Shortly after aggressive Douglas County prosecutor David Emadi was hired to head the State Ethics Commission in 2019, he announced a probe of Stacey Abrams’ campaign at his first press conference.
Emadi, a donor to Abrams’ 2018 gubernatorial election opponent, Brian Kemp, pledged to subpoena records to investigate whether the Democrat’s campaign had illegally colluded with groups backing her in the heated contest.
More than four years later, the case is ongoing and may outlive Emadi’s time at the commission. He’s been nominated to fill a superior court judgeship, a post Kemp, who won that 2018 election, will fill.
Abrams’ supporters say it’s a reward for keeping the Democratic superstar in the headlines — and not in a good way — as she headed for a rematch with Kemp in 2022. Kemp beat Abrams again last year.
“This 4-year-long partisan attack has been a waste of taxpayer dollars and a stunning failure for Gov. Brian Kemp’s allies, who made clear their goal is to chill political competition in Georgia,” said Lauren Groh-Wargo, who ran Abrams’ campaigns. “They’re still so threatened by our history-making 2018 campaign that they can’t stop attacking it.”
Emadi, however, can point to some successes in the wide-ranging case, and he said the Abrams probe has dragged on because her campaign and groups who supported her have been fighting his subpoenas in court for years.
“They are the ones dragging this out,” Emadi said. “I have heard political spin before, but I don’t know how you can make an argument that the agency is dragging this out.”
The state attorney general’s office, which represents the commission in court, recently filed a proposed order with Fulton County Superior Court Judge Jane C. Barwick in hopes of getting the case moving again.
First thing out of the gate
Emadi first announced in April 2019 that he would subpoena bank records and other documents from the Abrams campaign and groups that raised money to help her nationally watched race.
Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC
Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC
Abrams’ backers immediately accused Emadi of partisanship as he was a former officer in the Douglas County Republican Party who donated $600 to Kemp’s gubernatorial campaign.
Abrams had lost a close election to Kemp in 2018 and almost immediately a 2022 rematch was predicted.
Under Georgia law, groups advocating for candidates must disclose contributions and expenditures on a regular basis and are generally not allowed to directly coordinate their efforts with a candidate’s campaign.
One exception was carved out in the state’s leadership committee law, which allows a very select group of candidates to raise unlimited funds and coordinate their efforts with a campaign.
The law was passed in 2021 by the General Assembly’s Republican leadership — two years into the ethics commission probe — to help Kemp compete financially with Abrams in his 2022 reelection campaign. Abrams set fundraising records in 2018 and far eclipsed those marks in 2022. But Kemp raised more than three times as much money in 2022 as well, in part because of the leadership committee law.
While Emadi was accused of partisanship in his investigation of Abrams’ campaign and the groups, many of the questions he raised came out of campaign report audits that commission staffers did well before he took office. Staffers had accused the previous executive director of sitting on the findings.
Abrams’ camp says it has provided thousands of documents to the commission and that the panel was seeking records that either didn’t exist or should have no bearing on its case. They called it a “fishing expedition. “
They also said giving up some of the campaign documents Emadi demanded would have a “chilling effect” on future campaigns that would fear — among other things — that strategy and all other internal communications would be disclosed.
Commission finds violations
One of the groups backing Abrams, Gente4Abrams (People for Abrams), was fined $50,000 by the state ethics commission in 2020 for failing to report what it spent to help her win the Democratic primary in 2018.
Gente4Abrams (People for Abrams) spent $240,000 for canvassing, social media posts, and print and radio advertising to help Abrams win the primary but didn’t initially report what it spent or where it got the money to pay for those efforts, the commission said.
The group later registered with the state and reported spending about $685,000 more to help the Democrat in her 2018 campaign.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
After fighting court battles, the commission decided in August 2022 that there was probable cause to believe another group — the New Georgia Project, a voter registration nonprofit that Abrams founded — spent possibly millions of dollars to support her without disclosing it.
The case is before a state administrative law judge, and the New Georgia Project is suing the state in federal court, arguing the commission used an unconstitutionally broad definition of a “campaign fund” to allege the money the group spent before the 2018 election should have been disclosed as a campaign expenditure.
As nonprofits, the group’s lawyer said, the primary purpose of the New Georgia Project and an affiliate, the New Georgia Project Action Fund, is not influencing election outcomes and the groups are not required to file state paperwork to report contributions and expenditures.
But the commission’s lawyer and commission members said if the groups spent money promoting Abrams and other Democratic candidates, it’s irrelevant what their “primary purpose” is — they still have to file disclosures.
The commission staff says the groups hired canvassers, passed out literature, promoted Abrams’ candidacy — and the candidacy of other candidates — and solicited contributions.
That part of the case likely won’t be decided until sometime in 2024, at the earliest, Emadi said.
Just before Labor Day this year the commission filed a motion to have the Abrams campaign be held in contempt of court for not handing over documents it requested, and then, last week, came the proposed order submitted to Barwick, the Fulton judge.
Even then, that portion of the probe — based on events that took place five years ago — may not be resolved anytime soon, with a final decision possibly coming after the man who started the investigation has moved on.
“The reality is at no point have I definitively said they (Abrams and the groups) were coordinating,” Emadi said. “But they are withholding evidence that would point us in one direction or the other and then saying, ‘why aren’t you doing anything?’
“I am trying to make a legal determination one way or the other, and they are not allowing us to do that.”
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