Failed Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams has landed an attorney gig at a left-wing dark money group behind efforts to crack down on gas stoves.
Rewiring America, an environmental advocacy group, has been at the center of a push to restrict and ban gas stoves while “electrifying everything in our communities.” The organization announced on Tuesday that Abrams will join as senior counsel and help to “launch and scale a national awareness campaign and a network of large and small communities working to help Americans go electric,” according to a press release.
STACEY ABRAMS ACTING AS INTERNATIONAL OBSERVER IN NIGERIAN ELECTIONS
“I’m excited to join Rewiring America to share the benefits of electrification and ensure families get their fair share,” Abrams said on Tuesday. “I look forward to working together as we build the tools that will transform everyday Americans from energy consumers to energy moguls in their own communities.”
Rewiring America is a project of the Windward Fund, an environmental group managed by Arabella Advisors, the largest Democratic-linked dark money network in the United States, according to public records. This arrangement allows Rewiring America not to file tax forms with the IRS, though records show that it received roughly $300,000 in 2020 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a social justice group run by the powerful Rockefeller Family.
Since December 2022, Rewiring America has come under scrutiny from Republicans over its research associate Talor Gruenwald co-authoring a study associating gas stoves with childhood asthma. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm promoted the study on Twitter and, in June 2021, met privately with the Rocky Mountain Institute, a group that funded the December study, Fox News reported.
Richard Trumka Jr., a commissioner of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, said in January 2023 that the government agency was considering a gas stoves ban. But following backlash, the Biden administration backpedaled, with Granholm saying it’s “not true” later that month that there will be a ban.
“How appropriate that Rewiring America, famous for pushing shaky ‘science’ and enriching its leaders, would hire Stacey Abrams,” Scott Walter, president of Capital Research Center, a conservative investigative think tank, told the Washington Examiner. “She’s a fiction writer and election denier whose previous nonprofit work left a trail of scandals involving inflated claims of accomplishment and possible self-dealing. What America needs is more natural gas and less gaslighting.”
On Dec. 14, 2022, Rewiring America attended an “electrification summit” at the White House and a celebration of the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, a $740 billion energy and climate spending package that Biden signed into law in August 2022, according to federal records.
Rewiring America, along with similar environmental advocacy groups, has said electrification of homes is warranted to combat global warming. Right-leaning energy groups have pushed back on these claims, labeling such thinking alarmist and not viable given the country’s reliance on fossil fuels on a day-to-day basis.
“Rewiring America is working to make people aware of how induction stoves, EVs, heat pumps, and other electric appliances are cheaper to operate and healthier — and that there are thousands of dollars of rebates and tax incentives to help folks afford these upgrades,” Alex Amend, a spokesman for Rewiring America, told the Washington Examiner.
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Abrams, whom Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) trounced by roughly 298,000 votes in the 2022 November midterm elections, said in January that she will “likely run again.” Her acceptance of a role at Rewiring America comes amid a voting rights charity that she founded, New Georgia Project, being investigated by Georgia’s secretary of state for “financial irregularities,” the Washington Free Beacon reported.
The charity disclosed a roughly $533,000 consulting payment on its 2021 tax forms to the Black Male Initiative, a Georgia group that claims it never received the money. The initiative’s 2021 tax forms show that it took no consulting money that year.
