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(Georgia Recorder) — The chairman of a special Senate committee set up to
probe the Fulton County prosecution of Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn
his 2020 election loss has turned his attention to former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, whose ties to a voter registration nonprofit recently resulted in one of the largest campaign ethics fines
levied by the state.

Athens Republican Sen. Bill Cowsert on Friday filed Senate Resolution 292, which would allow the Senate Special Committee on Investigations to open a probe into Abrams’ founded New Georgia Project following a Jan. 15
settlement in the long-running campaign ethics case. Last month, the group
and affiliated New Georgia Project Action Fund signed an settlement
agreement in a 2019 case alleging illegal campaign contributions to
Abrams’ 2018 gubernatorial campaign and other Democrats running for
statewide office that year.

The New Georgia Project agreed to pay a $300,000 fine as part of a state
ethics commission settlement agreement for committing 16 campaign finance violations, including failing to register as an independent committee and
not disclosing about $4.2 million in contributions and $3.2 million in expenditures.

The Senate resolution says the special committee will examine whether
current state laws on campaign finance and nonprofits fail to address the “legal and fiscal issues raised by the alleged and admitted conduct of
multiple organizations with connections to Stacey Abrams.”

Abrams created the New Georgia Project to focus on registering more Black
and other non-white Georgians to vote, earning her national recognition
for her work for growing the state’s electorate and boosting engagement
among disaffected voters. She has not been affiliated with New Georgia
Project since shortly before her 2018 campaign, when she narrowly lost to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. Abrams lost by a wider margin in a 2022
rematch with Kemp.

The Senate resolution would also allow the committee to investigate a $2 billion grant awarded in 2024 to an environmental organization “with ties
to Abrams.”

In a PolitiFact post published Wednesday, the Poynter Institute disputed allegations on social media that Abrams committed fraud during the
awarding of the Environmental Protection Agency grant allocated for energy-efficient housing across the country.

The clean grant was awarded to Power Forward Communities, a coalition of
groups like United Way, Habitat for Humanity International and Rewiring America, a national electrification nonprofit that Abrams served as senior counsel for from March 2023 until the end of 2024.

An executive of Power Forward told Politico that Abrams never received any payments related to the grant.

Abrams is the second prominent Georgia Democratic Black woman targeted
since the special committee was established last year to investigate
alleged misconduct by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. In
January, the Senate voted along party lines to reinstate the committee’s investigation into Willis’ handling of the 2020 election interference case against Trump.

Senate Minority Leader Democrat Harold Jones said Friday that he is
concerned that SR 292 is another example of GOP Senate leadership wading
into legal matters that have been handled in more appropriate venues.

“The thing that stands out is that neither one is within our purview,”
Jones said. “There’s no real authority to do this, quite frankly, and it’s really a first that has been done. The president actually said people
ought to stop actually engaging in this type of behavior. And yet, here we
are, with their party still engaging in behavior that is trying to use a quasi-court system to gain a political advantage.”

Willis is requesting that the Georgia Supreme Court consider her challenge after the state’s appellate court disqualified her from prosecuting the
Trump case because of misconduct related to a previously undisclosed
romantic relationship with the special prosecutor she hired to lead the
case.

Willis also continues to wage court battles seeking to block Senate
committee subpoenas requesting her to testify and turn over a trove of documents.

https://nowhabersham.com/georgia-senate-panel-probing-fulton-da-now-turns- its-focus-to-stacey-abrams-and-new-georgia-project/

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