Conservative activist Tony Perkins says he knew why the gunman came before the gunman even confessed.
He was sent by the radical Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)… and so Perkins is suing the organization, he said.
On August 15, 2012, Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, was in a meeting at the conservative nonprofit’s Washington, D.C. headquarters when the building’s alarm went off.
In the lobby, security officer Leo Johnson was lying in a pool of blood, shot by a young man who had walked in claiming to be interviewing for an internship.
“It was a shocking day for our staff,” Perkins told Fox News. “There was glass and blood and bullet holes in our lobby.”
The gunman, Floyd Lee Corkins II, later told investigators how he chose his target thanks to the SPLC.
“It was, uh — Southern Poverty Law lists, uh anti-gay groups,” Corkins reportedly confessed. “I found them online. I did a little bit of research, went to the website, stuff like that.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center had labeled the Family Research Council a “hate group” in 2010, part of a sprawling list of conservative and Christian organizations the SPLC targeted on their website as anti-LGBT. Corkins had found them on that list, loaded his gun, and walked into the FRC building to murder people.
Johnson was shot in the arm but survived. Corkins was tackled and subdued before he could harm anyone else. He pleaded guilty in 2013 to terrorism charges and is serving a 25-year federal prison sentence.
Perkins is now calling for the SPLC to pay for what happened.
The Family Research Council has spent $8 million out of pocket on heightened security measures since the day of the attack. With the SPLC holding $750 million in assets in the face of a federal criminal indictment, Perkins told Fox News he hopes they are forced to pay.
“So yes, they’re sitting on $750 million,” Perkins said. “Part of what I hope the government, the federal government, the courts get to is making them pay restitution to their victims.”
In April, the SPLC was charged with 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The Department of Justice claims the SPLC had siphoned millions in donor funds to pay the salary of members of hate groups including the Ku Klux Klan, United Klans of America, Aryan Nations, and the American Nazi Party. The very organizations the SPLC told donors it was fighting.
Some of those funds were allegedly later used by white supremacists to carry out further crimes, which the SPLC then fundraised more from.
According to the DoJ, for decades the SPLC has funded white supremacist rallies, expanded Klan chapters, and purchased KKK robes, hoods, and materials for cross burnings. The Washington Times also reported that at a June 9 House Judiciary Committee hearing, at least one SPLC staffer had a romantic relationship with a neo-Nazi insider the group was funding.
Committee chairman Jim Jordan, who has subpoenaed the SPLC for all related records, summed it up: “They didn’t just pay them to foment the hate they told their donors they were fighting — they actually dated them.”
While funding these white supremacist hate groups, the SPLC’s donations revenue reportedly grew from $38.7 million to $129 million, an increase of 233%.
The organization has denied wrongdoing and says it was paying hate groups as part of their counter-extremism program, which was a lawful confidential informant operation.
Perkins said he has watched the SPLC’s evolution for years. They once fought real hate, he told Fox News. But they needed more hate groups to justify their existence and increase their fundraising.
“I think they began to peddle that legacy to those on the left,” he said. “They wanted to leverage that to help the left by going after conservative groups that were standing in the way, but they needed to hold on to those white supremacist extremist groups, to pin the conservative and Christian groups next to.”
“It was like they were fattening them up, keeping them alive so that they could use them for their bigger political purpose,” he said. “And that was to be able to help the left advance their agenda by marginalizing and silencing conservative groups.”