It’s Thursday, April 23. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Eli Lake on why Trump’s Iran deal is nothing like Obama’s. Charles Lane on the scourge of partisan gerrymandering. Will Rahn asks: What should smart people think about UFOs? And much more.

But first: Did the Southern Poverty Law Center break the law?

On Tuesday, the Department of Justice issued an indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC raised millions on a promise to combat hate. Except, according to the indictment, the SPLC was secretly funding the very groups—including Ku Klux Klan affiliates—that it claimed to be fighting.

Like so much in our politics today, the case quickly became a Rorschach test.

To the left, it was yet another example of the Trump administration’s targeting of its political enemies. As we reported in our pages last year, the White House had been planning a crackdown on liberal nonprofits.

To the right, a pernicious organization was getting its just deserts. Once upon a time, the SPLC worked to overturn the wrongful convictions of black men. Today, it smears conservative organizations like Turning Point USA and Moms for Liberty as “hate groups.”

But what about the actual case? What the DOJ calls “funding” of hate groups, SPLC says was payment to informants, whose information they then funneled to law enforcement.

To get to the bottom of this politically explosive case, we turned to our legal columnist Jed Rubenfeld. The moral case against the Southern Poverty Law Center is strong, he says. But what about the legal argument? Read Jed’s verdict.

—The Editors

Why Trump’s Iran Deal Is Not Like Obama’s Iran Deal

Eli Lake

Democrats and the press have been claiming, quite vehemently, that the nuclear deal the Trump administration is trying to negotiate with Iran is nothing more than a warmed-over version of the deal the Obama administration negotiated back in 2015. It ain’t so, says Eli Lake, who lays out a compelling case that Iran would be much closer to a nuclear weapon if the Obama deal had remained in force—and that the current war has made the prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon more unlikely than it ever was under Obama. Read full story

Virginia Failed the Basic Test of Our Democracy

Charles Lane

This week in Virginia, voters approved a Democratic redistricting plan that The New York Times calls “as extreme a gerrymander as exists in the United States.” True, this unprecedented frenzy of mid-decade redistricting began with Trump, but Free Press columnist Charles Lane finds himself dismayed at “the zeal with which Democrats have embraced the logic of knife-fight politics.” It is, he concludes, just the latest normalizing of “negative partisanship among not just professional pols but voters.” Read full story

What Does America’s Biggest Skeptic Think of Aliens?

Will Rahn

Will Trump’s promised disclosure of UFO-related government files amount to anything more than smoke and mirrors? In search of answers, Will Rahn interviewed science historian and Skeptic magazine co-founder Michael Shermer, who is—well—skeptical that space aliens have visited Earth and is unconvinced about the existence of UFOs. And wait till you hear what he has to say about the FBI’s investigation into 11 missing nuclear and aerospace scientists. Read full story

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