Does ANYBODY give a hoot about Allison Riggs’s $250K+ in taxpayer-provided COVID $$$ ?
Not yet, apparently. The Raleigh drive-by media and the state capital’s uni-party are still fawning all over Madame Riggs (D). They want us to believe she was an innocent victim at the hands of that Confederate-uniform wearing scoundrel Jefferson Griffin (R).
One of the Raleigh drive-by media’s ‘Mean Girls’ was actually seen on Twitter / X moaning about how “exhausting” Griffin’s court challenge to the Supreme Court race results has been. (*How’s that hard-hitting piece about who walks on the state seal going?*)
It didn’t matter that Griffin actually had a point about vital election law not being enforced during the administration of his race. There are some so-called media organizations still hanging around the sector between Jones and Blount Streets in our state’s capital. *But too many of their on-air personalities have their heads filled with visions of becoming the next Loretta Boniti to bother with any real journalism.*
Griffin even had his fellow Republicans beating on him to back off his challenge. (*The election system works for them. THEY are IN office. Why call attention to and screw around with what’s ‘worked’?*)
Griffin should turn to congressman Mark Harris for a little comfort. Harris knows all about getting thrown under the bus by alleged *friends and allies.*
We had a rather interesting story about Riggs way back in 2023 that never has been refuted:
Allison Riggs is on a meteoric rise through our state’s leftist political circles.
She’s been co-executive director of an abomination called The Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which has harassed and terrorized capitalists and other freedom-loving people across the Tar Heel State (and points southward) for years and years.
In January 2023, Riggs was appointed by Governor Doofus to the state Court of Appeals. Today, he announced her appointment to the state Supreme Court.
Riggs was with SCSJ from September 2014 to January 2023. From August 2019 to December 2022 she served as the organization’s “chief counsel for voting rights” and “co-executive director for programs.” Given those titles, it would be safe to assume she had a considerable amount of influence within the SCSJ.
We — and others – have done some reporting about various politically-connected folks in North Carolina applying for and being awarded Paycheck Protection (PPP) Loans from the US Small Business Association during the COVID pandemic lockdown. The PPP loans were meant to aid small businesses at risk of losing employees and / or significant chunks of business because of the COVID lockdowns.
SBA rules indicated that, in order to be eligible for the loans, your organization had to, among other things: (1) demonstrate a 25 percent or greater drop in total revenue and (2) show that less than 50 percent of your business was political. […]
As you can see, Riggs’s organization was awarded a PPP loan worth $257,088 in April 2020 — while Riggs was a senior figure in the operation. You can also see that the “loan” was forgiven as of August 23, 2021 — which technically makes it all a GRANT.
So, let’s see how Riggs’s group matched up to the SBA’s requirements for applying for and receiving PPP loans.
The above is IRS form 990 submitted by the Southern Coalition for Social Justice for the year 2020 — when the PPP loan was approved.
Browse to Line 12 of the above form and you will see SCSJ reported their 2019 Total Revenue at $6,645,336. They reported their 2020 Total Revenue at $8,888,698.
That’s hardly a decrease. In fact, if my math is right, THAT is a 25 percent increase in revenue. If the numbers shown on Form 990 were reported on SCSJ’s application for the PPP loan, they should have been DENIED. Do the numbers on the group’s PPP loan application MATCH those on Form
990? If not, WHY?
You can check publicly-available resources like THIS to see that federal authorities are aggressively cracking down on people and organizations who played fast and loose with their applications for COVID “relief” cash from the SBA.
Don’t get me wrong. We’re not convicting Riggs of wrongdoing. Granted, she was in charge when all of this went down at her workplace.
But we do believe that she and her former employer, The Southern Coalition for Social Justice, owe the public an explanation. We certainly don’t need to have a state Supreme Court justice — or a sitting Appeals Court judge, for that matter — under scrutiny by federal authorities, now DO we?
So, it doesn’t appear the ol’ Coalition qualified for six-figures from Uncle Sam. But they GOT IT. What happened to the cash, I wonder? Did it get returned to the taxpayers? Did a few lawyers get sweet raises?
This is federal money we’re talking about. SO, it would be under the auspices of the Trump DOJ to look into it. Jeff Jackson can’t save her on this one.
Balanced Nutrition — a nonprofit run by the family of former Lt. Governor Mark Robinson — also got COVID cash. BN’s figure — roughly $52K — was much smaller than the Southern Coalition’s. But we need answers on that one just as much as we need them for Riggs’s old employer.
It was political malpractice not to raise these issues in the campaign. Of course, judicial ethics rules did not allow Griffin’s campaign to do such things itself, so it would have had to have been done by others. Why did the NCGOP state chairman fail to call a press conference to call attention to this scandal? NCGOP chairmen in the past used to use press conferences for issues like this all the time. Why did the NCGOP dump most of its Judicial Campaign Fund money into the official campaigns of GOP candidates whose hands were tied and could not raise issues like this instead of using the money directly for a campaign linking Riggs to her role at the radical left NC Coalition for Social Justice? If the NCGOP Judicial Campaign Fund had been handled competently, we would have won this race. NCGOP Chairman Jason Simmons has a lot of ‘splainin” to do. This was an unforced error that cost us a key seat on the NC Supreme Court.
Riggs won the race because Democrats were smart enough to do an outside campaign, setting up a front group called “NC Families First” to do issue oriented mailings attacking Griffin and wildly distorting facts to make him sound liberal. They mailed these postcards to Republican voters. I received one and my wife received four.. The Democrats, even if playing dirty, ran that campaign competently. The NCGOP did not. We simply have to do better than the badly blundered “help” for Jefferson Griffin.