The Southern Poverty Law Center asked a federal judge on Wednesday to consider sanctioning federal prosecutors, after the Justice Department shared an unsigned and unstamped copy of a superseding indictment against the nonprofit with members of the media.
On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced it had obtained a superseding indictment against the SPLC that contained some new allegations about how it allegedly used donations to infiltrate hate groups, claiming the money helped buy materials for cross burnings and for Ku Klux Klan robes and hats.
The new indictment does not name any additional defendants. It still contains 11 counts of wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering, the same charges that were outlined in the original April indictment accusing the SPLC of paying informants in extremist groups without disclosing the practice to donors or banks.
The SPLC’s attorneys alleged in court filings Wednesday that the unofficial copy of the superseding indictment was improperly shared with journalists before it was publicly docketed, in violation of federal grand jury secrecy rules.
They asked the judge to order the Justice Department to provide an explanation for its conduct and explain why prosecutors on the case should not face sanctions.
The Justice Department “released an unsigned, unstamped Microsoft Word version of a draft superseding indictment to members of the media—before unsealing any legitimate filing and before alerting (or providing a copy to) defense counsel,” the SPLC said, adding the department was putting “putting media strategy before the sacrosanct rules on grand jury secrecy.”
The group’s lawyers wrote that revealing information about the case before it is formally made public could prejudice the SPLC by creating a “one-sided narrative that the SPLC could not address without compounding the harm.”
CBS News has reached out to the Justice Department for comment.
The SPLC’s lawyers said that the version of the superseding indictment shared with the news media “contained the underlying metadata of the DOJ attorneys who had ‘authored’ and ‘last modified’ the document” on Tuesday morning.
The Microsoft Word version also contained some language that was not in the superseding indictment returned by the grand jury and publicly docketed on Wednesday.
The SPLC’s lawyers said when they reached out to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Middle District of Alabama on Tuesday evening to ask why reporters were seeking comment on an unsigned copy of the indictment, the lead prosecutor could not explain it and needed to gather more information.
“In decades of collective practice, including serving as prosecutors at DOJ, none of the SPLC’s counsel has ever seen anything remotely like what DOJ did last night—distributing what turned out not to be the actual superseding indictment returned by the grand jury and docketed today,” the SPLC’s lawyers wrote.
“This conduct violates the letter and spirit of the federal rules, DOJ’s own policies, and even common-sense notions of professionalism to abide by the normal court procedure and treat those accused of wrongdoing fairly.”