by Ty Tagami | Jul 22, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — The Georgia Republican Party has returned money contributed by a family associated with a financial institution that the federal government alleged was a Ponzi scheme.
Saying he was not obliged to return the money but felt it was a “moral duty,” state GOP Chairman Josh McKoon announced Tuesday that the party had delivered $36,844 to the court-appointed receiver for First Liberty Building & Loan.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission alleged in federal court two weeks ago that the Georgia company had bilked investors and that its owner and president, Brant Frost IV, had paid himself and his family $5 million while making $570,000 in political contributions.
Last week, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, called on politicians to return any money received from First Liberty or Frost and his family.
McKoon said he followed the court receiver’s suggestion to return all such contributions that the party had received since the beginning of 2021.
Frost and his family are well-known in GOP circles. His son, Brant Frost V, is chairman of the Coweta County Republican Party.
“I am profoundly saddened that members of our conservative movement, along with many others, were misled by false promises of safe investments,” McKoon said. “This has left countless Georgians facing uncertain futures and financial distress.”
by Ty Tagami | Jul 22, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Five years after COVID-19 caused many Georgia kids to start skipping school, absenteeism rates remain stubbornly high, with students scoring worse in core subjects like math and reading.
A special committee of the state House of Representatives is studying the issue ahead of next year’s legislative session with the goal of producing laws that can reverse the trend. The first presentations at the Georgia Capitol Tuesday indicated that many of the likely causes relate to poverty, although mental health also plays a role.
More than one in five students missed more than 15 days of school in 2024, nearly double the rate in 2019. The rate missing six to 15 days climbed to 42%, six points higher than in 2019.
“A crisis is building,” said Rep. Will Wade, R-Dawsonville, a member of the committee.
Wade and fellow lawmakers heard that reasons as obvious as uncorrected vision and illness are driving absenteeism.
“Asthma is the leading cause,” said Garry McGiboney, a former state Department of Education official, the first expert to testify. He said diabetes is also a big driver.
“If you look deeper into that, one of the reasons why is because it’s difficult for school systems to implement an asthma or diabetes management plan, especially if they don’t have a school nurse.”
McGiboney led a volunteer panel that studied absenteeism for the group Get Georgia Reading. Their resulting report published in June said children with asthma were twice as likely to miss school and cited an American Lung Association report that children with asthma missed 8.3 million school days nationwide.
Justin Hill, a deputy state school superintendent, said illness is a top driver of absenteeism but that weather, family emergencies and vacations also contribute. High school students who skip school often cite fatigue, he said.
Carol Lewis, president and CEO of the group Communities in Schools, a non-profit with the mission of keeping kids in school, said many high school students are tired because they are helping to care for siblings or holding down jobs to help pay family bills.
She said lack of mental health services is a barrier, noting that many chronically absent students lost family members during the pandemic. Basic needs are a problem too, she added, such as clean clothes, feminine hygiene products, food, housing and internet service.
McGiboney recommended that the state enforce a law requiring the chief superior court judge in each county to form a multi-agency student attendance committee. Those committees can be effective, but not all counties have one, he said.
Wade, Gov. Brian Kemp’s House floor leader, said some schools don’t have a nurse and asked if getting one into every school would help. McGiboney responded that it would be one of the most important things the state could do.
The committee will meet two more times, with the next hearing scheduled for Sept. 22 at the Capitol.
by Ty Tagami | Jul 18, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Republican lawmakers have pushed through numerous changes to Georgia’s voting system in recent years, reacting to a concern, mostly among conservatives, that lax security produced stolen elections.
Now, House Speaker Jon Burns has empaneled a study committee to consider more changes, with the Republican from Newington selecting a likely candidate for secretary of state to lead it.
The Blue-Ribbon Study Committee on Election Procedures led by Rep. Tim Fleming, R-Covington, met for the first time this week, tapping discontent with the digital voting system Georgia used when Donald Trump lost the presidential election to Joe Biden in 2020.
It will provide a platform for Fleming, who filed this month to raise campaign funds to run for secretary of state, which oversees elections. Burns’ office noted that Fleming used to work as chief of staff there, making him “exceptionally qualified” to oversee this committee.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has been a magnet for election critics due to his assurances about the Dominion Voting System’s security. Neither his statements nor Trump’s victory last year have quelled the concerns. Nor, it seems, has onetime Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s loss in a defamation lawsuit brought by two Fulton County election workers after he falsely accused them of election fraud.
