Heidi Beirich GPAHE 2 GLOBAL PROJECT

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SEE SPLC 2

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9 26

No Accident: Project 2025 Comes for Public Lands

September 23, 2026

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William Perry Pendley wrote the Interior Department chapter of Project 2025. Doug Burgum now runs the Interior Department, and he is carrying it out. Endangered species, America’s public lands, and the sacred places on them are paying the price.

Key Takeaways

Project 2025 wanted wild horses disposed of. The government sold 3,700 of them last year, many for as little as $25, through a loophole that for some ends at a slaughter plant.

Project 2025 complained that Trump’s first-term monument cuts didn’t go far enough. He has now cut Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, both in Utah, by about 90 percent each.

Project 2025 wanted the Endangered Species Act kept out of the way of “economic development.” The wildlife agencies didn’t wait for Congress. They rewrote the rules, and 20 states and the District of Columbia sued on September 9. Five days later, Fish and Wildlife told its field offices that killing an endangered animal breaks no law unless the killing was the point.

Project 2025 called for “aggressively building the border wall system on America’s southern border.” Homeland Security has waived cultural and environmental laws to build it, and crews are blasting Kuuchamaa, a Kumeyaay sacred mountain on the U.S.-Mexico border.

The mustangs had waited years in an Idaho feedlot, penned there since helicopters ran them down off the range. In March, the Bureau of Land Management finally shipped 68 of them out. The trailers went 1,800 miles east to Brandon Jones, an Ohio livestock trader who had paid the government $25 a head. Around midnight the next day, two double-decker cattle trucks came for the horses. Jones won’t say where they went.

Jones told The New York Times, which ran the investigation on its front page in August, that he has nothing to do with Fred Bauer. Bauer is one of the largest exporters of slaughter horses to Canada, where they are processed into meat for human consumption and sold abroad.

William Perry Pendley, who wrote Project 2025’s Interior chapter, once ran the bureau now selling those horses. A federal judge ruled in 2020 that he had served unlawfully as its acting director for 424 days. His chapter asked Congress to repeal the Antiquities Act and to rein in the Endangered Species Act. Congress has done neither. Interior, under Secretary Doug Burgum, has found other ways, and the horses show how.

Project 2025’s section on wild horses ends by telling Congress to pass a law letting the bureau “dispose humanely of these animals.” Congress never did, and it still bars the bureau from spending money to kill healthy wild horses. A 2017 survey of 556 registered voters, commissioned by wild horse advocates, found 80 percent of respondents, including 86 percent of Trump voters, opposed killing them.

Livestock inspection records show some of the government’s mustangs on trucks bound for Canadian slaughter plants.

The bureau posts wild horses on its online adoption site, and after three one-week listings with no takers, it labels a horse unadoptable and can sell it. Once sold, the horse loses its protections. The buyer promises in writing not to slaughter it or knowingly sell it to someone who will. The middleman signs nothing, and the horses go to Canada. The government can spend more than $3,000 to capture a mustang and bring it to market, then sell it for $25.

Slaughter plants pay up to $750 per horse.

Clare Staples runs Skydog Sanctuary, a rescue for wild horses and burros with ranches in California and Oregon. She wrote to Burgum the day the Times story ran, demanding the sales program be shut down. She had spent more than a year combing the bureau’s own sales records and standing at the kill pens. Her count runs 19 months, a longer stretch than the government’s one-year figure: 6,331 wild horses sold, against a historic average of about 1,200 a year. More than half were one to four years old, prime adoption age, and nearly three-quarters sold for $25 or less. Staples has tracked 333 wild horses and burros into kill pens this year alone. Selling protected animals for $25 to be butchered abroad, she said, is “a betrayal of the law and the American people.”

Sacred Lands

Trump signed the monument orders in the Oval Office on July 13, 2026, with Utah’s senators, Mike Lee and John Curtis, Gov. Spencer Cox, and state House Speaker Mike Schultz lined up behind him. The proclamations took effect September 11, and Bears Ears was reduced from 1.36 million acres to 121,000, a 91 percent cut. Grand Staircase-Escalante lost about the same share. Conservation groups sued on September 2.

The proclamation itself acknowledges the twin buttes known as the Bears Ears, “which are considered sacred by the Native American tribes that call this area their ancestral home.” The same document lists “critical minerals such as silver, copper, molybdenum, lead, uranium, vanadium, and zinc.”

The proclamation also ended the Bears Ears Commission (BEC), through which the Hopi Tribe, the Navajo Nation, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and the Pueblo of Zuni had co-managed the monument with the federal government. In its place is an advisory committee whose named seats number 15: five for the tribes, four for San Juan County and its towns, and six for people recommended by Utah’s governor. The secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture now have no “obligation to engage, consult, or coordinate with the BEC or a comparable entity,” the proclamation states, though it still requires them to consult tribes under other laws.

