Professionals who have experience with anti-money laundering laws are not shocked by the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). If the facts alleged in the indictment are true, they appear to support charges that are unremarkable and to be expected. Those allegations also strongly suggest the possibility of more indictments.
That reaction isn’t the loudest response, right now. Indicted for fraud, making false statements to a bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering, the SPLC is hinting broadly at a victimhood defense about being a left-wing organization politically targeted by a right-wing administration. Among the army of lawyers the SPLC has hired from multiple law firms, the racial justice nonprofit is now represented by the D.C. insider Abbe Lowell, who also represented Hunter Biden. Reuters describes Lowell’s boutique law firm as one that works “defending Trump targets.”
Spreading the victimhood narrative, journalists in legacy media are suggesting that the prosecution is a faked-up political hit built on shaky legal ground; MS Now calls the charges “nakedly political.” Joining that chorus, Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page reads undertones of menace in an indictment that he describes as “murky.”
It’s not murky. You can read the indictment here. Among other things, the SPLC is accused of creating accounts at two banks for fake businesses that “were never incorporated, had no bona fide employees, and conducted no actual business.”
That’s hard to do. The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, updated after 9/11, creates extensive anti-money laundering “know your customer” rules that require banks to identify new customers and be sure a business is both real and representing its activities in an honest way. You can read the regulatory requirement for a “customer identification program” yourself, and look at bank websites to see what kinds of documents you have to show a bank to open a new business account: articles of incorporation, tax forms, permits, personal identification to show who is opening the account, and so on.
Kevin Sullivan is a retired New York State Police detective who served on multijurisdictional fraud task force investigations, and is also the author of an anti-money laundering (AML) guidebook for businesses. In retirement from law enforcement, he’s the president of an AML training academy. An investigation into allegedly fake bank accounts, he told The Federalist, has to start with a basic question: “How the heck did these businesses obtain an account in the first place?”
I’d like to se a report of what NGOs have folded since USAID was shuttered.