WASHINGTON — A former Southern Poverty Regulation Heart chief finance officer declined to face prices in person who she fraudulently funneled $1.2 million in donor cash to white supremacist teams.
Heidi Beirich waived her proper to look at a digital court docket arraignment within the Center District of Alabama on 14 felony prices involving alleged wire fraud, financial institution fraud, and cash laundering.
As an alternative, her protection crew appeared for the Zoom arraignment and entered a not-guilty plea earlier than US Justice of the Peace Decide Kelly Pate on all counts.
Pate set a trial date of Oct. 5, which each prosecutors and Beirich’s protection attorneys indicated would doubtless be pushed again given the “voluminous” proof to overview within the case.
“Dr. Beirich is harmless, and this case is with out advantage,” considered one of her protection attorneys, Michael Proctor, beforehand mentioned in a press release.
“We consider the costs in opposition to her and the SPLC are politically motivated, and Dr. Beirich has been focused on this case due to the essential work she has carried out to fight hate teams and extremists.”
Beirich is the one named defendant within the US authorities’s sweeping prosecution of a bunch billed as a defender of civil rights. As an alternative, prosecutors allege Beirich paid informants to maintain hate teams afloat and even develop into lovers with a member of a white supremacist group SPLC was formally attempting to take down.
SPLC itself has already pleaded not responsible to utilizing $4.1 million in donor funds to bankroll informants in extremist teams.
Beirich joined the SPLC in 1999 and went on to function the director of its Intelligence Mission from 2012 to 2019, which was devoted to monitoring and monitoring hate teams.
In that position, she additionally allegedly paid off informants in white nationalist teams, together with one named “F-9” within the Nationwide Alliance.
F-9 was paid specifically to interrupt into Nationwide Alliance headquarters and steal 25 bins of paperwork in 2015.
One other informant from the hate group, “F-39,” was paid a smaller sum of $6,000 “to falsely take accountability for the housebreaking,” per the federal indictment.
A few of these supplies had been later used to writer an article for SPLC’s weblog “Hatewatch,” which was a part of the Intelligence Mission. Beirich’s article, “Chaos on the Compound,” remains to be obtainable on-line.
As an SPLC worker, Beirich additionally allegedly was “in a romantic relationship with F-9,” the place the couple shared joint financial institution accounts and a home, in line with the indictment.
Between 1999 and 2019, Beirich allegedly facilitated greater than $1.2 million in funds from SPLC donors to Nationwide Alliance’s F-9.
Within the preliminary June 2 court docket submitting, Beirich had simply been listed because the “one who would develop into Director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Mission” and “Worker-2,” earlier than being unmasked in a Put up report from June.
When asserting the case earlier this yr, then-Appearing Lawyer Common Todd Blanche claimed SPLC’s work was as a substitute “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”
FBI Director Kash Patel beforehand mentioned Beirich “was on the heart of our ongoing investigation into SPLC.”
The far-left nonprofit “knowingly misled donors, who believed their cash was getting used to dismantle violent extremist organizations – when in reality, a part of these donations had been as a substitute getting used to pay senior management inside these extremist teams,” in line with the FBI boss.
Beirich lives in Palm Springs, Calif., and had made her preliminary look in federal court docket in Riverside earlier this month, Proctor mentioned. Patel and different media reviews indicated she had initially been arrested.
