Protesters rally outside the Georgia State Capitol during a ‘March for Trump’ protest against the results of the 2020 presidential election on November 21, 2020 in Atlanta. (Photo by Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images)
A GEORGIA REPUBLICAN WHOM DONALD TRUMP PRAISED by name at an Atlanta rally on Aug. 3—a member of the MAGA majority on a board that last week implemented controversial rules backed by the election-denial movement—got his seat on the board thanks to the state’s lieutenant governor, who was himself nearly indicted for his role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election.
The news that State Election Board member Rick Jeffares owes his seat to Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, one of the “phony electors” from Georgia in 2020, comes on the heels of the revelation that Jeffares had pitched himself for a position in a second Trump administration.
Jones didn’t have to go far to tell Jeffares he wanted him to serve on the board. The pair live down the street from each other, Jeffares said.
“Burt called and said ‘I need somebody like you on there that knows what’s going on and you can go up there and be strong. That’s what I need,’ and I said ‘Okay, I’ll do it,’” Jeffares told me in a conversation last week.
Jeffares “knows what’s going on” in some ways but in others, he is either in the dark or pretending to be. When I asked Jeffares if he knew that the rule the board passed last week, which gives local election officials more power to refuse to certify results, had been proposed by a sitting member of the Fulton County election board and a fellow Republican, Jeffares claimed he didn’t know—saying he voted for it only because he supported it, along with other rules the board has passed at the behest of election deniers.
Jeffares is also now in the spotlight for another reason: He admitted that he floated the idea of becoming a regional EPA director to a former Trump campaign aide, Brian Jack.
So, to sum up: Jeffares is a pro-Trump Republican who believes that election fraud occurred in 2020. He got his job on the State Election Board thanks to another pro-Trump Republican, Jones, who also believes in election lies, and who allegedly tried to illegally install Trump as president. Jeffares then went on to solicit an administration job from a Trump campaign contact and to work on the State Election Board to implement election-denier policies in Georgia that benefit Trump.
Rick Jeffares (at right, with steepled fingers) at a meeting of the Georgia State Election Board. (Via YouTube)
“How the rumor got started that I would join the administration is beyond me,” Jeffares told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Wednesday. “It’s all just to make us look like criminals.”
The AJC framed Jeffares’s attempted solicitation of a Trump administration job as not “formal,” as if that somehow negates the apparent conflict of interest.
“Jeffares’s suggestion of himself for a specific job in another potential Trump administration while serving on Georgia’s election board, and passing new election rules supported by Trump, reeks of corruption,” said Max Flugrath of the left-leaning Fair Fight voting rights advocacy group.
IN THE WAKE OF DONALD TRUMP’S SHOCKING LOSS in Georgia in 2020, state Republicans immediately got to work making sure it couldn’t happen again. Against the opposition of every Democratic state lawmaker, they passed SB 202, a law that was widely considered to be aimed at voter suppression. State lawmakers also introduced county-specific bills that allowed for Republicans to take over local election boards. Those boards then began engaging in all sorts of tactics based on Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.
For a while, the State Election Board was relatively immune to this MAGA takeover of Georgia. Three of the Republicans who sat on the board after 2020 were moderates. That ended when Trump himself began to lobby Republicans in Georgia to replace one of those members, Ed Lindsey. As Asawin Suebsaeng reported, Lindsey got “ratfucked” by Trump because Lindsey wasn’t enough of an election denier for Trump’s taste. Since then, the board has only gotten more MAGA. Now, three of the four Republican members are pro-Trump appointees who support the former president’s lies about elections, with a lone Democrat, Sara Tindall-Ghazal, standing against the MAGA majority’s preparations for calling November’s results into question before a single vote is cast.
I asked Jeffares last week about the rumor that has been circulating that the Trump campaign had floated an administration position to one of the Republicans on the board. Jeffares said that he suggested the EPA role to Brian Jack while helping with Jack’s Trump-endorsed campaign for Congress. And although Jack has close ties with the Trump campaign, which he used to advise, Jeffares insisted he has not spoken directly to anyone still on the Trump staff about the EPA position.
“And I don’t know how that got started,” Jeffares said of the rumor. “I don’t know anybody on the Trump administration [sic]. I helped Brian Jack with his campaign, and I told Brian, I said, ‘I’m fixin’ to retire,’ I said, ‘If y’all can’t figure out who y’all want to be the EPA director of the Southeast, I’d like to have it.’ That’s all I said.”
At least one of Jeffares’s three companies deals with sewage and wastewater management, so he has a direct interest in the types of rules and regulations that the EPA promulgates. Working as a regional director for the agency, Jeffares’s company might financially benefit from the deregulation of an industry that the EPA oversees. Drastically reducing government regulations is one of Trump’s major policy platforms and a hallmark of his campaign promises.
For his part, even Jack is distancing himself from Jeffares’s apparent attempt to secure a position in a second Trump administration while actively working to implement election rules favorable to Trump’s forthcoming stolen election claims.
A spokesperson for Jack told the AJC that Jack’s “position has been crystal clear: anyone lobbying for a role in a future administration is only hurting President Trump and themselves, and distracting from the campaign before us.”
While Jeffares told me he believes that Donald Trump legitimately lost the 2020 election, he also insisted there were problems. Specifically, Jeffares said, errors in Fulton County still need investigating. As part of last week’s MAGA-centric rule-making undertaken by the board, Jeffares voted with two of his Republican colleagues to reopen an investigation into double-counted ballots in Fulton County in 2020. But the Fulton County allegations were already investigated at the behest of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican; they were found to be entirely baseless. Both the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Federal Bureau of Investigation also looked into the allegations.
But Jeffares believes more investigation is needed, and he voted to refer the matter to Attorney General Chris Carr, also a Republican. Voting with Jeffares were Dr. Janice Johnston and Janelle King, the other two board members whom Trump shouted out at his Atlanta rally. Before serving on the board, Johnston was perhaps best known in Georgia politics as a frequent public speaker at meetings of the Fulton County election board, where she breathlessly called for investigations into supposed fraud. Now, she has the power to will those investigations into being as a member of the State Election Board. King is a conservative media personality who has never held elected office or overseen election administration.
All Voting is Local (AVIL) is among the many voting-rights groups that have expressed grave concerns with the State Election Board’s pro-Trump actions, as well as Jeffares’s apparent conflict of interest in discussing his desire for a Trump administration post while implementing election denier-based rules. While Jeffares says it was Jones who first tapped him to serve on the board, the appointment came with the backing of Republicans in the state senate. Voting out senators who voted to appoint Jeffares is one way that Georgians can help to hold the board accountable, AVIL said in a statement.
“Georgia voters can help drown out bad actors and disinformation by showing up during session to support voting access,” said AVIL’s Marisa Pyle. “But right now they can take action as well as by contacting Speaker [Jon] Burns and [Lt. Gov.] Jones to ask that they hold their appointees accountable to Georgia law and code of ethics.”
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Justin Glawe is an independent journalist based in Savannah, Georgia. He is the author of the forthcoming book If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened, to be published next year by the University of Georgia Press. He writes the newsletter American Doom.
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Publish date : 2024-08-14 19:14:00
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