The McKoons’ Ties to George Soros

Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared on October 23rd, 2024, when I removed it because I felt it crossed a line into including a political figure’s spouse, in this case, Jacqueline McKoon, the wife of Georgia Republican Party Chairman, Josh McKoon. I am sure that Mr. Shepherd will tell you that I made his job much harder than I usually do on this post because in order for it to be published I required him to provide definitive proof that Jaquelyn is a public figure in her own right. I cringe when spouses of political figures are dragged into the arena, but in this case Mr. Shepherd has provided that context as you will see below. I also required that the McKoons be offered the opportunity to respond and offer comment.

In 2016, Stacey Abrams and the New Georgia Project were registering new Democrat voters ahead of the election which would see Republican Donald Trump lose three historically Republican counties, Cobb, Gwinnett, and Henry, to Democrat Hillary Clinton, setting up a historic partisan shift in the Atlanta metro area and turning Georgia from a reliable red state to a pivotal swing state.

It’s no secret that Abrams had started long before 2016 laying groundwork to make Democrats competitive in Georgia again. According to the Advance, the local newspaper in Toombs and Montgomery Counties:

“In 2013, Abrams orchestrated the initiative called the New Georgia Project, a subsidiary of another of Abrams’s projects created in 1998 called Third Sector Development whose main objective was to register minority voters across the state. In 2014 she registered an advocacy organization called Voter Access Institute, Inc.

According to campaign contribution disclosure reports, Abrams’ tax-exempt organizations are receiving contributions from wealthy donors such as Democratic mega-donor and California based billionaire Tom Steyer and liberal billionaire George Soros. Soros himself gave her political action committee, Georgia Next, Inc., a check for half a million dollars in 2014 to help her voter registration efforts, according to Atlanta Magazine.”

The article goes on to note that, “The state department investigated allegations that the New Georgia Project submitted dozens of fraudulent voter registration applications in the months leading up to the 2018 vote.”

Jim Galloway at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted in 2014 that the Soros contribution was about 70% of what Georgia Next had raised as of Oct. 25 of that year. But Soros’ name wasn’t the only one to raise eyebrows at the AJC. Galloway goes on stating Georgia Next, “Besides Soros, the group got big money from San Francisco lawyer Steven Phillips ($100,000) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers ($50,000).”

Two years later, in the wake of the Abrams effort to change the political landscape of Georgia and the launch of her campaign for Georgia Governor, State Senator Josh McKoon also leaves his seat in the Georgia General Assembly to run for Georgia’s Secretary of State.

What Josh McKoon fails to tell Republican primary voters across Georgia is that his family has been on the payroll of George Soros and Stacey Abrams through his spouse’s company, Constituent Connect, LLC. The information becomes irrelevant as, despite winning straw polls at GOP events across the state, McKoon fails to connect with actual voters and places a distant third in the primary.

Josh McKoon’s wife, Jacqueline Byrd McKoon, is listed as the sole owner of Constituent Connect, LLC, which she formed in 2014, a couple of years after the McKoon’s married. In 2016, Stacey Abrams hired Constituent Connect paying $5,000 for “Strategic Consulting” according to to Abrams’ public campaign disclosure report.

2016 was also the year the Soros backed SuperPAC, Georgia Next, Inc. also hired Constituent Connect and paying $5,509.00.

Two years later, supported by the groundwork she had spent years laying, Abrams would raise to national superstardom with Presidential campaigns being planned after she won the Georgia Governor’s mansion.

She has yet to concede her loss to Brian Kemp who narrowly defeated her in one of the tightest Governor races in Georgia’s modern history. Also in 2017 and 2018, the McKoon household would be enriched by Democratic legislative clients like Calvin Smyre, Ed Harbison, Darrel Ealum, and Freddie Powell Sims.

