Federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment Tuesday against the Southern Poverty Law Center, expanding their fraud case against the civil rights organization with new details alleging that donor money was used to reimburse KKK members for cross-burning expenses, even including the wood and fuel used at the events.

The superseding indictment, returned by a federal grand jury in the Middle District of Alabama, alleges that $4.1 million in tax-exempt funds were used to pay informants inside extremist organizations, who then allegedly engaged in activities including recruiting new members and purchasing materials for cross burnings and Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods.

The superseding indictment does not contain any new charges or name new defendants from the original indictment returned in April. The SPLC still faces 11 counts of wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

According to prosecutors, the SPLC “secretly funneled” more than $3 million in donor funds between 2014 and 2023 to individuals associated with extremist organizations including the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, the National Socialist Movement, participants in the Unite the Right rally, and the Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club.

The new filing adds damning operational details. An SPLC employee allegedly encouraged reluctant KKK members to remain in the organization and offered them a monthly salary of $1,200, and the pair subsequently agreed to stay involved. Prosecutors also allege the pair were reimbursed for expenses related to KKK activities, including cross-burning events, and that one of the individuals recruited new members using donor-funded payments. The SPLC employee allegedly instructed the informants to claim they worked for a company called “Rare Books” and helped college students with research and writing assignments if anyone questioned the source of their income.

Prosecutors also allege the SPLC opened bank accounts tied to fictitious entities in order to conceal donor funds routed to confidential sources.

The indictment states that “the SPLC’s paid informants engaged in the active promotion of racist groups at the same time that the SPLC was denouncing the same groups on its website.” The superseding indictment also notes that the SPLC’s reported revenue grew from roughly $38.7 million in 2010 to more than $129 million in 2023 — an increase of approximately 233% — a figure prosecutors included to suggest the organization had substantial financial incentive to maintain and expand its public profile as a hate-group watchdog.

The SPLC’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement: “The SPLC did not lie to its donors, it did not mislead banks it did business with, and its informant program prevented violence and saved lives.” Lowell also raised procedural objections, saying the Justice Department appeared to have shared the superseding indictment with media before it was unsealed by the court, calling it “another example of the government’s troubling handling of this case.”

The SPLC has said its informant program was used to monitor threats of violence and that the information gathered was routinely shared with local and federal law enforcement. Interim CEO Bryan Fair has maintained that the organization “will vigorously defend” itself against what it calls false allegations.

The superseding indictment also addressed a legal vulnerability in the original filing. The prior version alleged an SPLC employee made “false or misleading statements” to banks, but the Supreme Court ruled last year in Thompson v. USA that the relevant bank fraud statute only criminalizes false statements — not misleading ones. The new indictment drops the words “or misleading” to correct that error.

The original indictment was filed in April, when Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the charges alongside FBI Director Kash Patel. Blanche said at the time that “the SPLC was not dismantling these groups — it was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”

The SPLC was founded in 1971 and built its reputation through civil rights litigation before later expanding to monitoring white supremacist and other extremist groups. For decades it was regarded as a leading authority on domestic hate groups, with its “hate map” widely cited by journalists, government agencies, and grant-making institutions.

Critics on the right had long accused it of inflating the threat of extremism to drive fundraising and of unfairly labeling mainstream conservative organizations as hate groups. The criminal case now places those accusations in a federal courtroom.

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