59-year old Heidi Beirich of Palm Springs, California, served as the SPLC's chief financial officer.
She is charged with wire fraud conspiracy, conspiracy to submit false statements to a federally insured bank and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. She was charged in the government’s existing case against the SPLC in Montgomery, Alabama.
In ankle cuffs and wearing a red T-shirt, Beirich made her initial court appearance for a bond hearing in Riverside, California, Wednesday afternoon. She did not enter a plea and U.S. Magistrate Judge David T. Bristow ordered her to surrender her passport and appear in court in Alabama within two weeks.
Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the new charges at a news briefing in Washington, but did not name Beirich. CNN was first to report on the charges against Beirich.
“This is exactly what we said would happen in a case like this,” Blanche said. “Our investigators and the U.S. Attorneys and the agents working the case will keep on working it even after the initial indictment.”
Beirich led the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, which incurred the anger of conservatives with its annual report on organizations that it classified as hate groups. Critics accused the law center of unfairly tarnishing conservative groups with the same label that it applied to white supremacists.
A superseding indictment filed in June appears to refer to Beirich as “Employee-2” and by her former title as director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project.
The indictment alleges that between 2007 and 2023, more than $4 million in donated funds were secretly funneled to people who infiltrated or were associated with violent extremist groups. Prosecutors said some of the money was used for recruiting new members and purchasing Ku Klux Klan robes and materials for cross-burning ceremonies.
The indictment says “Employee-2” oversaw the payment of donor money to SPLC informants or “field sources," including KKK members and white nationalists who initially approached the SPLC for help leaving the extremist organizations. The SPLC employee was in a romantic relationship with a source who infiltrated a neo-Nazi group at the direction of the law center, the indictment alleges.