Pendley has fought over sacred ground before. In 1996, Mountain States Legal Foundation, the Denver firm he then led, sued the Park Service over a voluntary June climbing ban at Devils Tower in Wyoming, a site many Northern Plains tribes hold sacred. A federal appeals court tossed the case in 1999, ruling that the climbers had no standing to sue.

In his Project 2025 chapter, Pendley wrote that Trump’s first-term review had been “insufficient” because only two Utah monuments were cut. The next administration, the chapter says, “must seek repeal of the Antiquities Act of 1906.” The law protects “cultural and natural resources of historic or scientific interest on federal lands,” and it confines each monument to the “smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects to be protected.” Whether that clause lets a president carve down a monument a predecessor created is the question the conservation groups have asked a federal court to answer.

The day the cuts took effect, mining companies filed 16 new claims on land stripped from Bears Ears.

What Counts as Harm

Since 1975, wrecking an animal’s habitat has counted as harming the animal. The Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service deleted that definition in a rule published July 14, 2026, and wrote nothing to replace it. The rescission took effect September 14. Logging the last of an owl’s nesting ground no longer harms the owl. Two more rules followed a week later. Newly listed threatened species lost their automatic protection. Critical habitat can now be trimmed when a company makes a credible case about the cost of preserving it.

Twenty states and the District of Columbia sued in federal court in California on September 9, five days before the harm rescission was due to take effect. The rules “are wrong on the merits, the morals and the law,” Washington Attorney General Nick Brown said. The complaint calls the harm rescission “a reversal of staggering proportions.” The rescission’s own preamble invites companies holding “take” permits to hand them back “in order to not have to continue spending resources to mitigate.”

Brian Nesvik, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, signed the memo on September 14 and sent it to every one of the agency’s field offices. The New York Times obtained a copy. It turns on one word. Until now, “take” has covered killing or injuring a listed animal whether or not anyone meant to. Now it covers only the killings someone intended. Wildlife advocates say that lets a logging company knowingly cut down a forest full of endangered bats, as long as it was after the timber.

Most endangered animals that die at human hands are killed by accident, in the course of somebody’s business, the Times reported. Because those deaths have counted as take, developers seek permission first. A builder who wants to put houses where an endangered salamander lives traditionally applies for an incidental take permit promising to protect a few of them, or pays to conserve some elsewhere, and the government forgives the rest. The memo appears to upend that arrangement. If an accidental death breaks no law, nobody needs the permit.

Andrew Mergen argued endangered species cases for the Justice Department and teaches law at Harvard now. Everyone has understood the act to mean one thing, he told the Times: “Don’t kill endangered species.” The memo drains it of that meaning. People are held responsible all the time for harm they never intended but should have seen coming, Mergen said.

Interior’s press office wouldn’t say why it adopted the new reading, or whether the memo is already in force, and sent an unsigned statement saying the act “continues to prohibit take of endangered wildlife.” Stateline reported on September 21 that the memo’s instructions to staff take effect immediately.

Pendley’s chapter asks Congress to keep the Endangered Species Act from being used to “seize private property, prevent economic development, and interfere with the rights of states.” Interior got there with a rule and a memo. Pendley cheered the result. The new reading, he told Cowboy State Daily, “will shield innocent people from litigation by the country’s largest law firm, the Department of Justice.”

The Border

Kuuchamaa, a 3,885-foot peak that straddles the border near Tecate, is sacred to the Kumeyaay. In their creation story, a shaman became the mountain. It has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1992, and the listing itself states that disturbing its natural state would be sacrilegious. Contractors have been blasting it anyway, and the explosions send rock tumbling down its Mexican side.

From a park in Tecate, Baja California, about half a mile away, Norma Meza Calles can hear the crews breaking boulders. Kumeyaay from both sides of the border have climbed the mountain for generations to sit on those boulders, Meza Calles, a Kumeyaay leader who works as a guide, told KPBS. “They’re destroying it,” she said in Spanish. “No one ever consented or supported the use of dynamite on the mountain,” Emily Burgueno, a Kumeyaay Nation member in California, told the Associated Press. The Department of Homeland Security waived cultural and environmental laws to speed the work.

Project 2025’s Homeland Security chapter directs the Pentagon to “assist in aggressively building the border wall system on America’s southern border.” Congress has since put more than $46 billion behind construction. The waiver power Homeland Security is using comes from a 1996 immigration law that Congress broadened in 2005, long before Project 2025 existed.

