SPLC helped train DOJ prosecutors under Biden, had exclusive access to hate crimes data, bombshell records show

WASHINGTON — The far-left Southern Poverty Law Center helped train Department of Justice prosecutors and was given exclusive access to federal hate crime databases to help draft talking points during former President Joe Biden’s administration, The Post has learned.

The partnership was one of several that the Biden DOJ’s Civil Rights Division cultivated with left-wing organizations to help shape its approach on issues such as “election security,” “racial profiling guidance,” “anti-LGBTQ violence,” and other hate crimes, according to internal emails, memos, schedules and records.

Thousands of documents detailing the association were obtained by the conservative group America First Legal (AFL) as part of a years-long inquiry into the Biden administration’s law enforcement priorities, beginning with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that resulted in litigation.

By 2022, members of the Civil Rights Division were directly soliciting SPLC for civil rights issues they should be “tracking” and inviting the group to attend quarterly departmental meetings.

“I hope this message finds you well,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke wrote to SPLC CEO Margaret Huang in an Oct. 28, 2022, email. “I wanted to flag some of our work on prison conditions and other work in the Deep South for your awareness, and see if there are federal civil rights matters of concern that we should be tracking.”

SPLC was later listed with the American Civil Liberties Union, Brennan Center for Justice, and Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights as attendees at a Nov. 14, 2022, meeting with high-ranking DOJ officials — including Clarke, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco and Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta.

The following month, SPLC became one of five groups — along with the Leadership Conference, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the Sikh Coalition and the Arab American Institute — that was given early access to the FBI’s 2021 hate crimes data.

“I appreciated getting an embargoed copy,” wrote Michael Lieberman, the SPLC’s senior policy counsel for hate and extremism in a Dec. 6, 2022, email to Deputy Assistant Attorney General Robert Moossy Jr., who had reached out to Lieberman for feedback.

“I just finished my draft backgrounder and talking points and would love to talk to you about the report,” Lieberman added. “I have the topic for the meeting of civil rights groups with DAG Monaco on Friday

By March 2023, the DOJ was looping in the SPLC and many of the groups involved in a civil rights suit against the Louisville Police Department — which the Trump administration dismissed this past May — and Clarke was visiting the Montgomery, Ala.-based organization at its headquarters during a tour commemorating the 1965 civil rights march from Selma.

Those interactions were first reported by The Daily Signal, which also revealed that Clarke had failed to disclose during her Senate confirmation process that she was accused by her ex-husband of slicing his finger to the bone with a knife during a violent domestic dispute in July 2006.

In November 2023, the DOJ’s Hate Crimes Symposium also featured a SLPC research analyst delivering remarks on helping “investigators and prosecutors identify potential evidence and motivations for bias crime” as part of an overview of “disturbing trends and developments within the anti-LGBTQ movement.”

More than 100 DOJ prosecutors and trial attorneys were in attendance for the Nov. 7-9 symposium, as well as other “staff from the SPLC,” according to an email chain that included Clarke, Moossy and others.

Despite the symposium taking place just one month after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel that killed an estimated 1,200 people, there was no focus on what would become a record surge in antisemitic incidents and hate crimes.

The senior SPLC research analyst who spoke, R.G. Cravens, also linked efforts to maintain “viewpoint diversity” with “white nationalism,” according to AFL, “and even falsely tied AFL’s lawsuit against Target to bomb threats — failing to mention that the very article he cited confirmed the threats came from Leftists demanding more LGBTQ merchandise on the shelves.”

“It was a total moral failing for the Biden Department of Justice to partner with a known partisan smear factory on something as important as hate-crime enforcement,” said AFL President Gene Hamilton in a statement.

“By weaponizing civil rights enforcement, Biden’s DOJ undermined the rule of law, threatened fairness, and endangered not just the constitutional rights, but the lives, of any American who does not fall in lockstep with the Left.”

The SPLC made national headlines by suing Klu Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy in the 1980s but has since accused mainstream conservative and religious groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom of fomenting “hate” or “extremism.”

In 2012, gay rights activist Floyd Corkins used the SPLC’s “hate map” feature to target the conservative Family Research Council’s headquarters in Washington, DC, as part of a violent rampage he undertook “to kill as many people as possible.”

Corkins shot and wounded an unarmed FRC security guard, who helped subdue the would-be mass shooter, who is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence.

Last month, SPLC placed the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA on its “Hatewatch” newsletter — one day before the conservative activist was assassinated during a speaking event at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10.

SPLC currently has a webpage describing White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller as being “credited with shaping the racist and draconian immigration policies of President Trump, which include the zero-tolerance policy, also known as family separation, the Muslim ban and ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.”

On Friday, FBI Director Kash Patel announced that he had “terminated” all official ties to the SPLC.

“The Southern Poverty Law Center long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine,” Patel said in a statement posted to X. “Their so-called ‘hate map’ has been used to defame mainstream Americans and even inspired violence. That disgraceful record makes them unfit for any FBI partnership.”

“In April, during our Anti-Christian Bias Panel, I made it clear that the FBI will never rely on politicized or agenda-driven intelligence from outside groups — and certainly not from the SPLC,” the FBI boss added.

Reps for SPLC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.