The voting rights non-profit founded by Stacey Abrams spent more than $25 million over two years on legal fees. The largest of that — $9.4 million — went to the law firm of Abrams' close friend and campaign chairwoman.
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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. 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.
Lawrence-Hardy was at the forefront of Abrams’ effort to combat suppression from the start, according to Abrams aides. “We do provide other services for Fair Fight Action,” Lawrence-Hardy said in a POLITICO interview, declining to elaborate further on the fees. “We have several matters for them.” Stacey Abrams, then a student at Spelman College, discussing her activism with Students for African American Empowerment in an interview on June 18, 1992. | Nick Arroyo/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP
“What is the boon to the campaign?” said Nina Smith, a senior adviser to the Abrams campaign. “We reject that premise. Ideally the remedies sought in this case would currently be in place and voters in Georgia would not have their government working against their right to vote. That benefits democracy.”
Xakota Espinoza, communications director for Fair Fight Action, said Lawrence-Hardy was hired for her expertise, not her relationship with Abrams. 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.
“It happens all the time. It is the way our system is built, that the political leaders and the policy leaders are one in the same. So this is not unique to Allegra. You can say the same thing about Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi or, or Chuck Schumer or Mitch McConnell or Kevin McCarthy,” Eisen said. “We not only countenance it, we embrace it; that is the American political, legal and ethical system.
Scenes from Brian Kemp's 2018 election night event in Athens, Ga., where he defeated Abrams for the governorship by about 55,000 votes. | Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images and John Bazemore/AP Photo In 2019, the two groups recruited four Black churches to join as co-plaintiffs, including Ebenezer Baptist Church, headed by Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, who was deposed for the case.
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 removed this allegation in December 2020 in a revised complaint. | Jessica McGowan/Getty Images Campaign Legal Center, an organization with more experience handling voting rights cases, was added to the legal team in late 2019. It is not known if CLC has been paid for its work because it is not among Fair Fight Action’s top five vendors, which are required to be disclosed. The same limited disclosure applies to the work of the firms Sandler Reiff Lamb Rosenstein & Birkenstock, Kastorf Law and DuBose Miller, which are listed on court documents but not on Fair Fight Action’s tax filings.
Open Society’s co-director for U.S. grants, Laleh Ispahani, said she was impressed with how “cutting-edge” Fair Fight Action was. “I was always informed about the work and I think most of their donors probably would say the same thing,” Ispahani said. The state maintained that while Georgia’s election system is not perfect, it is neither systemically flawed nor intentionally discriminatory.Belinfante, the lead attorney for the state, argued that while individual voters might have had issues voting there is not a burden on the right to vote itself, which is the legal standard in such cases.
Groh-Wargo responded she felt accountable to the people the Abrams campaign encouraged to vote in 2018. Lawrence-Hardy argued that this accepted division of responsibility between state and county was the same reasoning used to uphold racist systems of the past. Former Alabama Democratic Lawrence-Hardy speaks outside the Richard B. Russell Federal Building in Atlanta, Ga. on April 11, 2022, the first day of the Fair Fight Action v. Raffensperger trial. | Jenn Finch
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