In Southern Arizona, the wall has reached O’odham country, which straddles the border. In April, a Homeland Security contractor damaged the Las Playas Intaglio, a 1,000-year-old fish-shaped geoglyph in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge that pointed toward the Gulf of California. The Tohono O’odham Nation sued Homeland Security in June to stop a 30-foot wall in three places along the stretch of border that crosses its reservation. Tribal leaders posted No Trespassing signs on August 7. U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon denied the Nation’s request to halt construction a week later. On August 25, according to the Nation, contractors entered the reservation with about 20 masked, armed Border Patrol agents. Homeland Security says the work sits inside the Roosevelt Reservation, a 60-foot federal strip along the border. The Nation appealed on August 26.

About 30 miles west of the reservation, a second fence is planned 150 feet from the existing wall through Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Crews have already cleared ground a few miles east of Quitobaquito Springs, a desert oasis where O’odham families have held ceremonies for generations and where the endangered Quitobaquito pupfish and the Sonoyta mud turtle live. Lorraine Marquez Eiler, a Hia-Ced O’odham elder whose great-great-grandparents walked about 50 miles through the Sonoran Desert to the springs, called the wall “another slap in the face” to her ancestors. “This is not ours to own. It is ours to protect,” Verlon Jose, chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation, said at the springs.

Nobody Home

The National Historic Preservation Act requires federal agencies to weigh what a project will do to historic places, and to consult tribes, before they build. Pendley’s chapter asked Interior to revive a first-term order “clarifying” those reviews. Hiring rules under the Trump administration cap the agencies at one new employee for every four who leave, so most vacancies stay open.

Landscape Architecture Magazine combed Office of Personnel Management data and counted about 6,700 Park Service departures, close to three in 10 of the people who worked there in 2024.

The White House wanted deeper cuts. Its 2026 budget asked Congress to take nearly $4 billion from the land agencies. Appropriators balked and held Park Service funding roughly level, but a budget line can’t rehire a ranger who took the buyout. This year’s request targets the Historic Preservation Fund, which pays for state and tribal historic preservation offices. It would cut the fund by 95 percent.

What Hasn’t Happened Yet

Pendley’s complaint about Trump’s first term was that the cuts to protected lands stopped at the Utah line. The new list doesn’t. In April 2025, a senior Interior official told E&E News the department was weighing cuts to at least six monuments: Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, Ironwood Forest, Chuckwalla, Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks, and Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon. Burgum said the monuments were under review but “not a top priority of the administration.” Two are done. Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni covers 917,618 acres around Grand Canyon National Park, takes in Red Butte and land the 13 tribes of the Grand Canyon Tribal Coalition fought to protect, and keeps new uranium mining out. It is still on the list.

The horses never needed a vote. The ban on killing them rides in the spending bill nearly every year, and the White House left it out of its 2027 budget request, as it did the year before. Congress put it back last time.

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ymail 9 26

New from GPAHE: Betting Your Future: Crypto Casinos Radicalizing Young Men into Hate

Crypto casinos are becoming a new pipeline into far-right radicalization. Largely unregulated gambling platforms such as Duel, Stake, and Rainbet use influencers with millions of followers, including neo-Nazis and manosphere figures, to promote gambling while amplifying hate. As gambling debt and financial instability increase vulnerability, the industry is creating a dangerous convergence of addiction and extremist recruitment.

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AN TC 8 26 SEE DOJ 3 FOR COLOR

In April 2026, a federal grand jury returned indictments charging the Southern Poverty Law Center with wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The indictment alleges the SPLC, a nonprofit legal advocacy group, secretly funneled more than US$3 million in donated funds to people associated with violent extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations.

Prosecutors allege that the SPLC secretly paid members of those groups to act as confidential informants without telling donors. Eight informants received the money between 2014 and 2023, according to U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche.

The SPLC has denied the charges and seeks their dismissal, with lawyers for the group adding that the charges constitute “vindictive prosecution.” The SPLC’s interim president, Bryan Fair, has stated that the informant program “saved lives” and reflected decades of dangerous civil rights work.

Critics of the prosecution at Lawfare, a media site focused on the U.S. legal system, argued that the indictment is among “the most cynical criminal cases ever brought by the Department of Justice.” They noted that the SPLC had no legal duty to disclose the confidential nature of its informant program to donors.

Within hours of the Justice Department’s indictment, I found that white supremacist influencers on Telegram, Gab and other social platforms were celebrating the arraignment. They portrayed the charges as proof that journalists and civil rights groups documenting extremist movements could no longer be trusted.

The indictment became a rallying point to discredit not only the SPLC but the wider body of research on hate groups and political extremism. I believe that these narratives will be used to help justify increasingly radical and, in some cases, violent responses.

