It isn’t working, and we told you it wouldn’t work.
After the Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted in April on allegations that it lied to banks and created accounts for fake businesses to pay informants (and buy them Klan robes and crosses to burn), the organization hired Democrat fixer and Hunter Biden lawyer Abbe Lowell to fire up a theatrical victimhood defense: Mean Orange Man is trying to hurt the SPLC for being brave and anti-racist, and the whole thing is just a cruel political attack.
Legacy media journalists, being stupid and dishonest, have generally babbled along with that nonsense story like a choir of toddlers following a conductor.
The Federalist, discussing the charges with people who understand anti-money laundering laws, has been reporting since the indictment that the charges were serious, and the SPLC’s theatrically loud defenses were mostly pretty silly. The SPLC has due process rights and is entitled to a presumption of innocence, but their defense so far has been a media campaign and an attempt to distract, not an effort to address the substance of the allegations.
In May, in one of many pre-trial legal maneuvers, the SPLC filed a motion to dismiss the charges as the product of vindictive prosecution. Activist groups piled in to support the organization, filing amicus briefs arguing that brave leftists were being unfairly prosecuted by an administration made up of mean right-wingers. But The Federalist said this about the motion: “Though Lowell and the SPLC’s other lawyers are speaking with the expected dramatic language about politics and meanness, the legal argument will be hard to win.”
It was. On Friday, a federal judge in Alabama rejected the SPLC’s motion to dismiss the charges. You can read the whole opinion from District Court Judge Emily Marks here, or a curated set of excerpts from the legal scholar Eugene Volokh here.
The judge wasn’t impressed. “The parties’ briefing is, like much of our modern political discourse, heavy on heated rhetoric, better suited for cable news, or a podcast,” Marks wrote. “It emphasizes noise over substance.” She just described Abbe Lowell’s entire adult life, by the way.
Searching through the dramatic language of the briefs, the judge couldn’t find the legal argument and the evidence to support it. The SPLC, she wrote, “has failed to offer some evidence tending to show animus on the part of the prosecutors involved in bringing this case.”
A jury trial is scheduled to begin on October 5.
