Wait, What Was Trump Lie-Babbling About Stacey Abrams Last Night?
The answer is stupider than the question!
Let’s get this out of the way right up front: The really remarkable thing about this story is how very little Stacey Abrams actually has to do with it. There’s no scandal or corruption in it, either, but when has that ever stopped right-wing media from Benghazi-ing about a non-scandal for years and years?
And since Donald Trump decided to include it in his not-the-state-of-the-union speech last night, it’ll probably be cemented as an eternal truth in the minds of wingnuts, too.
What’s All This Then?
First, as ever, let’s get a slice of Context Bread and some Fact Fillings so we can make a tasty Truth Sandwich before we get to all the lies, shall we? As you know, Trump and unelected copresident Elon Musk are trying to undo every last bit of Joe Biden’s climate policies, much of which they shouldn’t legally be able to do because so much of it was passed by Congress. That’s the case with $20 billion in grants approved by the EPA in April 2024 as part of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, one of the many initiatives in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
Once the Trump people took over, they started looking for chances to claw back — again, illegally! — any Biden climate funds that had been awarded but not actually delivered to the businesses and nonprofit organizations that had gone through proper channels to apply for the grants. Yeah, you and I might call those contracts that had to be honored, but since climate change is now illegal, the grants are fraudulent too, don’t you see?
One of the grants in that $20 billion package was the $14 billion National Clean Investment Fund, which distributed IRA funds to nonprofits that then financed clean technology and other climate-helping programs. The smallest of three grants in that fund was for $2 billion, to a project called Power Forward Communities (PFC), which would use the money to offer loans to businesses, homeowners, and community groups to do clean energy projects, especially in low-income communities. For shorthand purposes, it was a kind of “green bank” that would loan money and then use the payback on those loans to loan more money.
Here’s The Really Stupid Shit
When Trump was inaugurated, the $20 billion in EPA funds were still parked at Citibank before being disbursed to grantees, in a completely normal funding arrangement for such “public-private partnerships.” That’s where the truly batshit part of the story comes in, and if you’re a regular Wonkette reader, this may sound familiar to you. Acting US attorney Ed Martin, arguably the dumbest (acting) US attorney ever, ordered an investigation into the grants because Trump’s EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin saw a video made by Project Veritas. Yes, those guys.
DOJ Prosecutor Won't Use Project Veritas Fever Dream Sequences To Open Fake Invesigations, Resigns
In the “undercover” video, an EPA guy told a fake reporter about the Biden administration’s efforts to get as much legally-awarded IRA money out the door as possible before Trump took office — a pretty common thing when there’s a change of administration. But the EPA guy used a metaphor that sounded very suspicious, likening the effort to throwing “gold bars off the Titanic.” Zeldin excitedly announced that the Power Forward Communities grant was one of those “GOLD BARS,” and he vowed to claw back the funds without any evidence that they were granted improperly. Hey, it was Biden, and maybe the money could still be grabbed from the bank, so he called it fraud and forwarded his accusations to Martin, the (acting) US attorney.
When Martin ordered Denise Cheung, the head of the criminal division in the DC US Attorney’s office, to freeze the funds and open a criminal investigation, she resigned instead of doing it, telling Martin that a video from Project Veritas is not enough evidence to convene a grand jury.
Martin — whose only qualification for his job is that he represented a bunch of January 6 felons pardoned by Trump — then pursued the investigation all on his lonesome, insisting that in all that bullshit, there surely had to be a fraudulent pony, because he can’t tell one metaphorical quadruped from the metaphorical scat of another.
Umm, Wait, Where’s The Stacey Abrams Part? Haha, There IS NO STACEY ABRAMS PART
By now you may be asking yourself, what about Stacey Abrams? What is that large automobile? How do I work this? You are right to ask, because there is no water at the bottom of this ocean.
Stacey Abrams literally had nothing, zero, naught, nada, bugger-all, not a whit, nuffin guvna to do with Power Forward Communities. She never worked for the PFC project, didn’t get paid by PFC, and obviously never saw a cent of the grant, because did we mention she isn’t part of Power Forward Communities and never was?
But if you don’t know how logic or linear time work, this is as close as there is to a “connection”: Abrams did work from 2023 to 2024 as an attorney and consultant for the big national energy transition nonprofit Rewiring America. And Rewiring America is one of five housing and clean energy nonprofits that set up Power Forward Communities. That’s it, that’s the “connection.” And remember, there’s absolutely no indication the grant was improper in the first place.
The other four groups in PFC included the United Way, Habitat for Humanity, and a couple of community development nonprofits you’ve never heard of. So far, no wingnuts have claimed that Jimmy Carter, the notorious hammer-wielding do-gooder who also loved solar energy was in on the scam of applying for a clean energy financing grant through proper channels.
On the other hand, by attaching the name of a Black woman who lots of right-wingers hate, hate, hate because she was guilty of Running for Georgia Governor While Black, the story gets a lot more of what passes for credibility in right-wing media.
The story blew up last month after Zeldin said he’d discovered the “gold bars” (not actually gold, not actually improper), although the original bullshit “connection” seems to have been made way back in January 2024 by some cleverly lying staffer for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, before the grants had been formalized, although at that time, the committee at least noted that Rewiring America was one of five groups that created PFC. The story spread quickly through the right-wing disinformation-sphere, from Old School Wingnut Queen Pam Geller to Crazy Chaya Raichik’s Libs of TikTok, even to lying old grifter Dinesh D’Souza, who tried to suggest that the grant to an organization not connected to Abrams at all was part of an even more scandalous scandal! The poor grifty asshole is still pimping his 2000 Mules conspiracy even though the book and movie were pulled from distribution for being full of lies.
And that, Charlie Brown, is how we got to Donald Trump lying like a lying liar last night, during his fake speech, in which he promoted a whole list of scandals that never actually happened.
Lied Trump, lyingly,
“$1.9 billion to recently created decarbonization of homes committee, headed up — and we know she’s involved — just at the last moment, the money was passed over by a woman named Stacey Abrams. Have you ever heard of her?”
Abrams was not head of nothing, as we’ve mentioned. Power Forward Communities was indeed formed for the purpose of seeking the IRA grant, but that was perfectly legal, and it was the work of five well-established nonprofits, including Rewiring America, which Abrams was not the head of. And of course, there’s no evidence at all that the grant was improper.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, there also wasn’t any $8 million grant to the NIH to create transgender mice, either.
Update: Article updated after I realized that I dopily misnamed Rewiring America as “Rewire America” which was wrong, and also replaced CNN link on mice with a more complete “everybody got it wrong” explanation of Trump’s transgender mice lie.
[Politico / NYT / EPA / WaPo (archive link) / The Dispatch / CNN / Hat tip to “Arriadna” on Bluesky for asking why a Fox News clip about the EPA grants kept showing pics of Stacey Abrams anyway]
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Updated to fix a dumb typo where I called Rewiring America "Rewire America" because I am dumb that way sometimes.
In related news, Stacey Abrams is also not 150 years old.