Georgia Ethics Board Moves Forward Against Abrams-Linked Groups

Margaret Newkirk
·2 min read
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(Bloomberg) -- The Georgia Ethics Commission will move ahead with a case against a group founded by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, saying it was likely it violated campaign law during her first run for governor four years ago.

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The commission is targeting The New Georgia Project, a voter registration non-profit Abrams founded in 2013, and an affiliate, the New Georgia Project Action Fund. The commission unanimously approved on Monday a series of motions saying that “reasonable grounds exist that New Georgia Project and New Georgia Project Action Fund violated campaign finance law.”

The ruling from the Republican-dominated commission paves the way for a final hearing and decision that could bring the biggest ethics fine in state history, just as the rematch between Abrams and Republican Governor Brian Kemp moves into its final three months.

Commission staff say the groups raised $4.2 million and spent $3 million during Abrams’s 2018 campaign. The staff alleges that the two groups were acting as political committees, and that they hired canvassers to aggregate votes and do other activities in support of Abrams. State law requires political committees to register with the state and disclose their donors and expenses. Neither nonprofit did that.

The New Georgia groups’ lawyers say the money raised was spent on operating expenses, and that the canvassing was done as a sub-contractor to a political committee working for Abrams, which disclosed it on its own filings with the state. They say that as subcontractors, the organizations didn’t have to disclose the spending themselves.

Abrams’s campaign has called the investigation a years-long fishing expedition fueled by a Kemp supporter who is the commission’s executive director. Abrams is no longer involved with New Georgia Project and had left before that organization formed the second group.

The Ethics Commission had raised questions about the role of nonprofits before it hired David Emadi, a Kemp donor, as its director in 2019. Emadi turned up the heat, though, issuing a flurry of subpoenas since then.

Another organization targeted in the investigation, Gente4Abrams, was fined $50,000 in 2020 for failing to report its spending on Abrams’s behalf in the 2018 primary.

(Corrects first and sixth paragraphs of an article published Aug. 1 to say Abrams founded only one of the two targeted groups.)

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