Chris Carr, while unique amongst Republicans for his notable lack of participation in Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 Presidential election, is also not immune to responsibility for and complicity in it. Carr did resign from his Chairmanship of RAGA over the group’s role in fomenting the insurrection, but he took three months following the events of January 6 to do so. Additionally, critics argued that RAGA “became even more anti-democratic” under Carr’s leadership and that his resignation represented little more than a convenient political stunt.
Of course, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution also reported n 2022 that while Carr negotiated a deal with Johnson & Johnson over its hand in the opioid epidemic, he was simultaneously accepting thousands of dollars in donations from PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry’s major lobbying and trade organization. That same year, the Augusta Chronicle reported that Carr’s office was leaving defendants languishing in county jails for months-going-on-years while awaiting a prosecutor to move forward in their cases, someone who can only be assigned by the AG’s office.
Instead of fulfilling his Constitutional obligation to guarantee accused persons’ a speedy trial, Carr arraigned nearly 60 people on racketeering charges for their alleged involvement in the 2020 George Floyd protests in Atlanta and/or the Stop Cop City movement in the city. Carr’s ongoing prosecution represents an “exceedingly frivolous slate of charges, one that seeks to establish ‘mutual aid,’ ‘collectivism,’ and ‘anarchism,’ as prosecutable offenses that are also intrinsically terroristic. Jacobin aptly called the charges, and the tinfoil-esque indictment which attempts to justify them, outright ‘cartoonish.’” Not only were the charges bizarre and anti-democratic in their overt attempts to criminalize constitutionally-protected displaces of dissent and free speech, but also notably serviced the interests of many of Carr’s own donors.
Chris Carr has been Georgia’s Attorney General since 2016, and was RAGA’s Chairman from 2020 – 2021.