Frosts’ Assets Frozen
If you’ve been involved in Georgia politics for any length of time, you’ve probably heard the name Frost. The family has been active in grassroots organizing for years and until recently, they ran a private lending firm out of Newnan called First Liberty Building and Loan. That company shut down abruptly last week, posting this on their website:
According to a report by The Times-Herald’s Clay Neely, the shutdown wasn’t just a quiet winding down of business. Payments to investors were suspended indefinitely. Employees are no longer answering phones or emails. The FBI has reportedly taken control of the company’s records. In other words, this is not a normal closure.
One investor quoted in the article, Jordan Baldwin of Sharpsburg, said he put in over $230,000 across multiple bridge loans with First Liberty. He told Neely, “They’d tell you someone was trying to borrow $5 million, and they were worth $20 million, so if Brant (Frost IV) had to liquidate them, you’d probably be made whole… It all looked like a slam dunk.” Baldwin also made clear he doesn’t believe Brant Frost V was just an innocent bystander. “You could go to either of them anytime. Brant V was handling payments when his dad wasn’t around. He knew exactly what was going on. They were both in it together.”
We’ve also heard troubling rumors that Brant Frost IV has told some people close to him that he thinks he’s going to jail. Whether that turns out to be true remains to be seen. Every American is innocent until proven guilty, and the details of this situation are still emerging. But there’s no question that the business is shuttered, investors are left in the dark, and people are asking hard questions.
Among those questions is whether this financial collapse touches politics. The Frosts were not just businessmen. They were also political players, particularly through the Georgia Republican Assembly and its PAC. That PAC made major contributions to Rep. Noelle Kahaian, Senator Colton Moore, and Rep. Charlice Byrd as examples. It was quietly terminated on June 29, just before the public announcement of First Liberty’s collapse.
Several people have reached out to me asking whether the Georgia Republican Assembly PAC might have been funded with money tied to these allegedly ill-gotten gains. The truth will come out in time. What we do know right now is this: $124,000 came into the PAC from an entity called First National Investments, which is co-located with First Liberty at the same address in Newnan. On top of that, individual members of the Frost family contributed another $21,912 to the PAC. I only pulled up one of their filings from 2022-2023, I will leave analyzing the rest to you, Dear Reader. You can find them at ethics.ga.gov and searching for Georgia Republican Assembly.
I am not a conspiracy theorist so I am not in the habit of drawing lines between dots just because it might get clicks or create a salacious story. I prefer to draw conclusions from actual evidence so I will refrain from speculating what the relationship between the Georgia Republican Assembly PAC and these allegations may be. But I will say this; if anyone beyond Brant IV was involved in questionable financial dealings, or if there was money clandestinely funneled from these investors to the PAC, you can be sure federal investigators are digging through emails, texts, and paper trails to find out exactly who knew what and when.
For now, what’s clear is this: what looked like a “slam dunk” was anything but. And a whole lot of people are now holding empty bags instead of repayment checks. This was just the stone hitting the water, how far the ripples travel remains to be seen.
Stay tuned.