Ideological ammunition

Some conservative advocacy groups and right-wing media outlets – including Moms for Liberty and the Daily Signal – immediately stripped the indictment of its legal context. In online posts, they recast it as established proof that the SPLC had been deliberately creating extremist activity rather than investigating it.

A Telegram search I conducted on May 6 identified 22 posts mentioning the SPLC across at least six white nationalist channels. Most appeared within 72 hours of the indictment. The posts did not engage in sustained discussion. They repeated a small set of claims.

The Super Sincere Alpha GOONMAXXING Aryan Sigma Patriot channel wrote: “The SPLC is a hate group.”

Other channels cited the indictment as proof that the SPLC had been paying sources to manufacture the very extremism it claimed to fight. In the White Lives Matter Official Telegram channel, users were urged to “become an activist for your race” while referencing the SPLC as an opposing force.

The similarity across channels and social media is notable. The same framing appeared repeatedly within a short time window. This suggests rapid circulation of a shared narrative across networks rather than independent commentary.

The neo-Nazi, neo-fascist layer

Comments on the Southern Poverty Law Center indictment by members of the Commander George Lincoln Rockwell channel – named for the founder of the American Nazi Party – demonstrate how antisemitic conspiracy theories work, not as explicit rhetoric but as a broader narrative.

Internet discussions portrayed the SPLC as a politically motivated or illegitimate actor. Posts in Patriot Front Updates, for example, circulated allegations of fraud and money laundering while criticizing the SPLC and its efforts to identify and challenge white nationalist activity.

I found that this criticism of the SPLC also became connected to a broader antisemitic conspiracy narrative – one that portrays the organization as operating on behalf of purported Jewish interests rather than simply as an advocacy organization with political and ideological commitments.

These narratives circulated alongside the “great replacement theory,” which falsely claims that shadowy elites are encouraging immigration and demographic change to replace the white population and diminish its political and cultural influence. It’s a conspiracy theory that the SPLC and others have documented as central to contemporary white nationalism.

In this logic, the indictment is not an isolated fraud case – it is evidence that a coordinated network of institutions has been systematically suppressing white identity.

Victimhood as recruitment

Scholars of white nationalism have long identified victimhood narratives as central to that movement’s appeal. By portraying white people as under attack or unfairly displaced, these narratives transform social change into a story of persecution and provide a powerful justification for political mobilization.

My research on white nationalism shows how contemporary extremist movements rely less on formal membership and more on decentralized digital spaces. It is there that narratives, grievances and identities are continuously reinforced.

In these environments, major news events like the SPLC indictment become opportunities.

Why this pattern repeats

Extremist movements have long used mainstream controversies as recruitment opportunities.

Participants often interpret external events through narratives of threat, injustice and persecution. In doing so, they transform moments of controversy into evidence that their worldview is correct.

In the 1990s, for instance, the deadly standoffs between federal officers and the Branch Davidians religious sect near Waco, Texas, and survivalist Randy Weaver in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, became foundational persecution narratives for militia and Christian Identity movements. These groups saw the sieges as proof that the federal government was hunting gun owners and religious dissenters.

In online extremist communities, these events can become powerful tools for reinforcing group identity and attracting individuals who are searching for explanations or belonging.

With a real-world legal event like the SPLC indictment, extremists can point to government action as evidence that their worldview is being validated. The result is a narrative that appears responsive to current events, even when the connection is shallow or distorted.

Redirected domestic terrorism policy

Legal scholars have noted that the Justice Department indictment fits within the Trump administration’s broader pattern of redirecting domestic terrorism policy away from white supremacist groups.

The Trump White House’s 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy does not mention violent far-right groups as a domestic terrorism threat at all.

That context matters for understanding how the SPLC case landed in extremist spaces: not as an isolated fraud allegation but as institutional permission. The indictment has become a symbol before the evidence has been weighed.

In today’s fragmented digital media environment, symbols travel faster than facts, especially when they confirm what a radicalized audience already wants to believe. I believe the real danger is not that white supremacists believe the SPLC is guilty. It is that the controversy, whatever its legal outcome, has already done its work.

Art Jipson, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Dayton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Melissa Ryan @ Ctrl Alt Right Delete: Revenge of the White Supremacists

Heidi Beirich isn’t the Trump Regime’s first target, and she won’t be the last.

