Stacy Abrams' PAC Grifted Money From Liberals, Then Spent Millions On a Single Lawsuit... Paying Her Chairwoman's and Best Friend's Law Firm $9.4 Million to Fight It

And the fees they paid were way above the norm.

The $9.4 million is just the amount we know about so far. The Super PAC still has two years of filings they haven't disclosed yet.

The voting rights organization founded by Stacey Abrams spent more than $25 million over two years on legal fees, mostly on a single case, with the largest amount going to the self-described boutique law firm of the candidate's campaign chairwoman.

Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, Abrams' close friend who chaired her gubernatorial campaign both in 2018 and her current bid to unseat Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, is one of two named partners in Lawrence & Bundy, a small firm of fewer than two dozen attorneys.

The firm received $9.4 million from Abrams' group, Fair Fight Action, in 2019 and 2020, the last years for which federal tax filings are available. Lawrence-Hardy declined to comment on how much her firm has collected from Fair Fight Action in 2021 and 2022 -- years in which Fair Fight Action v. Raffensperger, for which Lawrence-Hardy was lead counsel, had most of its courtroom activity.

Weird how the media meticulously documents every single moment of the Trump-Raffensberger election dispute but this is the first time we're hearing about the Election Denier Stacy Abrams' lawsuit against Raffensberger.

Fair Fight Action has maintained that the suit -- which ended last month when a federal judge ruled against the group on all three remaining claims -- served an important role in drawing attention to voting inequities.

Uh-huh

But some outside the group questioned both the level of expenditures devoted to a single, largely unsuccessful legal action and the fact that such a large payout went to the firm of Abrams' close friend and campaign chair. Those concerns were heightened by the fact that Abrams' national campaign against voter suppression galvanized the Democratic Party, many of whose top donors helped fill its coffers.

Fair Fight Action v. Raffensperger began as a sweeping legal attack on voting issues ranging from long lines at polling places to problems with voter registration to poor training of poll workers. The scope of the case was subsequently narrowed significantly by Federal District Court Judge Steve C. Jones. On Sept. 30, after a bench trial, Jones issued his final order and judgment, ruling against Fair Fight Action.

"Although Georgia's election system is not perfect," Jones wrote, "the challenged practices violate neither the constitution nor the [Voting Rights Act]."

So, in other words, the Election Denier Stacy Abrams conducted a legal insurrection based on meritless claims without evidence almost certainly based on Disinformation From Russia.

An expert in the field of election law said the typical fees for this kind of suit are a couple of hundred thousand dollars for a couple of years work -- not $9.4 million.

"The typical case is a couple of hundred thousand dollars and can take a couple of years," said Leah Aden, deputy director for litigation at the Legal Defense Fund, which advocates for civil rights and racial justice. She cited a case in Texas in which five plaintiffs sought about $8.8 million in legal fees after the verdict as the most expensive she had seen. "Beyond $10 million would be very shocking, I would say."

Of the eight different law firms working on the Fair Fight Action case, Lawrence-Hardy's firm served as lead counsel and collected the most fees.

...

Fair Fight Action's tax filings do not show an exact breakdown of what these outside legal fees were spent on, and the non-profit group is not required to provide that breakdown. But Fair Fight Action's former organizing director, Hillary Holley, told POLITICO that the outside legal fees line item showed the cost of litigating two cases filed by Fair Fight Action: Fair Fight Action v. Raffensperger and a case brought after the 2020 general election against True the Vote, an organization that has made uncorroborated claims of election fraud, filed in mid-November 2020. The True the Vote case would only represent two months of billings in the federal filings.

Neither Lawrence-Hardy nor Fair Fight Action provided a breakdown of its billings for the Raffensperger case compared to other work. Fair Fight Action also did not respond to a request for a breakdown of its legal fees in 2021 and so far in 2022, the year that the Raffensperger case came to trial. (Federal filings for 2021 will become public, on request, by November at the earliest.)

...

Kathleen Clark, a professor of legal ethics at Washington University in St. Louis, flagged Fair Fight Action's responsibility to be transparent about how the organization's money is spent.

"Fair Fight Action ought to explain why this lawsuit cost so much," she said. "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."

For those who claim that Stacy Abrams is not an Election Denier in the same way Trump is -- that it's (D)ifferent when (D)emocrats do it -- check out her original lawsuit complaint, before she amended it to sound (D)ifferent from Trump:

The original complaint included allegations that voting machines were vulnerable to hacking and were switching votes intended for Abrams into votes for Kemp. Fair Fight Action found two voters who said they had to select the button to vote for Abrams four times before the machine's screen showed a vote for Abrams instead of Kemp. Fair Fight Action removed this allegation in December 2020 in a revised complaint, at the same moment then President Donald Trump was making similar unfounded allegations in his effort to overturn the presidential election results in Georgia.

Meanwhile: Those of us who have been predicting that the nation's 100% perfect and tamper-proof election system would suddenly be open to all sorts of fraud the moment Republicans were about to win are now vindicated.

Biden is warning that the Vote is about to be #Hacked.

Disclose.tv @disclosetv

JUST IN - Biden admin set to warn about "threats to nation's election infrastructure" ahead of midterms -- an intelligence bulletin is slated to be issued this week, Politico reports.

posted by Ace at 01:00 PM

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