But Democratic Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon wasn’t having it. She delivered a blistering rebuke, directly linking the attack to what she called the Trump administration’s embrace of white nationalist ideology after the Department of Justice indicted the civil rights activist group in April.

The Pennsylvania congresswoman opened by invoking a piece of history that still hangs on the SPLC’s wall: a clock melted by the KKK’s 1983 firebombing of the organization’s Montgomery, Alabama, headquarters.

“This melted clock, which was frozen in time by the KKK firebombing, still hangs in SPLC headquarters as a reminder of the very real dangers of defending American civil liberties from hate,” Scanlon said during a May 20 hearing.

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“In the past year, we’ve seen pardons of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who orchestrated the violent January 6th attack, the DOJ hiding from the public government research confirming that right-wing extremism poses the biggest domestic terrorism threat to our nation,” she said, adding that the White House had issued directives to target left-leaning nonprofits “without evidence.”