This week, on the anniversary of the Unite the Right Hate Riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump’s Department of Justice announced the arrest of Heidi Beirich — former head of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. She tracked hate groups and founded the Global Project Against Hate & Extremism. Beirich is accused of defrauding SPLC’s donors to fund white supremacist groups, part of DOJ’s broader effort to destroy and discredit SPLC

If you don’t know Heidi Beirich’s name, you’re certainly familiar with her work and expertise. Beirich’s entire career has been spent investigating and exposing hate groups. Anyone who covers far-right extremism and related topics or works in anti-hate spaces owes Beirich a debt of gratitude. Much of what we know about hate in the US, and the way it’s covered and investigated, comes from Beirich’s work. Here’s what you need to know:

This indictment is designed to isolate and alienate Beirich. There’s a lot to unpack here, but this is the most important thing. The indictment contains some salacious details, which reporter Phil Williams covers in his newsletter if you want to know more. We obviously don’t know the entire story, but I don’t trust the indictment for a minute, and neither should you. The DOJ couldn’t even be bothered to get Beirich’s job title correct, falsely naming her as SPLC’s former CFO. Whether because the DOJ is being strategic, incompetent, or its usual combination of both, there’s no reason to assume that the indictment is correct or even close to the whole story until proven otherwise.

The isolation is the point. A tried and true strategy of the MAGA Right is to make their targets toxic so that allies back off and don’t stand in solidarity with MAGA’s enemy of the moment. Cutting targets off from key emotional, institutional, and financial support and making allies terrified to stand in solidarity, lest they be next. I often refer to this as the ACORN strategy. The MAGA Right keeps doing this because it works -- with help from the institutional left and reactionary centrists.

Too many groups in Civil Society, even so-called allies, are more than happy to play along. Just this week, the centrist think tank Third Way put out a job notice for a Director of Anti-Extremism. Lest you think Third Way is actually doing something useful and researching hate groups, the job is for leading opposition research against members of the Democratic Socialists of America and the candidates they’re running, which apparently Third Way considers a bigger threat than the Trump Regime. Good to know, I guess, but also a perfect illustration of just how much water some are willing to carry for the fascists and why isolation often works.

The attacks against experts in far-right extremism and disinformation is so vast it’s difficult to quantify. I’m living this, and I cover it regularly, but it’s still difficult to describe the scale of what’s happened since 2021 in the anti-hate/anti-disinformation spaces. From Jim Jordan’s witch hunt investigations, to Big Tech rolling back anti-hate and disinformation policies while laying off trust and safety teams, to the #TwitterFiles bullshit from Elon Musk, and the targeting and harassment of researchers like Nina Jankowicz, the list is endless.

As someone who does this work, I can tell you it’s taken a real toll on us all. I don’t know one researcher, journalist, or advocate whose mental health and finances haven’t taken a hit over the past few years. But that doesn’t even begin to cover the impact on American politics and discourse as the MAGA Right has discredited our work and effectively isolated us from institutions and funders. So much of the research, advocacy, and brainpower has been lost—to America’s detriment.

Meanwhile, the Trump Regime’s weaponization efforts have expanded well beyond our space. This week we learned that DHS spent months spying on civil society in Minnesota, including churches, libraries, and union halls, by sending undercover agents to infiltrate local groups. You know, the kind of activity they’re mad at SPLC (which shared intel with law enforcement regularly) over. Eventually they will come for everyone who they consider an enemy.

The Trump Regime is a white supremacist group, and they’re out for revenge. Let’s be real for a minute. Making this arrest on the anniversary of Unite the Right is a choice, intended to send a message. Heidi Beirich and her team at SPLC were instrumental in covering the hate groups that organized the terror in Charlottesville and exposing them. The MAGA Right has never forgiven SPLC for its role in exposing and bringing the organizations and people responsible to justice. This is about revenge and retribution, plain and simple. Which is true of most of what the DOJ seems to do these days: abuse its power to punish political opponents.

Or as neoreactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin put it a few months ago:

“What’s cool is that I don’t really see a strong legal case that the SPLC shouldn’t be able to run these kinds of wacky black ops. That means DOJ is prosecuting the SPLC just because it (kind of) can. If so, this would be an unusual sign of “finally getting it.””

Solidarity is the only way forward. I stand with Heidi Beirich, and I encourage everyone to do the same. She has denied any wrongdoing through her lawyers, and I see no reason to believe the DOJ’s version is true or even grounded in reality. Even if you didn’t know Beirich or her work, you owe her a debt of gratitude. As her friend and colleague Eric K. Ward put it:

“Heidi was taking on organized bigotry long before “multiracial democracy,” “white nationalism,” “political violence” and “authoritarianism” became language people tossed into grant proposals. Long before most of progressive America, the racial justice field and liberal civil society were even willing to admit just how organized the threat had become…

…Her work exposed dangerous organizations, warned communities and protected people.”

The MAGA Right’s power comes from brute force. Ours can and should come from collective force. We can only win when we stand together. When we stop saying Please don’t let me be next and say Alright, try and make us. Heidi Beirich isn’t the Trump Regime’s first target, and she won’t be the last. If you’re as sick of this as I am, the best way to put a stop to it is to fight the urge to hide and instead stand strong and speak out.

