EXCLUSIVE: Kristen Clarke Met With the Southern Poverty Law Center

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Kristen Clarke, who headed up the Justice Department office that prosecuted pro-lifers for protesting abortion clinics, met with leaders at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which compares mainstream conservative and Christian groups to the Ku Klux Klan, documents suggest.

The meeting may shed light on the animus that Clarke—then the DOJ’s assistant attorney general for civil rights—harbored against conservatives.

According to emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by America First Legal and provided to The Daily Signal, Clarke planned to meet with SPLC leadership on Monday, March 6, 2023.

“As you know on Sunday/Monday, Kristen will be in Selma and Montgomery,” Johnathan Smith, deputy assistant attorney general at Clarke’s Civil Rights Division, wrote in a March 2 email to Karen Stevens, a senior policy counsel at the division. Stevens asked Kevin Jenkins, the division’s public engagement and outreach adviser, for Clarke’s itinerary.

Jenkins shared that Clarke planned to “meet with the leadership of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Equal Justice Initiative. The meeting with the SPLC and EJI are with leadership only.”

The Daily Signal reached out to the Justice Department, the SPLC, EJI, and the organization Clarke once ran, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, for confirmation that the meeting took place and for details about it. This article will be updated with any response.

What Is the SPLC?

The SPLC gained its reputation by suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy in the 1980s, but by the 2000s, it had weaponized this history against conservatives. The SPLC publishes a “hate map” that plots mainstream conservative and Christian groups alongside Klan chapters, suggesting that the same kind of hatred and potential for terrorism drives conservatives.

The “hate map” includes parental rights groups like Moms for Liberty; religious freedom law firms like Alliance Defending Freedom; conservative Christian think tanks like the Family Research Council; pro-enforcement immigration groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform; organizations that warn about the threat of radical Islamist terrorism like the Center for Security Policy; and more.

The most recent version added groups of doctors who oppose the experimental interventions euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming care.” It also added the lesbian, gay, and bisexual organization Gays Against Groomers to the “hate map” as an “anti-LGBTQ+ hate group.”

The SPLC has faced numerous scandals over the years.

In 2012, a terrorist used the “hate map” to target the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. The SPLC condemned the attack, but kept FRC on the map.

In 2019, the SPLC fired its co-founder amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal. Amid that scandal, a former employee called the “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.”

In the wake of that scandal, SPLC staff unionized. Last year, the SPLC Union accused the center of “union-busting” for a rash of layoffs that included unionized staff.

The SPLC has paid millions in defamation settlements, and it currently faces a defamation lawsuit for branding a pro-enforcement immigration group in Georgia an “anti-immigrant hate group.”

As I wrote in my book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” these scandals did not prevent the Biden administration from welcoming the SPLC with open arms. President Joe Biden nominated an SPLC attorney to a top federal judgeship. The Biden White House welcomed SPLC leaders and staff at least 18 times. The Justice Department received a briefing from the SPLC shortly after it added Moms for Liberty to the “hate map” in June 2023.

The March 2023 meeting raises important questions about Clarke’s animus against the conservatives and Christians the SPLC demonizes, and about whether Clarke may have influenced the SPLC.

Kristen Clarke

Clarke’s bias against Christians should not come as a surprise. After all, she cited the SPLC in condemning Alliance Defending Freedom—a conservative Christian law firm that has won multiple cases at the U.S. Supreme Court—as a “hate group.”

As head of the Office of Civil Rights, Clarke led the disproportionate charges against pro-life protesters outside abortion clinics.

Following the leak of the Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion overturning the abortion precedent Roe v. Wade, vandals have attacked at least 96 pro-life pregnancy centers and 326 Catholic churches. Yet in all of 2022, the Justice Department did not charge a single person with any attacks, and it only charged four people with violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act for such vandalism in 2023.

According to the Justice Department, the FACE Act protects access to both abortion clinics and pro-life pregnancy centers, but the Civil Rights Division charged 26 pro-lifers with FACE Act violations in 2022. By contrast, the DOJ only charged four people with FACE Act violations in 2021 and even fewer in the years before that. Clarke, as assistant attorney general for civil rights since May 2021, leads the division in charge of FACE Act prosecutions.

Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, who held Clarke’s job during the Obama administration, said in December 2022 that the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe increased “the urgency” of the DOJ’s work, including the “enforcement of the FACE Act, to ensure continued lawful access to reproductive services.”

A former DOJ official told The Daily Signal that the department appears to be “using the FACE Act to intimidate the pro-life population of the country.”

Clarke served as president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a left-wing activist group. She also worked for five years at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, a leftist group that ties abortion to “racial justice.” Both groups have frequently accessed the Biden White House and received large cash infusions from the Left’s dark money network.

As my former colleague Mary Margaret Olohan exclusively reported for The Daily Signal, Clarke had been arrested for attacking her then-husband, Reginald Avery, with a knife, deeply slicing his finger to the bone in 2006. The pair finalized their divorce in 2009. Clarke had the arrest expunged from her record, and during her Senate confirmation, she denied ever having been arrested or having been accused of committing a violent crime. Clarke admitted to her failure to disclose this arrest, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, called for her to resign.

As the Trump administration takes control of the federal bureaucracy, Americans can expect more secrets like this March 2023 meeting to become public. Groups like the SPLC enjoyed tremendous access and influence in the previous administration, and that helps explain why bureaucrats weaponized law enforcement against conservatives.

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