Mary Ellen Klas: Georgia Republicans have gone full 'knives out'

The MAGA-world blow-up over the Trump administration’s about-face in handling the Jeffrey Epstein files isn’t the only conspiracy-fueled dispute splintering Republicans. Another feud is playing out in the state of Georgia, where a group of ultraconservative Republicans that rose to power with the backing of a wealthy financier is at war with the GOP leadership over control of the party.

The infighting may provide a window into what Republicans are now facing as the heretofore monolithic MAGA movement begins to fissure. And whether nationally or in Georgia, an intraparty firefight could darken the party’s chances in the midterms.

The wealthy financier is Brant Frost IV, recently charged with conducting a $140 million Ponzi scheme. He has neither admitted nor denied the allegations, but has apologized for “the damage I created” and agreed to cooperate with the Securities and Exchange Commission as officials sort through the damage he’s done to at least 300 defrauded investors. The group Frost helped launch and bankroll, the Georgia Republican Assembly, has spent the last decade attempting to become the controlling faction of the Georgia GOP.

As chronicled by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the GRA has spent more than a decade pushing the state party further to the right. It championed resolutions punishing mainstream Republican officeholders for veering away from the MAGA agenda. It vilified everyone from Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to Governor Brian Kemp for rejecting President Donald Trump’s demands to illegally overturn his 2020 election defeat.

It now wants its purity test enforced by allowing local party officials to prevent people they consider insufficiently conservative from qualifying as GOP candidates. In June, the GRA successfully won overwhelming support at the state Republican Party convention for a resolution urging party leaders to block Raffensperger from running as a Republican in 2026.

Raffensperger is considered a possible contender for governor or U.S. Senate, two of the high-stakes offices on the Georgia ballot next year — a year that also includes all the state cabinet offices. In a general election, he’d be a formidable opponent for Democrats to beat. But many Republicans still harbor disdain for the secretary of state for his refusal to “find” enough votes to reverse Trump’s defeat.

Not all of this is sitting well with Georgia Republicans, even those who have been members of the faction. “They got power hungry. They started using heavy-handed tactics and they just lost their way,” said Debbie Dooley, a long-time Republican Party activist and a founding member of the GRA.

In June, dozens of prominent Republican activists signed a letter saying they were quitting the GRA and accused it of dividing the party and weakening its odds in the midterms.

Woven into this saga is a predictable menu of conspiracy theories. Before the convention in June, GRA activists accused Republican Party Chair Josh McKoon of “orchestrating a power grab” to rig the outcome of the officer elections. But McKoon, in handpicking candidates, had only been doing what party leaders typically do.

At the convention, the GRA presented their own slate of candidates and insisted party officials use paper ballots instead of the electronic “clickers” the party had traditionally used to conduct the vote. And, because everything that goes around comes around, when the GRA’s slate of candidates was trounced using the “clickers,” the group accused party leadership of “rigging the election.”

“It’s conspiracy theory central,” Dooley told me. “If they can't be in control, they want to tear it down.”

It’s hard to imagine that no one realized the irony of one faction of the Georgia Republican Party accusing another faction of operating a cover-up without verifiable proof. Since Trump emerged on the political scene with his birther conspiracy, Republicans in government and media have pulled conspiratorial rhetoric into their force-field so often that it’s become the new normal.

With so many politically connected backers, the knives are now out everywhere. Raffensberger, whose office is investigating First Liberty in coordination with the Securities and Exchange Commission, urged all recipients to return their political contributions.

Georgia Republicans are learning what the Epstein saga is reminding Republicans at the national level: Conspiracies have a way of preying on systems that stoke mistrust and benefit from media that narrowcasts to an audience of like-minded listeners. The Republican Party is one of those systems. How many MAGA faithful have argued that global warming is a hoax, Jeffrey Epstein was murdered, the Sandy Hook massacre was faked, fluoride in water causes cancer, or that the 2020 election was stolen? When falsehoods are repeated so often, they become familiar. The familiar becomes real — and nearly impossible to challenge.

Frost, the GOP hardliner who financed the GRA via his alleged Ponzi scheme, is the other side of the same coin. Instead of exploiting mistrust in institutions, he preyed upon people who were willing to trust — his fellow church-going conservatives. His pitch was that he was building “the patriotic economy” for small and mid-sized businesspeople who were “authentic followers of Christ.” He advertised on right-wing media, the echo-chamber for validating conservative beliefs, and promised returns of up to 13% annually. It was all a lie, but his GOP audience had been conditioned not to question.

“It was like lending money to your neighbor,” John Vander Wiele, one of the First Liberty investors, told the Newnan Times-Herald. “You feel good about it because you know where he lives. But it’s probably not the right thing.”

It’s never the right thing when you betray the truth. Georgia Republicans have given safe harbor to conspiracies for so long, too many people have stopped doubting them. Both at the state and national level, this culpability has been baked into the party. Perhaps it’s no surprise now that Georgia’s Republican Party leaders would like to distance themselves from the GRA, its purity tests and its shady financial backing.

But intraparty clashes will likely complicate the 2026 election, when Democratic U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff is up for reelection and Georgians must choose a new governor. The damage is done.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.

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