do you think other groups are next? You represent scores of groups similar to the SPLC.

MAYA WILEY: We’ve had hundreds of organizations refuse to be afraid of this administration weaponizing government against lawful activity. Hundreds have. But the reason — one of the reasons is because everyone understands that this administration has been signaling in multiple ways that it is going to find ways to punish anyone it disagrees with. So, yes, I expect that we will see this audition from Todd Blanche to be the people’s lawyer is Todd Blanche’s audition to show, “I’ll go after anyone you want me to because we don’t like them.”

AMY GOODMAN: Maya Wiley, I want to thank you for being with us, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, ran for mayor in 2021.

Coming up, Lebanese-born academic Gilbert Achcar on the wars in Iran and Lebanon and President Trump’s embrace of gunboat diplomacy. Back in 30 seconds.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Mercy” by Minneapolis jazz musician and songwriter Sophia Shorai.