The head of the Family Research Council says the Southern Poverty Law Center should be forced to pay restitution to the victims of a 2012 shooting at its Washington, D.C., headquarters, an attack directly inspired, by the gunman's own admission, by the SPLC's decision to label the conservative Christian nonprofit a "hate group."
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, told Fox News Digital that the SPLC's recent federal indictment, alleging the organization funneled $4 million in donor dollars into shell companies to fund the very extremist groups it claimed to fight, makes the case for accountability stronger than ever.
The demand comes more than a decade after Floyd Lee Corkins II walked into the FRC lobby on Aug. 15, 2012, pulled a gun from his bag, and shot building manager Leo Johnson. Corkins, then 28, gained access by telling security he was interviewing for an intern position. He was carrying two fully loaded 15-round magazines, a box of 9mm ammunition, and 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches, the fast-food chain he believed was "anti-gay."
An interrogation video later released by the Family Research Council captured investigators asking Corkins how the group became his target. His answer was plain.
"It was, uh, Southern Poverty Law lists, uh anti-gay groups. I found them online. I did a little bit of research, went to the website, stuff like that."
Those words, spoken by a man who pleaded guilty in 2013 to committing an act of terrorism while armed, assault with intent to kill while armed, and interstate transportation of a firearm and ammunition, form the core of Perkins' argument. The SPLC slapped the "hate group" label on the Family Research Council in 2010. Two years later, a gunman used that label as a target list.
Corkins is now serving a 25-year federal prison sentence.
Perkins, a former police officer and pastor, recalled the moments after the attack in detail. He was in a meeting when the building's security system triggered. He ran out, heard the commotion, and was told there had been a shooting downstairs.
"By the time I got down there, the police had arrived, and so we saw Leo Johnson, who was our building manager, who was in a pool of blood."
The lobby told the rest of the story: glass, blood, and bullet holes. FBI personnel entered the office that day. Corkins was taken into federal custody immediately.
"It was a shocking day for our staff, especially, there was glass and blood and bullet holes in our lobby."
Since the shooting, the Family Research Council has spent $8 million out of pocket on heightened security, a cost Perkins says the organization should never have had to bear.
The SPLC once held a reputation for fighting genuine domestic extremism, including groups like the KKK. Perkins acknowledged that history. But he argued the organization weaponized its legacy for political purposes, particularly around the marriage debate of the early 2010s.
"I think they began to peddle that legacy to those on the left... in particular, beginning around 2010, 2012, when there was a big effort to redefine marriage."
Perkins described what he sees as a deliberate strategy: keeping extremist groups on the SPLC's radar not to fight them, but to use them as cover for targeting mainstream conservative organizations.
"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."
The Justice Department's recent indictment adds a darker dimension to that claim. Federal prosecutors allege the SPLC funneled $4 million in donor dollars into shell companies that routed money to extremist organizations the group publicly said it was combating. As the DOJ fraud case has widened, the allegations now include funding events like KKK cross burnings.
Perkins did not hold back about what that means.
"It was like they were fattening them up, keeping them alive so that they could use them for their bigger political purpose, and that was to be able to help the left advance their agenda by marginalizing and silencing conservative groups."
The Family Research Council's demand for restitution is not abstract. Perkins pointed to the SPLC's financial reserves.
"So yes, they're sitting on $750 million. Part of what I hope the government, the federal government, the courts get to is making them pay restitution to their victims."
That figure, three-quarters of a billion dollars, sits in the coffers of an organization now under federal indictment. Meanwhile, the FRC has borne $8 million in security costs since a gunman used the SPLC's own list to pick his target.
The SPLC did not return Fox News Digital's request for comment. Its interim president and CEO, Bryan Fair, appeared before the House Judiciary Committee on June 9, 2026, as congressional scrutiny of the organization intensified. That hearing came as the DOJ expanded its fraud indictment over alleged payments to Klan members.
The federal case against the SPLC has grown in scope. Allegations that a senior official funneled over a million dollars in donor money to an informant inside a neo-Nazi group have raised questions about how deeply the rot runs. Those allegations paint a picture of an organization that blurred every line between monitoring extremism and sustaining it.
Congressional Republicans have pressed for answers. Rep. Jim Jordan demanded SPLC documents after the federal indictment dropped, seeking records that could reveal the full extent of the alleged scheme.
For years, conservative critics warned that the SPLC had become a political weapon masquerading as a civil rights watchdog. The "hate group" designation, applied to organizations like the Family Research Council for holding traditional views on marriage, was the sharpest edge of that weapon. It carried real-world consequences: not just reputational damage, but the kind of targeting that put Leo Johnson in a pool of blood on a lobby floor in 2012.
The SPLC's defenders long dismissed those warnings as partisan grievance. The federal indictment makes that dismissal harder to sustain. Conservative voices who raised the alarm years ago are watching the DOJ's case with grim vindication.
Open questions remain. The specific court documents and docket numbers behind the SPLC indictment have not been widely detailed. Johnson's full medical outcome after the shooting is not publicly documented in available reporting. Whether federal courts will entertain a formal restitution claim from the FRC, and under what legal theory, is uncharted territory.
But the moral case is not complicated. An organization labeled a mainstream conservative group a "hate group." A gunman read that label, picked up a gun, and walked into a building. The organization that published the label now stands accused of secretly funding the very extremists it used as justification for the designation in the first place.
When you publish a target list and someone uses it, you own a share of what follows. When you then get caught allegedly bankrolling the hate you claimed to oppose, the word for that isn't "irony." It's fraud, and the people who paid the price deserve to be made whole.
