“Good-Government Ethics-in-Politics” Nonprofit Gives Stacey Abrams’ Grift a Pass

Stacey Abrams is much better at courting donors than she is at courting voters.

She’s also better at funding lawsuits than she is at winning them.

The Georgia Democrat is on track to lose the governorship in two weeks for the second time in two election cycles. Her “voting rights” lawsuit had most of its claims dismissed, and on the remaining ones, she lost. But in these past five years, she has raised an obscene amount of money.

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Any time you see politicians who are better at raising money than at winning elections, you should wonder whether they are up to something other than what they say they are up to. Politico this week had a great expose on what Stacey Abrams Inc. is up to.

In short, Abrams’s “voting rights” nonprofit group, which lost badly in its multiyear lawsuit alleging disenfranchisement and “voter suppression,” spent $25 million on legal fees, with most of it going to a small law firm, of which one of the partners is Abrams’s close friend and campaign chairwoman, Allegra Lawrence-Hardy.

The Politico story by Brittany Gibson makes the case that the amount spent on lawyers was extraordinarily large under the circumstances and that Lawrence-Hardy’s well-funded role in the case was sketchy.

Here’s a key comment by an ethics expert:

Good job, Politico. Good job, Craig Holman.

Stacey Abrams is probably the biggest rock star of the Democratic Party, and so pointing out ethical questions about her takes courage.

Alas, Abrams’s status as untouchable led to a very odd next chapter. Ethics reporter Jesse Eisinger brought it to my attention:

Yes, the supposed good-government ethics-in-politics nonprofit group retracted the quote of one of its ethics experts after said expert called into question the propriety of massive legal fees that went to a politician’s friend to bankroll a failed court case.

Why? As Eisinger lays out, there’s no real explanation. But we can guess because there’s a simple truth in politics today: The rules don’t apply to Stacey Abrams.

“Election denial” is supposed to be the one unforgivable sin in 2022. That at least seems like a nonpartisan, nonideological rule that the media can enforce without sacrificing their claims to impartiality. Well, but it’s OK when Stacey Abrams does it.

Conspiracy theories and misinformation are supposedly a sign that a candidate is dangerous. Yet Abrams said, “There is no such thing as a heartbeat at six weeks. It is a manufactured sound designed to convince people that men have the right to take control of a woman’s body.”

That’s a crazy, anti-science conspiracy theory. Yet the fact-checkers incredibly rushed to her defense.

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When Abrams made the bizarre, callous, extremist remark that inflation would matter less if America had more abortions, it was totally ignored by the major liberal newspapers, which relentlessly pick up every controversial statement by Republican candidates.

There’s a broader point here — that the rules articulated by Democrats and their media allies aren’t really rules at all but pretenses for beating up on Republicans. The narrower point is that Stacey Abrams is protected from scrutiny by powerful organs of the Left and the media.