The New Georgia Project and an affiliated group, the New Georgia Project Action Fund, admitted to 16 violations of state campaign finance. The fine is the largest ever assessed for violating Georgia campaign finance laws.

According to a consent order approved by the State Ethics Commission on Wednesday, the New Georgia Project admitted it raised and spent millions of dollars to support Abrams’s campaign without registering as an independent political committee, an action required by state law. At the time of the campaign, the group was led by Raphael Warnock, who later became one of the state’s U.S. Senators in 2020.

Because of its campaign work for Abrams, the nonprofit organization admitted that it should have registered with the state as a political committee. Federal law prohibits tax-exempt charities such as this from campaigning for candidates, but this case was focused on the group’s violation of state law.

The New Georgia Project is a voter registration initiative that propelled Abrams into the national spotlight for its efforts in registering first-time voters across the state ahead of her 2018 gubernatorial run. Abrams has not been affiliated with the group since she left to run for governor in 2017.

The order action is an investigation that began in 2019 into the nonprofit organization, which the group said was a politically motivated “fishing expedition.”

“They’re now admitting everything we said was true,” said David Emadi, the executive director of the commission. 

David Fox, an attorney for the New Georgia Project, told the commission that the consent order “relates to events from more than five years ago, and respondents are eager to put the matter behind them.”

“At a fundamental level, my clients understand and respect the commission’s decision on the facts of the law, and we believe that this is a reasonable resolution of this long-standing dispute,” Fox said.

A spokesman for Abrams said in a statement, “Stacey hasn’t been involved in the organization’s work since she departed in 2017.”

Warnock’s Senate office said while he was the leader of the New Georgia Project in 2018, “compliance decisions were not a part of that work.”

Under the consent agreement, the New Georgia Project must pay $150,000 within 30 days and the other half within a year.