Attorney and civil rights activist Maya Wiley responds to the Justice Department’s fraud case against the Southern Poverty Law Center, which centers on the group’s history of paying individuals to infiltrate white supremacist groups in order to monitor their activities. The SPLC has 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.
“It’s political persecution,” says Wiley, head of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a civil rights coalition that includes the SPLC. “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,” she says.
