DOJ charges former Southern Poverty Law Center CFO with fraud

Heidi Beirich was arrested Wednesday morning in California, DOJ officials said.

The Southern Poverty Law Center's former chief financial officer was arrested Wednesday and charged with fraud in a superseding indictment that accuses her of overseeing fraudulent donor payments to informants inside hate groups -- including one with whom she had allegedly been in a romantic relationship and shared a bank account -- according to newly unsealed court documents.

Heidi Beirich was arrested in California Wednesday morning and charged with several counts, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering.

ABC News was not immediately able to reach her attorney Wednesday afternoon.

Prosecutors say Beirich, who previously led the SPLC's hate groups tracking section, was one among several individuals who oversaw payments to individuals who infiltrated white supremacist groups and acted as informants for SPLC.

In April, the SPLC was charged as an organization with bank fraud and money laundering offenses related to its paying of informants to infiltrate hate groups.

Beirich is the first named individual to face criminal charges in connection with the case. The SPLC has rejected allegations it misled donors and has said payments to informants were in line with the organization's broader mission of rooting out and exposing the internal workings of white supremacist and other hate groups.

The superseding indictment alleges that one of the individuals Beirich approved payments for was an imperial wizard in the Ku Klux Klan and that Beirich had also had a romantic relationship with a separate person who the SPLC had paid over $1 million since 2007. Beirich allegedly shared a bank account with that person, and between 2015 and 2021 approximately $140,000 in SPLC donors' money flowed into it, the indictment said.

The SPLC previously moved to have the case dismissed on the grounds that the organization was a victim of vindictive prosecution by the Trump administration, but that claim was rejected last week by a federal judge.

In an unrelated news conference on Wednesday, Attorney General Todd Blanche said the SPLC indictment shows "exactly what we said would happen in a case like this, which is that our investigators and the U.S. attorneys and the agents working the case will keep on working it even after the initial indictment."