(RoyalPatriot.com )- Democrat Stacey Abrams, the failed 2018 Georgia gubernatorial candidate who is taking another run at the position, is taking some heat for yet another instance of shady dealings.
Fair Fight Action, a group that Abrams founded that focuses on voting rights, was recently revealed to have paid $9.4 million to a small law firm that calls her campaign manager one of its partners.
In 2019 and 2020, Fair Fight Action paid $9.4 million to Lawrence & Bundy. The law firm was doing work for the organization in their lawsuit against Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s attorney general, and the State Elections Board, which accused them of engaging in suppressive and discriminatory election practices.
Abrams’ group lost that lawsuit, but obviously still had to pay the $9.4 million to the firm that represented them.
One of the partners at the law firm, Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, served as the chair of Abrams’ gubernatorial campaign in 2018, and she’s serving in that role again this year.
Politico reported recently that Lawrence-Hardy wouldn’t comment on the record to them about how much money her firm brought in from the case that involved Fair Fight Action. Lawrence-Hardy served as lead counsel in the case and led much of the activity in the courtroom.
That didn’t stop the criticism from pouring in about Abrams’ practices and that of Fair Fight Action, Craig Holman, of Public Citizen, said:
“It is a very clear conflict of interest because, with that kind of close link to the litigation and her friend, that provides an opportunity where the friend gets particularly enriched from this litigation.”
Fair Fight Action was founded by Abrams after she lost the 2018 gubernatorial election to Republican Brian Kemp, the state’s current governor who she’s running against again this year. At the time, Kemp was serving as Georgia’s secretary of state.
Following her loss in that election four years ago, Abrams incorrectly claimed that thousands of voters were disenfranchised during the election.
Fed up with Abrams’ continued fight against a case that she obviously lost, Raffensperger commented in December of 2020:
“Ms. Abrams still refuses to acknowledge she lost.”
Others want to get to the bottom of the entire situation and know why the money was spent in the first place. Kathleen Clark, a Washington University professor of legal ethics, said:
“Fair Fight Action ought to explain why this lawsuit cost so much. I think there are significant questions about this choice of firm and just why this lawsuit was so much more expensive. And there may be perfectly valid, innocent explanations to both of those questions, but I don’t know what they are.
“It is essential that non-government organizations, that charitable organizations, be run so they actually further their stated purposes. It’s important that we have assurances that it is pursuing its stated goals, rather than feathering someone’s nest.”
In this case, it looks pretty clearly that Abrams was fighting a losing battle the entire time, and that her organization took money it raised in donations to spend at a law firm whose partner is Abrams’ campaign manager.
