A senior Trump administration Justice Department official ordered federal prosecutors in Alabama to “rush through” a controversial indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center despite concerns about the strength of the case, according to a description of a whistleblower account obtained exclusively by MS NOW.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government, describe the whistleblower allegations in a letter sent Thursday to Kevin Davidson, the acting U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Alabama.

“According to whistleblower information provided to this Committee, Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh ordered your office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama, to rush through the indictment of the SPLC, despite serious concerns about the strength of the case,” the letter said....

Former federal fraud prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, an MS NOW contributor, said the case “bears none of the indicia” of normal Justice Department charging review and called the theory “exceedingly far-fetched.”

The indictment does not specify what donors were told that was fraudulent, he said.

“DOJ’s exercise in gaslighting-by-indictment also requires America to bury its head in the sand and pretend SPLC’s payments to infiltrate white nationalist groups were meant to support them, despite evidence to the contrary presented in its charging document,” Raskin wrote in a separate letter to Singh, also obtained by MS NOW. That letter asks Singh, the official accused of pressuring prosecutors, to produce relevant documents to the committee.