SPERRY: New Evidence Reveals EPA Mega-Grant Has Stacey Abrams’ Fingerprints All Over It

By Paul Sperry RealClearInvestigations:

Last month, President Trump singled out Georgia activist Stacey Abrams as someone who helped orchestrate a controversial $2 billion deal between left-wing nonprofit groups and the Environmental Protection Agency during the Biden administration.

“We know she’s involved,” Trump told Congress.

He was right. But after his statement, the Washington media went into overdrive to pooh-pooh her role in a frenzy of “fact-checking.”

The Washington Post, for one, claimed Abrams’ role in the Biden massive green-energy initiative has been “vastly overblown” by President Trump and the “right-wing media.”

The paper’s top fact-checker asserted it’s “a stretch” to suggest the Democratic politician helped land the grant. “[S]he was not involved with Power Forward’s EPA grant,” Post reporter Glenn Kessler recently wrote.

The Post also denied she had “any role at Power Forward Communities beyond advising Rewiring America,” one of the partners in the coalition.

This claim was echoed by PolitiFact, a fact-checking site run by the liberal Poynter Institute, which quoted an Abrams spokesperson as saying, “Abrams did not have a role at Power Forward Communities beyond her position at Rewiring America.”

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But in fact, Abrams and her partner Ari Matusiak, CEO of Rewiring America, were the driving force behind winning the massive grant, something they revealed in their own words during a podcast last year. Matusiak said she helped “put together” the Power Forward Communities coalition to apply for and win the $2 billion grant.

By his own account, Matusiak also helped draft the 2022 Biden legislation that created the $27 billion green fund that Rewiring and its coalition were able to tap into two years later.

PolitiFact also claimed Abrams is no longer working for Rewiring, but Abrams’ own website said she is still working with the nonprofit.

“Stacey serves as a senior adviser and consultant for Rewiring America,” her site states.

Abrams and Matusiak did not respond to requests for comment.

A timeline drawn from public records, however, sheds light on how their histories dovetailed to secure the multi-billion dollar grant from the Biden administration:

2021-2022: Matusiak, a former special assistant to President Obama, joins Rewiring America, and the group meets with Biden officials and Democratic lawmakers to help craft many of the provisions that ended up in the climate bill – the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA). The bill, which President Biden would sign the following year, creates the unprecedented funding vehicle for green groups like Rewiring. “The Inflation Reduction Act was something that we were really involved with in shaping,” Rewiring CEO Matusiak said last year. “We were very involved in shaping that.”

Democratic U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, a big proponent of the IRA, recently confirmed, “An enormous amount of the work that Rewiring America did ended up in the climate bill.”

A search of federal lobby records turned up no record of Matusiak or Rewiring America as registered lobbyists.

August 2022: Biden signs the Inflation Reduction Act, which creates the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund that would later benefit Rewiring.

September 2022: Matusiak and other Rewiring America officials travel to the White House to meet with Biden and celebrate the bill’s passage on the White House lawn.

November 2022: White House announces Washington-based Rewiring America will lead a coalition to educate low-income households about the Inflation Reduction Act rebates and tax credits to electrify “everything” in homes and businesses, effectively banning more cost-efficient natural gas.

Circa January 2023: Rewiring America, which uses a Washington, D.C., mom-and-pop shipping and mailing service as its business address, starts recruiting members of the board and key hires to support its electrification mission. It formally incorporates and begins the “transition” process from its fiscal sponsor, Windward Fund, a nonprofit managed by the liberal “dark money” group Arabella Advisors that provided at least $4.5 million in startup capital for Rewiring, according to tax filing

March 2023: After Biden officials “introduced” Rewiring to Abrams, Rewiring hires  Abrams as senior counsel to help pitch the federal project and educate communities of color about the green financial incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act.

Summer 2023: Abrams and Rewiring CEO Matusiak “put together a coalition to apply for grants from Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund,” according to Matusiak, who is also listed as “founder and co-chair of Power Forward Communities.”

July 2023: EPA formally opens the opportunity for groups to apply for the billions in funding offered through the Inflation Reduction Act.

October 2023: Rewiring America announces it is partnering with Enterprise Community Partners, Local Initiatives Support Corporation, United Way , and Habitat for Humanity to form a coalition – Power Forward Communities – to apply for $9.5 billion from the IRA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund for household decarbonization and electrification.

On its website, which is run by Rewiring, Power Forward Communities lists two nonprofits founded by Abrams – Fair Count and Southern Economic Advancement Project – as some of its “partners” in helping implement its EPA-backed project.

October 2023: Abrams tweets that she is “thrilled to be part of @rewiringamerica and the Power Forward Communities coalition.”

December 2023: White House hosts an “Electrification Summit” with Rewiring America and other green community organizers to discuss how the Inflation Reduction Act created an “electric bank account” of $10,600 on average per household “to help people electrify their homes.”

Circa 2023: Rewiring pressures the U.S. Energy Information Administration to change its methodology for measuring efficiency to show the cost of heating homes with electricity is on par with that of natural gas.

April 2024: White House selects Rewiring America and four other members of the Power Forward Communities coalition to receive a $1.92 billion EPA award to electrify low-income and disadvantaged communities and “electrify a billion machines.”

“We were selected for two billion dollars,” Rewiring America CEO Matusiak gushed with Abrams sitting next to him.

July 2024: Abrams stands by Biden after his poor debate performance against Trump the previous month, penning an Op-Ed  exhorting Democrats that “Our path to victory lies in standing by Biden” and not to “introduce a new, untested candidate.” She added: “[I]t is crucial that we continue to support him … we must do the critical work of getting Biden reelected.”

She also said, “I’m not concerned, I’m committed [to Biden’s candidacy],” adding, “He is our nominee and he will be president again.”

Then she hinted at her motivation for still supporting the troubled president: “[L]et’s be clear: we would not have the Inflation Reduction Act, we would not have the billions of dollars, but for President Joe Biden.”

The Trump administration is now investigating the grant review process, claiming it was not competitive, because Rewiring and Abrams appeared to have the inside track due to their close relationship with the Biden administration. In the meantime, it has frozen the awarded funds. In turn, Power Forward Communities is suing the current administration to release the billions in funding.

This RealClearInvestigations article was republished by The Gateway Pundit with permission.

Paul Sperry is the former D.C. bureau chief for Investor’s Business Daily, Hoover Institution media fellow, author of several books, including bestseller INFILTRATION