David Perdue, the former Georgia Senator, is reportedly exploring running again for the U.S. Senate and against the current officeholder Senator Reverend Rafael Warnock, and happened to time his announcement alongside a suspicious fake news entry about Senator Warnock, which we will debunk here. Perdue’s camp once again shows its attempts at bomb-throwing at would be opponents are clumsy, forgetting the saying that people in glass houses should never throw stones.
In Mr. Perdue’s case, his glass house is very much visible, and already showing signs of damage from the 2020 campaign. According to Politifact, But Perdue’s claims in a Nov. 30 2020 campaign ad saying that he “was cleared” by the United States Justice Department, the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Senate Ethics Committee, was “totally exonerated” is not true, or as the fact-checking website writes “don’t accurately describe what happened”.
Politifact reports:
For one thing, there has been no public disclosure that the Senate Ethics committee investigated Perdue at all. We contacted the committee staff but didn’t hear back.
For another, “exonerate” usually implies a formal finding that there was no wrongdoing.
Federal law enforcement agencies “generally don’t ‘exonerate’ subjects of investigations,” said Penn State University law professor and longtime attorney Stanley Brand, who has defended clients in Justice Department prosecutions. “Rather, they decline to bring cases which they don’t believe they have sufficient evidence to prosecute.”
Perdue campaign spokesman John Burke called Ossoff’s claims “debunked.” Asked for evidence that Perdue has been exonerated by the Justice Department, the SEC or the Senate Ethics Committee, Burke referred us to the New York Times story that revealed the DOJ-SEC probe and resulted in no charges.
Burke has previously said Perdue “doesn’t handle the day-to-day decisions of his portfolio.” But the New York Times reported that Perdue directed his wealth manager at Goldman Sachs to sell more than $1 million in Cardlytics shares.
Moreover, as a U.S. Senator, David Perdue showed a particular interest in advancing legislative concerns that just happened to help companies he was investing in. The New York Times also reported this:
As a member of the Senate’s cybersecurity subcommittee, David Perdue has raised alarms that hackers from overseas pose a threat to U.S. computer networks. Citing a frightening report by a California-based company called FireEye, Mr. Perdue was among the senators who asked this spring that the National Guard prepare to protect against such data breaches.
Not only was the issue important to Mr. Perdue, so was FireEye, a federal contractor that provides malware detection and threat-intelligence services. Beginning in 2016, the senator bought and sold FireEye stock 61 times, at one point owning as much as $250,000 worth of shares in the company.
The New York Times reported that the Justice Department had investigated the senator for possible insider trading in his sale of more than $1 million worth of stock in a financial-analysis firm, Cardlytics. Ultimately, prosecutors declined to bring charges. Other media outlets have revealed several trades in companies whose business dealings fall under the jurisdiction of Mr. Perdue’s committees.
David Perdue Made 2,596 Stock Trades
David Perdue Made 2,596 stock trades in one Senate Term. One Senate Term is six years, or 432 trades a year – basically, just over a stock trade a day. That’s far more than the 169 items of legislation he sponsored over that time. In other words, David Perdue traded stocks as often as he ate breakfast, and perhaps even more times than that.
Clearly, there’s no wall separating David Perdue’s investment life, and his time in the U.S. Senate. No wonder David Perdue wants to get back in the Senate, to help his investment portfolio. No wonder he and his cronies made up the fake news about Senator Warnock.
While New Georgia Project, the non-profit founded by Stacey Abrams, is once again the focus of an allegation on the part of the Georgia Secretary of State, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Without digging into the light detail, the fact is, Senator Warnock was not on the New Georgia Project Board of Directors during the period of time in 2019 that the alleged voter fraud was said to have been done. Thus, putting his name to an issue that has nothing to do with him is fake news. The fact is, New Georgia Project – a group establishing a historic effort to register tens of thousands of minority voters in Georgia – has always been investigated by the GOP-controlled State of Georgia, since 2014. None of the claims have checked out. Warnock served on the Board of the New Georgia Project for just two years, 2017 and 2019.
The only public claim of voter fraud is a tweet issued on November 19th, 2020, (note, 2020, not 2019) and points to Indivisible, and not New Georgia Project, a fact that runs contrary to the claims of The Atlanta Journal Constitution:
I got a package of postcards dropped off on my porch, seemingly accidentally. They’re accompanied by materials from https://t.co/jQkT6MrNCG which has a progressive agenda. The cards tell people how to register to vote in Georgia for the senate runoff election. I live in NYC. ? pic.twitter.com/yGR799qCMT
— Katie McFadden (@_KatieMcFadden_) November 19, 2020
Stay tuned.
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