Southern Poverty Law Center’s Murky Offshore Assets Ballooned As Embattled Group Secretly Funded KKK and Other ‘Violent Extremist Groups’
Plus, winery owned by Ilhan Omar's husband folds a year after Omar said it was worth millions—and Harvard board chair Penny Pritzker has a new podcast sponsored by Harvard's audit firm
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which claims to “dismantle white supremacy,” saw its offshore assets balloon by as much as 430 percent over the decade it allegedly defrauded donors by funneling millions to the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations, our Andrew Kerr and Chuck Ross report.
A federal grand jury on Tuesday indicted the SPLC—a self-described “catalyst for racial justice”—for wire fraud, false statements to banks, and conspiracy to commit money laundering after it allegedly sent more than $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to members of the KKK, Aryan Nations, the National Alliance, and other “violent extremist” groups, purportedly as part of FBI-style undercover investigations that went nowhere. The SPLC was able to make those payments thanks in part to assets parked in offshore accounts. Those assets skyrocketed over that decade to a staggering $233 million in non-U.S. equity holdings in the fiscal year ending in October 2021, up from $44 million in non-U.S. equity holdings in 2013.
That money appears to be parked in the Caribbean. The SPLC—which controlled more than $800 million in assets at the end of 2024—reported owning accounts in the Cayman Islands and disclosed making a combined $57 million in “investments” in Central America and the Caribbean in its two most recent tax filings.
Though the SPLC was founded in 1971 as a civil rights law firm seeking damages for KKK victims, its scope expanded over the years to include issues like immigration enforcement and gender ideology. Kerr and Ross write: “Every year since 1990, the SPLC has published a ‘hate map’ that is meant to identify groups that ‘attack or malign an entire class of people’ but often includes run-of-the-mill conservative organizations like parental rights groups Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education. As the SPLC’s left-wing advocacy grew, so did its financial holdings, prompting criticism from former employees like Bob Moser, who described the group in 2019 as a ‘highly profitable scam’ that was ‘ripping off donors.’”
The California-based winery co-owned by Ilhan Omar’s husband has folded, business records reviewed by our Collin Anderson and Andrew Kerr show. Hard to believe a hardworking and upstanding businessman like Tim Mynett, Omar’s third and current husband, couldn’t make a go of it. The collapse came nearly a year after Omar filed a financial disclosure listing the winery’s value at as much as $5 million—and roughly a week after Omar amended the disclosure to state that the winery had no value at all.
The troubled winery, eStCru, filed for termination with the California secretary of state’s office on April 4, records show. It does not appear to have been producing wine for some time. This all comes in the context of Omar amending her financial disclosure, which was evidently off by millions, after the Free Beacon pointed out that her net worth had grown substantially.
“When the Free Beacon reported on Omar’s exploding net worth, the left-wing ‘Squad’ member called the report false,” write Anderson and Kerr. “Omar argued that, although the winery and one other asset, her husband’s ‘Venture Capital Management’ firm, were indeed worth millions of dollars, they generated no more than $15,000 in income, which is not how wealth is calculated. ‘Learn to read before you post misleading shit,’ Omar said.” The congresswoman would be wise to take her own advice when it comes to her congressional disclosures, though she doesn’t appear to have learned a lesson: Her office blamed the massive valuation discrepancies on an accounting error, one that “confirms what we’ve said all along: The congresswoman is not a millionaire.” That’s one way to spin it.
The Harvard Corporation’s 66-year-old senior fellow, former Obama and Biden administration official and hotel heiress Penny Pritzker, has a new podcast on Semafor, the newsletter and events company she happens to be an investor in, though they’re not disclosing that to listeners. The show is “presented by PWC,” or PriceWaterhouseCoopers, which happens to be Harvard’s audit and accounting firm, another fact not disclosed on the program. The Free Beacon‘s Ira Stoll writes:
An introductory promotion of the podcast features Pritzker describing the program as “conversations about leading complex organizations at a uniquely complex time.” The episodes so far have featured the CEOs of Starbucks and IBM making corporate-conference-circuit style observations about organizational change and managing through uncertainty. Pritzker has a co-host, Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, who adds a British accent. The show description identifies Pritzker as “investor, business builder, and former U.S. Secretary of Commerce,” but not anywhere specifically as an investor in Semafor or as senior fellow of Harvard’s Corporation.
Pritzker has been promoting the episodes from her LinkedIn account: “I sat down with my friend Arvind Krishna, Chairman and CEO of IBM … I was particularly struck by Arvind’s intentionality in nurturing authenticity and innovation across a global organization.”
Pritzker, a billionaire heiress to the Hyatt hotel fortune, shares some personal background as she banters with the guests. “My husband often says I’m a kind of person who runs towards a fire,” she said at one point. She also recalls, during high school, working at a hotel front desk. “You learned a lot about people and how to help people who are frustrated,” she said.
Elsewhere:
One day after President Donald Trump extended the ceasefire with Iran, the regime responded by attacking three ships in the Strait of Hormuz. That could explain why Trump is reportedly giving the Islamic Republic a “short window” of “three to five days” to coalesce around an offer to end the war or face further military options.
CNBC’s Sara Eisen asked Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren why she supports left-wing Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner given his various baggage like, you know, the covered-up Nazi tattoo and remarks shaming rape victims. “He has apologized,” Warren responded. “He is out meeting with the people of Maine every single day so they can evaluate not who Graham Platner was but who Graham Platner is today.”
Checking in on the “newspaper of record”: The New York Times published a 35-minute interview with anti-American streamer Hasan Piker titled, “’The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?’: Why petty theft might be the new political protest.” “I’m pro stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers,” Piker said. “The lemons that you stole are factored into the bottom line of these mega-corporations regardless.” He also said people “understand” why Luigi Mangione murdered United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson because Thompson was guilty of “social murder.”
Is the Times devoting enough coverage to this piece of human garbage? In recent weeks, the paper has run two other in-depth pieces about Piker, one from Ezra Klein and one a profile from the campaign trail in Michigan. That’s in addition to the Times’s infamous 2025 profile headlined, “A Progressive Mind in a Body Made for the ‘Manosphere’”
Check out our full Thursday lineup below.
A winery has to make wine to be profitable! The real question is why is Omar still in Congress and in this Country? Deport the crooked B!tch!
"Fall from grapes" - OK that was witty!