In 2020, Constituent Connect received $2,000 again from Biden surrogate State Rep. Calvin Smyre, who, after Biden’s election, would be nominated by the new President to serve as the U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic. though the Senate would not confirm him to either. Campaign disclosures show she also previously received $1,200 from Smyre in 2018.

To be fair, income from Democrats comprised only about 9.5% of Constituent Connect LLC’s income between 2016 and 2020, amounting to only $24,681.00 out of $259,432.00, but at the same time she was working for Democrats like Smyre and Feddie Powell Sims, McKoon was being paid by the Georgia Republican Party having been hired by her husband’s mentor who would eventually endorse Josh McKoon to succeed him as Party Chair, David Shafer. For those who believe there is no difference between the two parties, all the have to do is point to the McKoon household profiting from both Democratic and Republican clients.

It is the policy here at Peach Pundit the Blog to leave criticisms on the elected official as spouses, children, and other family members are not the ones who choose to seek elected office, regardless if its public office or Party Office. However, Josh McKoon made it very clear when he ran for State Party Chairman in 2023 that the McKoons were a package deal. Josh McKoon stated clearly on his campaign webpage (which is still available on web.archive.org).

While the issue of the McKoon household profiting from Abrams and Soros was brought out in a number of sources prior to Josh McKoon’s election as State Party Chair, the dogmatic and almost obsessive focus of Josh McKoon and the Georgia Republican Party on the State Election Board and the lawsuits surrounding it rather than statewide election GOTV activities seems to cast it in a new light. Certainly, if I had a hand in the Democrats’ efforts to flip Georgia, I would want to focus on meaningless and possibility illegal rules changes and continue to blame a “stolen election” too.

In Washington, D.C., avoiding responsibility for something one helps to create is know as the “Potomac Two-Step“. Maybe in Georgia, it would be better referred to as the the “Chattahoochee Trot,” but either way, Josh McKoon is dancing around the issues that have caused a bluing of Georgia, namely, the efforts by Soros and Abrams to get new Democratic voters registered and engaged, an effort that the McKoons personally profited from.

Maybe it is easier for McKoon to turn his focus from organizing grassroots canvassing to directing the actions of three of the five State Elections Board members and writing appellate briefs instead, but, unfortunately for McKoon, his bravado was silenced as the Georgia Supreme Court unanimously halted McKoon‘s and other’s efforts to impose illegal and burdensome new election rules with only weeks left before the election.

According to the AJC’s report, McKoon responded to the decision by attacking the Court stating, “The rules adopted by the SEB to reinforce key transparency and checks and balances in Georgia law are common sense. It is supremely disappointing to observe yet another failure of our judicial system to expeditiously resolve critical questions about our elections process.”

But all the Georgia Supreme Court did was to reinforce that these rules need to be put in place by the elected representatives of the people, not some appointed bureaucrat acting at Josh McKoon’s direction and outside the authority of state law. As an attorney and former State Senator, Josh McKoon should know the difference.

The irony is, in the end, Donald Trump won Georgia, as polling trends were pointing to in the days leading up to the General Election. With the GAGOP focused on legal fights that ultimately didn’t matter, the winning outcome in Georgia was likely because of the efforts of Brian Kemp and the Governor’s massive political operation, and not because of the futile efforts of Trump’s most devoted allies the GAGOP to reshape elections rules.

For metro counties that have seen since 2016 their political landscape dramatically shift from red to blue, it’s hard to imagine that the leader of the Georgia Republican Party financially benefited from the demise of those counties’ Republican majorities, but following the money from Soros and Abrams to the McKoon household, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion. Coupled that with the lack of effort by the Georgia Republican Party to counter the efforts of Abrams and Soros with the resources necessary to win back those counties, the 2024 election results in Cobb, Gwinnett, Henry, and other metro counties will be blue for the foreseeable future.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: While the facts speak for themselves, prior to this article’s publication, I invited Josh McKoon to add his comments or additional information may offer a better explanation. As today, McKoon has yet to respond.