CUMMING, Georgia. – Three days before the second round of elections to decide control of the US Senate, Senator Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) – who has run a relentlessly negative campaign against her Democratic opponent, Pastor Raphael Warnock – is playing the toughest attacks and personals seen so far in this already heated race.
In a campaign interrupted on Saturday morning in Cumming, a town on the conservative outskirts of northern Atlanta, Loeffler accused Warnock of being “involved in child abuse, domestic violence – he is hiding, he does not answer those questions”.
This phrase drew applause from the crowd – and from one man, the well-known refrain of the Trump era reserved for the most hated political figures: “Arrest him!”
The senator then said that “Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer” contributed to Warnock’s campaign. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” he added. Loeffler was probably referring to David Boies, the prominent lawyer who once represented Weinstein. Boies made a donation to a PAC that supports Georgia’s Democrats, but not specifically to Warnock’s campaign, according to federal records.
In making the explosive charges, Loeffler was referring to a couple of events that defined the GOP’s effort to attack Warnock’s character.
One is a March incident in which the police were called after a dispute between Warnock and his wife when they were in the process of divorce. Warnock’s ex-wife claimed that he ran over her foot with the car; recently launched the police body’s capture camera telling officers that Warnock was a “great actor”. That phrase was introduced in a blitz publicity attack, financed by Loeffler’s Republican Party allies, flooding Georgia’s radio waves before the election.
Warnock denied any wrongdoing and no charges were filed after the incident. O Atlanta Journal Constitution reported on December 30 that, according to hours of footage from the camera body, Atlanta police officers expressed doubts that Warnock injured his wife. Ouleye Warnock told the AJC that she felt that the incident had no place in the Senate election.
The second is a 2002 incident at a Maryland summer camp run by the then Warnock Church in Baltimore, in which he and another religious leader were arrested after interrupting a police investigation into allegations of abuse at the camp. Warnock said at the time that he was preventing the police from speaking to campers without the children’s lawyers present; Later, the Maryland police gave him credit for cooperating with the investigation and called the prison “communication failure”. Last week, the story surfaced when an ex-camper claimed that the counselors punished him by forcing him to sleep outside and throwing urine at him.
Last week, after Loeffler said that Warnock “needs to answer” for what happened, Warnock’s campaign told the AJC, “No matter how many lies Senator Loeffler tells, the facts are the same: Reverend Warnock was helpful in law enforcement with his investigation and they thanked him.”
In response to Loeffler’s allegations, a Warnock spokesman said the senator “spent her entire campaign lying about Reverend Warnock and trying to divide the Georgians”.
“Georgians are aware of Kelly Loeffler’s dishonest campaign and know that, during her year in the Senate, she spent much more time looking after herself than looking after them,” said the spokesman.
For most of the two-month run-off campaign, the GOP focused on painting Warnock as a dangerous radical from the far left, while broadcasting fragments of his previous sermons. Many Democrats, including the candidates themselves, have called these ads racist in the way they touch certain tropes.
But many Republican voters in Georgia cannot think about the next election without thinking about the November 3 election. President Trump has settled in Georgia, claiming, without any evidence, that the state election was fraudulent and hopelessly corrupt. This fantasy took root at the base of the Republican Party, and key leaders – including Trump – asked Georgia voters to vote in the January 5 election, even if they believed the whole system was rotten.
Joining Loeffler on Saturday was Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), who attended the demonstration shortly before his office announced it would lead a group of Republican senators in opposition to Biden’s victory when the Senate met to certify the results. of the Electoral College on January 6. In a joint statement, the senators claimed that the 2020 election suffered from “unprecedented” electoral fraud, but they failed to produce any specific evidence of this, just as Trump’s legal team failed in its series of errors trying to overturn the election in the court.
Speaking to the crowd in the back of a pickup truck, Cruz made unfounded claims that Democrats stole the 2020 election – and accused them of planning to do the same for the second round of Georgia.
“Are they going to try to steal it? Yes, ”said Cruz. “But I’m going to tell you what we’re going to do – we’re going to win by a margin big enough that no one will steal the state of Georgia.”