Keisha Lance Bottoms must release her business’s secret client list
During my tenure as a U.S. attorney, I was responsible for prosecuting those who abused a public trust for private gain.
Regardless of political affiliation, I was charged with holding accountable those who thought a government check was a personal line of credit. The cases differed, but the lesson remains the same.
Corruption does not start with a crime. It starts with a secret, and it grows in the space between what an official is required to disclose and what the public needs to know.
I believe anyone who uses public office for personal gain should lose that office. This is why I cannot stay quiet about the secret at the center of Keisha Lance Bottoms’ campaign for governor.
Bottoms owns the consulting firm KRLB LLC. On the sworn financial disclosure she filed in April, KRLB is the only source of income she reports for 2024 and 2025, providing her each year with up to half a million in income. It paid her up to another $100,000 in the first three months of this year and paid her six figures in 2022, the year she went to work as a senior adviser to then-President Joe Biden. Through a White House job, a federal board appointment (First Responder Network Authority) and now her campaign to be Georgia’s next governor, the names of the people writing those checks have never once been made public.
This is not new territory for her. As mayor, her campaign paid a $37,000 state ethics fine after refusing to turn over bank records the State Ethics Commission had subpoenaed, and her administration handed a former Atlanta City Council member a $137,100 City Hall job the city’s own review determined had violated the charter. The pattern here is clear — treating accountability as something that applies to other people; her secret client list is the same pattern but with higher stakes.
Bottoms is demanding disclosure from others, but not herself
A governor signs or vetoes every bill presented to him, appoints hundreds of people to state boards and presides over an administration that awards billions of dollars in contracts.
If Bottoms were to win the governorship, Georgians would have a chief executive who owns a private firm with paying clients nobody can identify — and no way to know whether one of those clients was on the other side of a contract, a bill or an appointment.
That is hardly a hypothetical conflict of interest. It is an open door, and she is holding it open.
What makes this situation even more remarkable is that Bottoms has spent the fall demanding disclosure from everyone but herself.
She has called on her Republican opponent Rick Jackson to make his investments and state contracts public (which he already has; his contracts with the state are public records and reporters have written about them in detail).
His investments are listed in his personal financial disclosure for anyone to read, and he has said on the record that he will end his company’s state contract if he is elected.
But when asked recently whether she would release her own client list, she called her firm “private” and turned it into a bargaining chip: “I’ll make my client list available at the exact same time that Rick Jackson makes his investments available to the public.”
A candidate who honestly believed Georgians were entitled to the answer would not be negotiating over it.
Georgians deserve to know who’s been paying former Atlanta mayor
There is no excuse for holding it back. Twenty years ago, Ralph Reed, a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor who owned a consulting firm, listed 31 clients on his Georgia disclosure — names and dollar amounts included.
It has been done before, by a candidate of my own party, on the same form she signed. The only thing standing between Georgians and her client list is her.
So, the questions are simple. Who are KRLB’s clients? Did any of them have business before the city of Atlanta, the state of Georgia or the federal government while she held office? And if she wins, does she keep them?
I have spent my career fighting those who hid what they were doing with the public’s trust. Keisha Lance Bottoms is asking for the highest public trust in Georgia while hiding who has been paying her.
Georgians deserve to know before they vote, not after.
Release the list.
Bob Barr represented Georgia’s 7th District as a Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served previously as the U.S. attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, serves as head of Liberty Guard and is the immediate past president of the National Rifle Association of America.
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