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REF CNN 8 26

A former employee of the Southern Poverty Law Center has been arrested in California on charges that she oversaw secret payments to informants inside of White supremacist groups, one of whom she was allegedly living with and had a romantic relationship with at the time.

The woman, Heidi Beirich, previously ran the SPLC’s project tracking hate groups in the US. The Justice Department has alleged that the program, which is no longer running, defrauded donors who did not realize they were helping to pay individuals inside the same groups that the SPLC aimed to root out.

Beirich allegedly “oversaw payments of donors’ money” to people inside of these hate groups, according to an indictment unsealed Wednesday. She also allegedly shared a bank account with one of those sources, which included funds from the SPLC’s payments.

“I believe she was part of the effort to open bank accounts in completely fictitious companies’ names and make payments to individuals for reasons that were not accurate as described,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a news conference Wednesday. “This is exactly what we said would happen in a case like this, which is that our investigators and the US attorneys and the agents working the case will can keep on working it even after the initial indictment.”

Beirich has been charged as part of a superseding indictment with wire fraud conspiracy, conspiracy to submit false statements to a federally insured bank and conspiracy to conceal money laundering.

A lawyer for Beirich denied wrongdoing on her part.

The SPLC has fought the case, arguing that the government is mischaracterizing a long-standing informant program designed to gather intelligence on hate groups, and accused the Justice Department of charging them for political reasons. Attorneys for the SPLC have also said that law enforcement officials have used information gathered by the organization’s informants in the past.

Rahmat Gul/AP

SPLC charged with defrauding donors over paid extremism informant program

4 min read

The charges are part of the Justice Department’s case against the SPLC over the alleged payments, which prosecutors say were done through shell companies. In earlier court documents, the department gave details on nine unnamed informants it says received payments through the program, which began in the 1980s.

Despite her role in overseeing the payments — some of which were directed to an Imperial Wizard in the KKK — Beirich allegedly had a romantic relationship with one source who infiltrated a White Supremacy group and stole documents for the SPLC, according to the indictment.

That person, prosecutors say, was paid over $1 million by the SPLC since 2007 – $140,000 of which was put into a bank account that Beirich and the person shared. Beirich allegedly used that money to pay for their personal living expenses.

The documents that person allegedly stole were used as part of an article that the SPLC later published. Beirich then allegedly paid a second informant $6,000 to take the fall for the stolen documents.

“Dr. Beirich is innocent, and this case is without merit,” her attorney, Michael J. Proctor said in a statement. “We believe the charges against her and the SPLC are politically motivated, and Dr. Beirich has been targeted in this case because of the important work she has done to combat hate groups and extremists.”

Proctor said Beirich left the SPLC over six years ago.

“Dr. Beirich won’t be silenced or intimidated by the government’s false and politicized allegations now,” Proctor continued. “She welcomes the opportunity to present the truth in court.”

The SPLC told CNN the indictment has not changed their commitment to the cause.

“Taking on violent hate and extremist groups is among the most dangerous work there is, and we believe it is also among the most important work we do. The actions taken by the DOJ will not shake our resolve,” the group said in a statement. “We remain steadfast in our fight for justice and in our commitment to ensuring the promise of the Civil Rights movement becomes a reality for all. We are confident in our position and look forward to presenting the evidence and making our case in court.”

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Revealed: how a shadowy group of far-right donors is funding federal employee watchlists

Project 2025 architects are among those behind the American Accountability Foundation and their blacklists targeting people of color

Jason Wilson

Sun 9 Feb 2025

A rightwing non-profit group that has published a “DEI Watch List” identifying federal employees allegedly “driving radical Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives” is bankrolled by wealthy family foundations and rightwing groups whose origins are often cloaked in a web of financial arrangements that obscure the original donors.

One recent list created by the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) includes the names of mostly Black people with roles in government health alleged to have some ties to diversity initiatives. Another targets education department employees, and another calls out the “most subversive immigration bureaucrats”.

The lists come amid turmoil in the US government as Donald Trump’s incoming administration, aided by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has sought to fire huge swathes of the federal government and purge it of DEI and other initiatives – such as tackling climate change – that Trump has dubbed “woke”.

While the publication of the personal details of government workers – whom the website describes as “targets” – has reportedly “terrified” many in federal departments, the Guardian has discovered that some current and former employees of AAF have taken pains to conceal their affiliations with the group on LinkedIn and other public websites.

One of the donors to the AAF is the Heritage Foundation, the architects of Project 2025, which has been a driving ideological force behind Trump’s re-election and first weeks in government.

Heidi Beirich, the chief strategy officer of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), said: “It’s not surprising to find a vile project such as this backed by Project 2025 entities and far-right donors who have it out for public employees.”

