DOJ says it has superseding indictment against Southern Poverty Law Center

The Justice Department said Tuesday it obtained a superseding indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center that contained new allegations about how its donations were purportedly used to pay informants inside hate groups.

The superseding indictment, which the DOJ said was returned by a grand jury in the Middle District of Alabama, alleges that $4.1 million worth of 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 charges do not stem from the general practice of paying informants but from the Justice Department's allegations that the SPLC made these payments without disclosing the practice to donors and by defrauding banks.

The superseding indictment does not contain any new charges or name new defendants from the original version, which was returned in April.

The group still faces 11 counts of wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering, with prosecutors alleging it defrauded its donors and duped its banks by creating shell accounts to funnel money to insiders who belonged to the same hate groups it pledged to dismantle.

The Southern Poverty Law Center pleaded not guilty to the charges filed in April, and recently asked the court to dismiss the case, saying it is a victim of an unlawful vindictive prosecution.

"This apparent superseding indictment attempts to shore up the flaws in the initial charges, but it changes nothing," the SPLC's lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement provided to CBS News.

"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."

A public copy of the superseding indictment was not yet available on the docket as of Tuesday night, and the version provided by the Justice Department was not a final signed copy. 

Lowell, in his statement, said the Justice Department appeared to have shared a copy of the superseding indictment with the media before it was unsealed by the federal district court.

Such a move represents "another example of the government's troubling and unusual handling of this case," he said, adding that SPLC's legal team would be addressing such irregularities with the court.

The new version of the indictment appeared to clean up what some former prosecutors said was problematic language in the older version.

In the prior version, the indictment alleged that an SPLC employee who opened the bank accounts in question made "false or misleading statements."

But the Supreme Court last year, in Thompson v. USA, ruled that the bank fraud statute at issue only criminalizes false statements — and not statements that are misleading but not false. Former prosecutors told CBS News that this error meant the indictment was wrongfully suggesting that misleading statements could be criminal, and they predicted that the DOJ would need to return to the grand jury to fix the mistake.

The new version of the indictment no longer includes the words "or misleading" in reference to the statements made to banks.

The superseding indictment also contains information about SPLC's revenue from its public tax filings, which had not been included in the original indictment.