Stacey Abrams' Fair Fight Action Paid $9.4 Million To Firm Headed By Her Campaign Manager

[Ubiquitous]

A voting rights group founded by Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate
Stacey Abrams is coming under fire after revelations that it paid $9.4
million to a boutique law firm where one of the partners is her campaign
manager.

Fair Fight Action, which lost its multi-million dollar case in which it
accused Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger — who was elected in
2018 to succeed Brian Kemp — and the State Elections Board of discriminatory
and suppressive election practices, paid the law firm Lawrence & Bundy $9.4
million in 2019 and 2020; Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, a partner at the firm,
chaired both Abrams’ 2018 gubernatorial campaign and her current
gubernatorial campaign.

“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,” Politico reported.

“It is a very clear conflict of interest because with that kind of close link
to the litigation and her friend that provides an opportunity where the
friend gets particularly enriched from this litigation,” Craig Holman of
Public Citizen declared.

Abrams founded Fair Fight Action after losing the 2018 election to the GOP’s
Brian Kemp — who was then serving as Secretary of State — and then claiming
thousands of voters had been disenfranchised. In December 2020, Raffensberger
wrote bluntly, “Ms. Abrams still refuses to acknowledge she lost.”

“Fair Fight Action ought to explain why this lawsuit cost so much,” Kathleen
Clark, a professor of legal ethics at Washington University commented. “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.”

“It is essential that non-government organizations, that charitable
organizations be run so they actually further their stated purposes,” Clark
continued. “It’s important that we have assurances that it is pursuing its
stated goals, rather than feathering someone’s nest.”

The initial lawsuit made roughly twenty different claims but Judge Steve
Jones jettisoned most of them and focused on three issues. “I call it the
incredible shrinking lawsuit,” quipped Georgia attorney General Chris Carr.

“It started off with allegations of tens of thousands of votes that were
suppressed across the state of Georgia in the 2018 Election,” he pointed out.
“We’re down to seven individuals who didn’t vote. … That is not what they
brought. That’s not what their press conferences have been about. That’s not
what their fundraising emails have been about. It was about a watershed
landmark voter suppression case. That’s what they took to the American
people, not just Georgians, they made this a national campaign. We literally
went from 20-some claims to three, and three that don’t go to the heart of
affirmatively prohibiting Georgians from voting.”

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Let's go Brandon!