Disclosure documents show that the AAF has been closely involved in training Republican staffers in collaboration with the affiliated Conservative Partnership Institute, in sessions that promise to train rightwing operatives in skills including “open source research” and “working with outside groups”.

Funding fear

Significant sums come to AAF via “dark money” donor-advised funds, which obscure the original benefactors by design.

In the most recent filings for large donor-advised funds, AAF received $25,000 via the Goldman Sachs Charitable Fund; $16,750 via the National Christian Charitable Fund; and $22,300 via the Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund.

But other donors are named private foundations, some of which also donated to affiliated organizations including the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI).

In 2022, for example, the Dunn Foundation gifted $250,000 to CPI and $25,000 to AAF. In 2023, the same foundation gave AAF another $25,000 and upped its CPI donation to $2.5m.

In 2023, the WL Amos Sr Foundation handed $10,000 to AAF, $55,000 to CPI-affiliated American Moment, and $300,000 to CPI, along with another $200,000 to Project 2025’s architects at the Heritage Foundation.

The Guardian emailed Foundation Source, listed as the administrator of the Dunn Foundation in filings, and William Amos III, who is listed as president of the WL Amos Sr Foundation, to ask about their donations and whether they approved of AAF’s style of political advocacy.

The Guardian also emailed others listed as officers or trustees of other family foundations that have made substantial donations to AAF, including Tina Kimbrough, executive director of the Nord Family Foundation; and Hallie McFetridge, a trustee of the Quinn Family Foundation.

Only Quinn’s McFetridge responded, saying: “As we are a family foundation, different members of the family are able to make gifts as their conscious dictates. Another member of our family made this particular donation.”

She added that she would pass the Guardian’s questions on to that person but that “I can assure you I would find this absolutely intolerable. I strongly disagree with this approach to political advocacy.”

Other heavyweight conservative groups have pitched in for AAF.

AAF was one of two organizations to receive direct grants in 2023 from the Club for Growth Foundation. That foundation is co-located and affiliated with a family of non-profits and political committees including Club for Growth Action and Club For Growth PAC, which channel money to conservative causes and candidates from billionaire mega-donors Jeff Yass, Richard Uihlein and their affiliates.

According to tax filings, in 2023 AAF also received $50,000 from The 85 Fund, which is one among a network of organizations funded by Leonard Leo, the conservative mega-donor and Federalist Society mastermind.

Although 2024 filings for AAF are not yet available, last June the organization reportedly also received $100,000 from Heritage for a project whose “goal is to post 100 names of government workers to a website this summer to show a potential new administration who might be standing in the way of a second-term Trump agenda”.

‘Incubated’ by the Conservative Partnership Institute

The most crucial support for AAF, however, has come from the organization that birthed it: the CPI, which continues to have a profound influence on the Trump administration and the Republican party as a whole via its own activities and those of its flotilla of spin-off groups.

AAF was founded in 2021 to “take a big handful of sand and throw it in the gears of the Biden administration”, as Tom Jones, the organization’s head, told Fox News at the time.

In 2021 and 2022, however, CPI’s filings indicate that it was the “directly controlling entity” for the “related tax-exempt organization” AAF, and that CPI funded AAF to the tune of $335,100 in 2021 and $210,000 in 2022.

This was the period in which a well-heeled CPI was incubating a “network of closely affiliated think tanks, legal groups, and training centers dedicated to the thorough makeover of the federal government”, according to the Nation.

That network included America First Legal (AFL), the Center for Renewing America (CRA), the Electoral Integrity Project (EIP) and American Moment, along with AAF.

All of these groups were on the advisory board for Project 2025, and most have placed personnel at the highest levels of the new Trump administration.

AFL’s Stephen Miller is Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy; CRA’s Russell Vought is poised to be confirmed as head of the office of management and budget; and in a little-reported move, Trump placed American Moment’s founder, Saurabh Sharma, as special assistant in the presidential personnel office.

Moulding Magaminds

The Guardian reported last year that CPI had been cementing ties between the far right and the GOP by means of training events for Hill staffers and their bosses in Congress

Many of these events were held at “Camp Rydin”, a sprawling 2,200-acre (890-hectare) property on Maryland’s eastern shore purchased after a $25m donation was made to CPI by its namesake, retired Houston software entrepreneur Mike Rydin, in the wake of January 6.

Others were held at one of at least nine adjacent properties on Washington DC’s Pennsylvania Avenue purchased by CPI since 2022, in what reports described as a $41m “shopping spree” that has created a “Maga campus”.

CPI literature describes the precinct as “Patriot’s Row”.

Records obtained from US Senate and House ethics disclosures indicate that AAF has benefited from being front and center at many of these events.

