Ethics Complaint Accuses Evans’ Campaign of Circumventing GA Campaign Finance Laws
OK, first off I am not a lawyer and I’m not even remotely qualified to begin having an opinion on anything legal. So take that massive caveat however you want when reading this post.
The Stacey Abrams campaign alleges the Stacey Evans campaign created a 501(c)4, Hope for Georgia, to shield donor privacy. In fact evidence is presented with a Evans staffer Josh White writing: “We moved everything to a c4 structure for donor privacy.”
Oops.
The documents filed with the Georgia Ethics Commission (which will be attached when we sort out our technical issues) make a compelling argument but see my first sentence for the caveat. That said, it’s all so obvious that I kind of refuse to believe the Hope for Georgia folks would be this transparent if they were acting nefariously.
Lauren Groh-Wargo, Campaign Manager for Stacey Abrams for Governor who filed the complaint said in a press release: “We are saddened that the Evans campaign is running an old playbook to attack and smear, and has now gone a step further by forming a dark money group to circumvent campaign laws and shield donors from disclosure.”
The Evans campaign said they were reviewing the complaint, having just seen it. I will provide an update when I receive their response.
About Author
edatlanta
Add a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
I haven’t seen the Complaint yet, either, but one thing that seems clear is that Hope for GA is not the candidate campaign committee, which a quick search revealed as Evans for Georgia, Inc. So, then the c4 is just a social welfare organization with a couple of constraints. One, it can not coordinate with the candidate or campaign committee. Second, it can’t spend more than half of its budget on political issues. The former seems broken by the statement of the staffer quoted above, but that is not actually coordination in my experience. You can direct potential donors (especially if concerned about anonymity) to donate to the nonprofit. You could have the same donors giving some to the candidate and some to the nonprofit- that’s fine- as long as the nonprofit operates and spends independently. There should be different people running the nonprofit. If not, that would be coordination. Coordination is more commonly in the context of spending. The second piece about only spending half of the budget on political advocacy is one that is more difficult to enforce, and is the job of the IRS, not the Ethics Commission.
BORRRRRRRING!
Plus, anybody can have an opinion, that’s the whole point of one.