Stacey Abrams: Still Crooked After All These Years

Georgia Republicans now want to investigate the shady Stacey Abrams, who ran twice for governor of the state. What took so long?

According to Capitol Bear News Service a special Georgia Senate committee wants to look into a settlement in January between groups involving Abrams and the Georgia Ethics Commission.

“I think we ought to get to the bottom of these allegations,” Sen. Bill Cowsert, R-Athens, said Feb. 28, explaining why he had introduced Senate Resolution 292 the day before.

“The New Georgia Project and a separate fundraising arm, the New Georgia Action Fund, agreed to pay $300,000 for failing to disclose $4.2 million in contributions and $3.2 million in spending during the 2018 election cycle on behalf of Abrams’ unsuccessful bid for governor.

“It was the largest fine ever assessed by the Ethics Commission.”

From an AP story: “U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin that $2 billion was improperly given to a coalition of groups trying to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Abrams worked with one of the groups until the end of last year.”

I tried to tip everyone off about Abrams with a story I posted in American Thinker in August 2020:

When Stacey Abrams was running for Georgia governor, she had an impressive list of social changes she wanted to make. People paying their bills didn’t make the cut.

Abrams was $228,000 in debt during her 2017 campaign for Georgia governor, including $50,000 to I.R.S. Despite that, she managed to loan her campaign $50,000. She also owed $76,000 in credit card debt and $96,000 for Yale Law School.

Abrams claimed that family obligations and a misunderstanding of how credit cards worked as the reason for her financial mess. This from a woman who is a tax attorney who wanted to be the vice president of the United States.

Abrams claims the concept of handling money seemed to escape her. She wrote that when she was at Spelman College, she got her first credit cards but was unaware that they would be “yoked to something called a credit score.” She also learned that if you don’t pay your rent, you get evicted, the way she was in 1994 from the Oaktree Apartments in Decatur, GA just like she and her sister, Andrea, did.

In a continuing effort to blame others for her failings, Abrams claimed some of her financial problems stemmed from when she helped her parents in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit Mississippi. She is one of six children, including a sister, Leslie Abrams Gardner, who was appointed to a federal judgeship by Barack Obama. How did her parents’ debt become only hers to carry and how was it still around twelve years later in 2017, especially when she was able to loan her campaign $50,000?

Abrams, a tax lawyer, who graduated from Yale in 1999, with $96,000 in student loan debt, still had repaid none of it almost twenty years later when she ran for governor. She even got jammed up by the I.R.S. in 2010 when she declared her parents as dependents on her tax filing.

She justified this in an interview:

“Abrams, 44, has talked publicly about her struggles with mounting credit card debt dating to when she was a student at Spelman College. And she said she "stretched every penny I had" to help her parents after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005.

“She cited those expenses in her decision to work out a payment plan for the $54,000 she owes the IRS. She’s also said a previous federal income tax lien of nearly $30,000 was filed erroneously in 2010 when she was trying to claim her parents as dependents as they faced mounting medical issues.

"While delaying tax payments wasn't my smartest move, it allowed me to take care of the parents who'd sacrificed so much for me and my siblings..."

She neglected to mention that when she was hired out of law school in 1999 by a law firm in Atlanta, Sutherland Asbill & Brennan, that paid her $95,000 a year, but Abrams she still wasn’t paying her bills.

On Abrams’ 2018 Financial Disclosure Statement filed for her run for Georgia governor, Section X shows she listed receipts of $909,006.89 in money received from twenty different companies.

Since there was nothing listed in Section X on her 2015 filing, it was curious what the listings were two years later. An email received from the GA Gov’t Transparency & Campaign Commission said: “Section X deals with payments by the state [sic] of Georgia to an entity that is controlled by (or substantially owned by) a candidate.”

Another email explained that the money listed on the X Section of her statement was received from the Department of Community Affairs and given to the Small Business Credit Cooperative Inc. (SBBCI) and the Trade Credit Guaranty Corporation (TCGC). It also said: “There were no payments directly paid to Stacey Abrams at any time.” Word play at its finest.

Both SBBCI and TCGC received money from the state to distribute by a company called NOWaccount Network Corporation to companies seeking loans. Abrams was identified as an officer for the NOWaccount Network.

That organization loans money to approved entities. The twenty companies listed on Abrams’ Financial Disclosure received almost a million dollars in 2016 from NOWaccount.

Stacey Abrams helped incorporate NOWaccount in 2010 and received a salary of $80,000 as senior vice president and $60,000 a year through 2015, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

But she was also an officer in both the SSBCI and TCGC from 2016 to 2018. In other words, she controlled the money NOWaccount received, helped decide who got the money and how much they would get. Of the twenty companies who got money via Abrams, eight companies were dissolved between 2016 and 2018.

A request for a list of companies that did not repay their loans was ignored. The SBBCI was a one-time program that terminated in September 2017.

Few elections have cost more than the one Abrams ran against Brian Kemp. The cost of Abrams’ race for governor exceeded $100 million and was financed by out-of-state money from mega-donors like George Soros and Tom Steyer. As of April 2020, Abrams was still under investigation for ethics violation pertaining to the campaign money she received. Despite losing by 55,000 votes, she still insists that she won, in the mode of Hillary Clinton.

She started paying IRS $1,000 a month toward her $50,000 debt in 2017 but magically all her debt disappeared by May 2019. Did she use her campaign money to pay off all $228,000?

Despite her financial problems, Abrams was able to buy a townhouse in Atlanta in 2004 for $246,300 and a house in Stone Mountain in 2019 for $370,000.

What’s interesting is that in 2019 she was slapped with her seventh tax lien against her non-profit, Third Sector Development, since 2014. Between then and 2016 the Georgia Labor Dept. issued $13,000 in tax liens for unpaid employment contributions. In a Daily Caller story: “Abrams has blamed third-party-clerical errors for all the issues.”

Also from the 02/13/19 story: “Nonprofit work has paid Abrams handsomely over the years. Third Sector Development and Voter Sector Institute -- two groups founded by the Democrat (Abrams) -- have paid her nearly half a million dollars over the course of three years. Both organizations raked in $12.5 million in donation between 2013 and 2016. However, she has remained quiet on the sources of the donations.”

Although Abrams considered herself a contender for Biden’s VP, no one else did. Biden insiders talked to the New York Post about her:

“No one takes Stacey seriously. And her public campaigning for the job seems more like a hostage negotiation than an actual attempt to get the job,” a Biden insider told The Post. “Biden is an old school guy and will always be. Picking Stacey would be like picking [Sarah] Palin. He doesn’t need to throw a Hail Mary. He wants a good governing partner.

“Internally, her star has fallen with the onset of the coronavirus as concerns grow about her preparedness.

“Stacey isn’t ready on day one. Even she knows that and it’s why she’s engaging in this dance. She might get perfunctorily better, but she’s not a serious pick for him. And her campaign is viewed as much as promotion for her book as it is for being chosen as Biden’s VP,” the insider continued, referring to Abrams’ forthcoming book “Our Time Is Now.”

So it seems that Joe Biden could have done worse. Though perhaps not by much.

Susan Daniels has been a licensed private investigator in OH for more than thirty years. She uncovered the phony Connecticut social security number Barack Obama has been using since his mid-20s. She is the author of The Rubbish Hauler’s Wife versus Barack Obama: A True Story, available on Amazon.com.