BREAKING🚨 Trump just ARRESTED the woman who investigated the Proud Boys and testified to Congress about right-wing extremism. Heidi Beirich, 59, was taken into custody at her home in Palm Springs, California on Wednesday and appeared in federal court in Riverside. She ran the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project from 2012 to 2019, the operation that monitored the Klan, neo-Nazi outfits and the Proud Boys, and she submitted testimony to the House January 6 committee about Proud Boys extremism. She now faces wire fraud conspiracy, conspiracy to submit false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering, in a case filed 2,000 miles away in Montgomery, Alabama. The program at the center of it ended years ago. The SPLC paid confidential informants to embed inside white supremacist groups and passed what they found to local and federal law enforcement. It says the accounts were kept quiet to protect informants who would have been killed if exposed, and that the intelligence saved lives. Its attorneys have pointed out that law enforcement used what those informants gathered. Prosecutors say the money moved through accounts opened in fictitious companies' names, and that donors were deceived. Attorney General Todd Blanche, announcing the arrest, said: "I believe she was part of the effort to open bank accounts in completely fictitious companies' names and make payments to individuals for reasons that were not accurate as described." He also called Beirich the SPLC's former chief financial officer, which she never was. The indictment alleges she was romantically involved with one informant who infiltrated the neo-Nazi National Alliance, and that $140,000 of SPLC money sat in a joint account they shared. Her attorney, Michael Proctor, says she is innocent and the case is without merit. "A free and fair society does not use the justice system to silence its political opponents," he said. "Her decades-long record of success dismantling hate groups, and the resulting threats to her life, speak volumes. For this, she has been indicted."