It is Friday, April 23, 2020, 26. It is 4 o'clock p.m. in Washington, D.C.

And in all hotel rooms in New York City. You are watching

Lawfare Live. The Trials of the Trump administration. I'm Benjamin Wittes. Editor-in-chief

of Lawfare, and I am here with Lawfare senior editors, Eric Columbus, Roger Parloff, and Anna Bauer,

and on his last day, as a Lawfare Public Service Fellow, Troy Edwards, who is moving on to the next big thing starting next week.

Folks, we've got an agenda that is so packed that I am going to keep my witty banter at the

beginning to an absolute minimum, and I'm also going to ask all

the panelists to be relatively brief in answers, or we're just not going to get through stuff.

And I may or may not suspend questions for the week, depending on how we're doing on time at the end.

It's been a big week in the politicization of the Justice Department, and I want to start with the

indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

L.T., I got to say when I read that indictment, I was skeptical that it would survive a motion to dismiss

for a number of technical reasons.

But my knowledge of fraud prosecutions is not super refined. Yours is better.

So first of all, give us a little overview of this prosecution. And secondly, how cooked is the goose of the Southern Poverty Law Center?

Yeah, so you said there are a lot of indictments. I actually printed a ton of them, and this is not common.

And all of these are indictments from this past week that we're going to talk about.

This first one,

the Southern Poverty Law Center, has raised a lot of questions. My experience has not

typically been in the white collar space, but in reading through the charges, a couple of things

have stood out. The background here is that the Southern Poverty Law Center, the civil rights

institution historically known for

...