The go-to strategy for organizations in a PR crisis often leads to disaster. Conventional wisdom tells organizations to simply deny any allegations made against them. Extremely cynical and dishonest as it may be, the calculation seems to be that a straight denial offers a “second side” to the story, which can sow doubt in hearers’ minds — at least long enough for the scandal to fade from the news cycle.

But this strategy needs to find a landfill faster than that moldy mango marinating for months in the office mini-fridge. In a significant number of instances, the denial strategy prompts worse revelations to surface, making the scandal larger and longer than it would have been otherwise. This week, the organization reaping these consequences is the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

The U.S. Department of Justice indicted the SPLC in April for defrauding donors and banks by fundraising off the promise to fight white supremacy and then using those donations to pay white supremacists through bank accounts fraudulently opened for non-existent entities.

A week later, SPLC interim president and CEO Bryan Fair responded, “We strongly deny the allegations in the indictment and their falsity is already being exposed in our court filings. The government is blatantly mischaracterizing our efforts to successfully fight hatred and violent extremism, something we have done for decades.”

In other words, the SPLC deployed the denial strategy to call the Trump administration’s bluff. But the SPLC should have known enough about its own activities to realize the government wasn’t bluffing.

In a superseding indictment released Tuesday, the federal grand jury expanded its assessment of SPLC’s misdeeds, as federal investigators have now linked the organization to bank accounts for nine fictitious corporations, instead of the original four. If the allegations are credible, then the SPLC was better off under the earlier indictment.

The substance of the indictment has been ably covered in detail elsewhere by The Washington Stand, so I need only paint in broad strokes. After fighting for decades to bankrupt the Klan, the SPLC was approached by two broke Klansmen who feared for their lives and wanted help getting out of the group. Instead, the SPLC convinced the Klansmen to stay in the extremist group and offered to pay them a monthly “salary” plus expenses.

The SPLC used the same method to recruit a disillusioned leader of a neo-Nazi outfit, paying him a comfortable salary to keep his extremist position and, at his request, soften the language in his SPLC-curated “Extremist File” to not scare off new recruits. The SPLC also provided him with funds to write and publish racist propaganda and host events, just as they reimbursed Klan members for the wood and fuel used in cross-burnings.

One high-ranking SPLC employee even became romantically involved with a paid “informant” to the point that the couple shared a house and two bank accounts, into which the SPLC deposited the stipend used to pay the extremist’s living expenses. The mainstream media tried to defend the SPLC by claiming that the federal government also pays informants in criminal enterprises. But, besides the other arguments against this, government agents would get in big trouble for romantically entangling themselves with their informants.

It should be noted that the 21-page superseding indictment contains only brief summaries of the allegations, not complete details. But the DOJ attorneys who prepared it likely know better than to make such specific allegations, unless they are prepared to back them up with sound evidence. The revelations only cause more trouble for the SPLC — at least in public opinion if not in the courtroom.

Thus, the incident bears a thematic connection to the Trump administration’s Signal scandal from early last year. Senior officials inadvertently included a journalist in a Signal chat that discussed the March 15 airstrikes against the Houthis. The journalist published this revelation but did not disclose the more specific and sensitive details of the thread. When administration officials responded that no “war plans” or “classified material” had been discussed in the chat, he published a more detailed follow-up piece. Administration officials were caught calling a bluff that wasn’t a bluff. But they should have known better because they had access to the exact same information.

This week, the SPLC has fallen into the same trap. It fell back on the crisis-PR strategy, “deny, deny, deny.” But the DOJ only came back with more evidence and examples of further SPLC behavior which, at minimum, stinks to high heaven.

The SPLC was thinking only for the short term (the very short term, as it turned out). Organizations are built on trust, and institutions that give way to dishonesty rarely survive for long, or else they persist as a zombified half-life of their former glory. Successful organizations plan for the long-term by staying honest. But, with every new revelation about the SPLC’s secret informant program, it sounds like the SPLC shed that honesty a long time ago.