https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CAQJAUYMfI
On 4/27/2022, Sen. Josh Hawley grilled President Joe Biden’s judicial nominee for the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for her involvement with the Southern Poverty Law Center during her nomination hearing. “I have to tell you, I find your answers absolutely extraordinary,” Hawley, R-Mo., said to Nancy Abudu at the hearing. “Absolutely extraordinary. I can’t believe you’ve been nominated for this position. I can’t believe that the president of the United States would nominate someone from this organization with this record, and I can’t believe that you would sit here today and refuse to condemn this hateful, frankly, violent rhetoric.”
“2019 was the year the SPLC paid $3.4 million in response to defamation lawsuits. 2019 was the year Charity Watch gave your organization an ‘F’ rating. The SPLC has been labelled by the left-wing policy journal Current Affairs as an outright fraud that uses willful deception designed to scare liberals into writing checks,” Hawley said. Hawley’s harshest questioning concerned the organization for which Abudu has worked since 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center. Hawley wondered why she would choose to be affiliated with it. He cited not just conservatives but very liberal activists and journalists repeatedly referring to the SPLC as a “fraud,” with one describing it “collectively” as “one of the greatest frauds in American life.”
“The progressive journalist Alexander Cockburn said this about SPLC: ‘I regard it, the Southern Poverty Law Center, collectively as one of the greatest frauds in American life,’” Hawley said. “Liberal death penalty abolitionist Stephen Bright refused to accept an award named after the founder of the SPLC, saying, in his words, ‘The SPLC has long been run by a conman and a fraud.’ Also in 2019, SPLC employees told the press, ‘We were part of a con and we knew it.’”
Hawley grilled Abudu about the organization’s record and asked if she was concerned by the criticism SPLC had received, prompting her multiple times to answer the question directly. In addition to a host of well-publicized internal scandals, the SPLC has labeled as “hate groups” a number of organizations and legal-aid organizations that are mainstream enough to have repeatedly won cases before the Supreme Court. Yet when Hawley asked her if she would condone, or alternatively denounce, the SPLC activities and positions that earned it such universal opprobrium, she repeatedly dodged his questions. “Senator, again, my work with the Southern Poverty Law Center has been to uphold the constitutional rights of individuals who without pro bono counsel would not be even able to have access to justice,” Abudu responded.
Abudu, the strategic litigation director at the SPLC, said she joined the organization in February 2019. The SPLC publishes an annual “Hate Map,” which features several conservative and Christian organizations, including the Family Research Council. Abudu’s repeated oral testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee that she is not involved in the SPLC’s work trying to delegitimize other groups as “hate groups” contradicts her own written testimony, which she handed in just a few months ago. In writing, she said that she oversees a broad swath of the SPLC’s work, including, again, in her own words, “litigation related to hate groups.” Those contradictory aspects of her testimony can’t both be right, which certainly indicates that one of them is untrue. The only thing of substance she did offer to Hawley was that she is proud of her work for the SPLC in working for “voting rights.” Our next video will show Senator Kennedy questioning Abudu about voter ID.
https://facebook.com/HygoNewsUSA/videos/990098361673708/
Hawley to Nominee: I can’t believe you’ve been nominated for this position, liberal activists & journalists referring SPLC as a fraud.