At a 29 May 2024 “Legislative Assistant Symposium” attended by staffers then working for senators including Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and JD Vance, AAF’s Jones was billed as speaking on “strategies for how Congress should approach oversight and accountability”, alongside speakers from CPI, AFL, Advancing American Freedom and anti-immigrant group NumbersUSA.

A parallel event with the same line-up drew staffers for hard-right Maga representatives including Anna Paulina Luna – who recently introduced a bill that would see Trump’s face added to Mount Rushmore – and Paul Gosar, who in November invoked antisemitic conspiracy theories in a newsletter defending Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick to lead national intelligence.

NumbersUSA was part of a network of groups “founded and funded” by John Tanton, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center called the “puppeteer of the nativism movement and a man with deep racist roots”.

At an event held 15-17 February 2023, hosted by AAF and attended by staffers for Congress members including Luna, Ken Buck and Marjorie Taylor Greene, trainees were to learn skills including “how to effectively draft requests for information from agencies and witnesses”, “tools and techniques for conducting open source research into agencies, individuals, and organizations”, and conducting “mock interviews with reluctant / recalcitrant witnesses”.

AAF’s reticent researchers

Prior to AAF, Jones worked as a Capitol Hill staffer for a string of high-profile hard-right Republicans including Ron Johnson, Cruz and the former senator Jim DeMint, who headed up CPI after he was forced out in an internal power struggle at Heritage.

Since opening his AAF unit, he has blooded a new generation of rightwing opposition researchers. Some of those researchers appear reluctant to publicly advertise their affiliation.

On LinkedIn, four people openly flag their affiliation with AAF: Jones himself; communications manager Yitz Friedman of Brooklyn, New York; development adviser Nadeen Wincapaw of Tampa, Florida; and associate researcher Elisabeth Guinard of Helena, Montana.

Search engine-cached versions of the LinkedIn page of Jerome Trankle of Washington DC, however, indicate that he is research director at AAF. Data brokers also yield an AAF-associated email address for Tankle.

Trankle’s live LinkedIn profile has him doing “ESG & Financial Services” research at “AAF” without using the badged – and searchable – link some of his colleagues use.

The Guardian emailed the address associated with Trankle at AAF to ask why he doesn’t more clearly advertise his affiliation but received no response.

Additionally, an anti-fascist research group claimed late on Wednesday to have identified additional researchers on the basis of LinkedIn profile pictures that had inadvertently been included in purposed evidentiary materials about government workers on the DEI Watch List site.

The Guardian corroborated the inclusion of researchers’ profile pictures in evidence on the DEI watchlist.

One of those identified, Cari Fike, is married to Hugh Fike, a senior director at CPI, and is a former lobbyist for Heritage Action, the 501(c)4 associated with the Heritage Foundation.

The Guardian contacted Fike for comment on her apparent involvement in researching government workers for AAF.

Beirich, the extremism expert, said: “It’s rather ironic that an organization that is targeting public officials through a watchlist that could open them up to harassment and mistreatment goes to such lengths to protect its own,” adding: “Clearly, they understand how dangerous this outing can be.”

Dirt machine

The dirt machine now targeted at government workers was honed on higher-profile targets during the Biden administration.

Early on, AAF pointed its opposition-research machine at Biden nominees including Saule Omarova, nominated for comptroller of the currency; Sarah Bloom Raskin, nominated for vice-chair for supervision of the Federal Reserve Board, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, supreme court justice, whom the organization falsely claimed had been soft on sex offenders.

In the process of “desperately seeking dirt” on the Federal Reserve nominee Lisa Cook, AAF used a customary tactic of peppering her employer, Michigan State University, with records requests. But Jones went one step further by bombarding “dozens” of her colleagues in a bid to cast doubt on her tenure promotion a decade earlier.

A significant proportion of the nominees targeted by AAF – including Brown Jackson, Cook and Omarova – were women of color.

The dozens of public employees whose information was collected in “dossiers” on the DEI watchlist site are overwhelmingly people of color. Of 44 profiles listed under agencies at the time of reporting, 29 were people of color, and 20 were women of color alone. Just five were white men.

“The fact that many on the list are people of color just adds another layer of vileness to the project,” Beirich said.

“Recent attacks by the Trump administration on public employees shows that the Maga/Project 2025 movement will go as far as possible to make life miserable for public servants.”

This article was amended on 10 February 2025. An earlier version incorrectly stated that employees of Foundation Source act as trustees for the Dunn Foundation; rather Foundation Source acts as an administrator. A spokesperson said after publication that Foundation Source “does not recommend (or decide) specific organizations for its clients to fund”, and that it has no affiliation with the CPI or AAF.

It also clarified that Jeff Yass and Richard Uihlein have not contributed to the Club for Growth Foundation.

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