Phoebe Eckhart of Roswell expressed a concern shared by several others who spoke at Tuesday’s hearing, the first of a half dozen that will occur around the state. She said she had repeatedly watched a video of a ballot count inside a building in Fulton.
What she saw made her deeply suspicious: workers repeatedly tabulating the paper ballots printed by the Dominion voting terminals.
They were “taking the ballots and putting them in the machine, just over and over and over again,” she said. “It was fraud.”
Eckhart then expressed the frustration that is driving Republican lawmakers to revisit election law. She attended a GOP breakfast five years ago where a speaker outlined the party’s top issues.
“And the very first one was election integrity,” Eckhart said. Yet there is still “no election integrity,” she told the lawmakers. “Please, please, please, can you do something about this?”
Others, including Brad Carver, a state GOP leader, criticized the various options for casting a ballot in Georgia, including early voting. It costs too much and should be reduced to two weeks, he told the committee. “Three weeks of early voting is a very long period of time, it’s very costly to a lot of our local governments,” said Carver, who chairs the GOP’s 6th Congressional District, which includes parts of Cobb and Fulton counties.
The lone Democrat on the seven-member committee, Atlanta Rep. Saira Draper, countered with other methods of cutting costs that do not reduce voter access, such as ranked-choice voting. That would have eliminated the need for the state Public Service Commission runoff election that was occurring the same day as the hearing, she noted.
Only 2.4% of Georgia’s 8.4 million voters cast a ballot in the PSC primary last month, and the turnout for the runoff, when fewer than 114,000 cast a ballot, was even smaller.
Carver had already expressed criticism of ranked-choice voting and of absentee voting, which he claimed was not secure. Draper challenged him to produce evidence of that. “I don’t believe in fearmongering as a basis for policy changes,” she said.
Others from the public echoed that sentiment.
Brian Nunez, with the Southern Poverty Law Center, cautioned against passing new election laws based upon rumors about rigged elections.
“A widespread false narrative about fraud in our elections persists,” he said. “The allegations have been proven time and time again to be unfounded.”
Karen Davenport of Decatur criticized an election law passed last year that enables mass voter challenges, saying it empowers “conspiracy theorists” and amounts to voter intimidation. She implored lawmakers not to erect barriers to voting.
“Elected state officials should strive to make voting easier and not more difficult for Georgians,” she said.
In addition to costs, Republican lawmakers on the panel had questions about Georgia’s participation in the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, a multistate data-sharing compact designed to root out voters who cast ballots in more than one state. Among their concerns was the security of the encrypted personal information shared between states.
But the computerized Dominion system was at the center of complaints. A common critique at Tuesday’s hearing was the way the system uses a Quick Response (QR) code to transfer voter intent into each polling place’s database. After a voter casts a ballot, the terminal prints a piece of paper with the code — a matrix of black and white squares — in addition to recording the voter’s intent on a data card. The voter then places the paper into a QR reader, producing another record of the vote.
One man’s T-shirt summed up the concern about this technology, which renders ballots inscrutable to the human eye: The words “I voted” were followed by an image of a QR code. Then, came the punch line: “Can you read this?”
Such concerns have helped drive doubts about election results.
When Draper pressed Carver about whether he believed Biden had legitimately won the 2020 election, he said he did not believe it. The room at the Capitol then erupted in cheers.
Last year, Georgia lawmakers banned using QR codes to tabulate ballots starting with the 2026 elections, so the state must modify its system.
Many want paper ballots, counted by hand. Field Searcy, co-founder of Georgians for Truth, tried and failed to get Republican party leaders to use paper ballots for their own officer selection process when he attended the state GOP convention in May. Party leaders instead used electronic “clickers,” saying they lacked the resources to do a hand-count, even though Searcy said he had brought 3,000 printed ballots and 120 people trained to count them.
The convention crowd had jeered when party leaders announced they would be using electronic voting instead of paper. Rank-and-file Republicans were still upset about it Tuesday, with one complaining to lawmakers about the clickers.
That controversy illustrates the political risk for Republican lawmakers on this issue.
Searcy, who testified on Tuesday about his election suspicions, said in an interview that his interest is non-partisan. Trump’s victory in the last election did not assuage his concerns.
He said his clicker failed twice at the convention and noted that there was no way to validate that it accurately recorded his intentions. He had the same concern about the voting terminals Georgia uses on Election Day.
“If we don’t have trust in our elections, we don’t have a country,” he said. “If our elections are not secure and trustworthy, it’s all a farce.”
by Ty Tagami | Jul 18, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Tobacco companies are using social media influencers, bright packaging and fruity flavors to lure new customers to vaping, and state lawmakers heard Thursday that they appear to be targeting teenagers.
