A new in-depth New York Times profile of unelected Senator Kelly Loeffler examines how her self-serving pitch to Georgia voters about her life story and run for Senate doesn’t align with reality. From a clear misrepresentation of her “prosperous” upbringing and blatant hypocrisy on the role of the federal government to a pattern of corrupt, pay-to-play politics surrounding her sham appointment to the Senate, Loeffler’s fabricated persona on the campaign trail is just one more example of the political mega-donor doing what’s best for herself, and one more reason why Georgia voters don’t trust her. Here are four key takeaways from the NYT profile:
1. Loeffler is a fraud and there’s “little evidence” about her “hardscrabble upbringing.”
While she is described by friends and foes alike as deeply driven, there is little evidence of a hardscrabble upbringing. She came from a prosperous farming family in central Illinois, and in her early 20s was given large tracts of some of the richest agricultural land in America. By 24, she had bought herself a duplex condo on Chicago’s Gold Coast.
2. Loeffler is a hypocrite — her family has taken millions of dollars in “help from American taxpayers” but she opposed extending emergency unemployment relief, saying we need to “limit government dependency.”
There was also help from American taxpayers. Since 1995, members of the family, including Ms. Loeffler’s father, who is now retired, and her brother Brian, who last year was named the county’s farmer of the year, have received $3.2 million in federal farm subsidies, according to data from the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit. (Nearly a quarter of that came from money Mr. Trump used to compensate farmers for his trade war with China.)… it is noteworthy because the Club for Growth, an anti-tax group that backed Ms. Loeffler, ran an ad campaign criticizing her primary opponent, Mr. Collins, for supporting the farm bailout program. And Ms. Loeffler, as a senator, also opposed continuing the extra $600 unemployment payment given this year to workers who lost their jobs because of the coronavirus pandemic, saying people needed to “get back to work and limit government dependency.”
3. Loeffler and her husband have spent more than $30 million to try and buy her Senate seat — and her brazen pattern of pay-to-play politics began before her appointment was even announced.
Ms. Loeffler had not donated to Mr. Kemp in 2018, but in the weeks between Mr. Isakson’s hospitalization and retirement announcement, records show, she contributed more than $18,000 to the governor’s 2022 campaign, the maximum allowable.
4. Loeffler is a corrupt politician whose ethical conflicts of interests in office go even deeper than previously reported.
By the time she was picked, Ms. Loeffler had taken on a new job at I.C.E., as chief executive of Bakkt, the company’s fledgling exchange for digital currencies like Bitcoin. Ahead of Bakkt’s official debut, she spent much of 2019 negotiating directly with senior officials at I.C.E.’s most important regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. A few months later, she was sitting on the Senate’s Agriculture Committee, which oversees the C.F.T.C… “The conflict of interest is just so completely glaring,” said Marcus Stanley, the policy director of Americans for Financial Reform, a nonpartisan Wall Street watchdog. “Almost all of I.C.E.’s important activities are regulated in very fine detail by the C.F.T.C.”
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