Flavors like mango, cucumber and creme brulee sound delectable and contribute to widespread use, along with easy access from older siblings and third-party vendors, said Suhaas Reddy Bonkur, a Georgia Tech student.
“It’s super easy for them and very convenient to just take a hit, maybe it’s as simple as grabbing a snack after school,” said the fourth-year biomedical student, who is a member of the American Heart Association’s state advocacy committee. “And this easy access normalizes its behavior and fuels the addiction.”
A medical expert testified about the cornucopia of health risks for young people who vape — risks that science can “extrapolate” from cigarette use.
“They include things like various respiratory illnesses and pneumonias, worsening asthma as well as the risk of developing asthma,” said Dr. Mary Ellen Fain of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. “Lots of behavioral problems like ADHD, antisocial behavior, middle ear infections that can cause hearing impairment.”
Thursday’s hearing of the House Study Committee on the Costs and Effects of Smoking was the second in a series that started last month. The first hearing focused on smoking and Georgia’s exceedingly low cigarette tax. At 37 cents a pack, it is well below the national average of $1.97. Only Missouri, at 17 cents, charges less.
Testimony Thursday revealed a similar tax policy for vaping. Georgia and 32 other states plus Washington, D.C., have a vape tax policy, said Danny Kanso, an analyst with the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute.
“Among those 33 states, we are at the very bottom,” said Kanso, who said Georgia taxes the product at 5 cents per milliliter while the national average is 82 cents.
No one from the industry spoke this time or at last month’s hearing.
Advocates at both hearings proposed raising the tax rate on tobacco products. They also advised more sales restrictions and cessation programs.
Bonkur, the Tech student, lamented the recent defunding of Georgia’s Tobacco Use Prevention Program, a victim of federal cuts.
The state health department said last month that core tobacco and vaping prevention and cessation programs were still operating, but Bonkur said it was a loss of “instrumental” prevention work, adding that the state should invest more into it.
These temporary study committees take deep dives on complicated topics, then advise the broader General Assembly. No specific tobacco legislation has emerged so far, but this committee will meet one more time to discuss concrete proposals ahead of next year’s legislative session.
The chairwoman, Rep. Sharon Cooper, R-Marietta, who also leads the House’s standing Public and Community Health Committee, lamented that Congress omitted menthol when it banned cigarette flavors in 2009, suggesting a direction she might want to take.
Rep. Lee Hawkins, R-Gainesville, chairman of the House Health Committee, another key lawmaker on the topic, said he would like to see more transparency requirements for vape product packaging.
“I would like to include in there that the ingredients of these vaping products must be disclosed,” said Hawkins, a dentist who has also been leading a summer study committee on cancer care access. “Because you’re putting all kinds of things in these vaping products, and I think the public and the user should know.”
by Ty Tagami | Jul 17, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Georgia will benefit from a portion of another $27.5 million agreed to by the owner of a defunct medial lab accused of Medicaid fraud, the U.S. Justice Department announced Thursday.
Kevin S. Murdock, former CEO and owner of the now-defunct laboratory Premier Medical, Inc. agreed to the terms, acknowledging he was likely to lose in a lawsuit brought against him by the federal government and the states of Georgia, Colorado and South Carolina.
“The scheme perpetuated by the defendants in this case was fueled by greed and kickbacks,” said U.S. Attorney Bryan Stirling for the District of South Carolina, which pursued the case on behalf of the federal and state governments.
Murdock’s attorney, John Sten, said his client agreed to the resolution to avoid the cost, time and uncertainty of a trial, noting the consent judgment included no finding or admission of wrongdoing.
“Kevin has consistently maintained that he did nothing improper,” Sten said.
The plaintiffs alleged Premier Medical conspired with others in targeting Medicaid beneficiaries for medically unnecessary genetic testing that could cost as much as $12,000 in Georgia.
In 2018 and 2019, they traveled to the three states and set up tables in public spaces in low-income areas, such as bus stops, dollar stores and street corners, hoping to lure Medicaid beneficiaries, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
The governments also sued both Premier and Freedom Medical Labs, LLC in 2021 for fraud, waste and abuse against Medicaid, saying they were aware that orders and patient samples were obtained using kickbacks, in violation of the federal Anti-Kickback Statute.
The judgment resolves claims brought by a whistleblower who worked for Premier Medical.
The latest agreement brings the total amount in judgments and settlements to $114 million. The scheme cost Georgia’s Medicaid program $7 million.
