As his legislative career wound down, Sen. Brandon Beach watched the Georgia House of Representatives debate one of his final achievements: a bill that potentially could allow President Donald Trump to recoup millions of dollars in legal costs in the Fulton County election interference case.
Senate Bill 244 would apply to any Georgia criminal defendant in a case in which the prosecutor had been disqualified for misconduct and the case dismissed. But Beach, an Alpharetta Republican, had made it clear it was intended to aid the president and his codefendants in the election case, including a fellow senator.
Democrats blasted the measure as a political favor to Trump, who had just named Beach the next treasurer of the United States.
“The bill’s sponsor is headed on to bigger and better things in D.C.,” Rep. Shea Roberts, D-Atlanta, said during the April 2 debate. “This bill looks like a parting gift to his colleague and a bonus to his new boss. No wonder people don’t trust their government anymore.”
Beach denied his bill was a political gift or had anything to do with his new job. But it’s not the first time he’s been accused of doing Trump’s bidding.
Once known as a “chamber of commerce” Republican and transit advocate, Beach has become one of Trump’s fiercest defenders in Georgia.
He played a significant role in Trump’s campaign to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 victory here. That led to the criminal charges against Trump and 18 other Georgia allies in Georgia
Beach was not charged, though for a while he became an outsider in his own Republican Party.
But he never disavowed Trump, and his loyalty has paid off. As treasurer, he’ll oversee the U.S. Mint and Fort Knox and see his signature on every dollar and other currency printed in the United States.
“Listen, I was loyal, and I never blinked,” Beach told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I never wavered.”
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
Making his name
In 2013, Beach boarded Bus 40 at Kennesaw State University, determined to ride transit to Duluth in neighboring Gwinnett County.
In Marietta, he caught another bus to MARTA’s Arts Center station in Atlanta and then a train to Doraville. He finished with a third bus that took him to the arena. The trip took him three and a half hours and involved three different transit agencies.
Beach was a newly elected state senator, and his trip had a point: metro Atlanta transit service was too fragmented and difficult to navigate. Transit, he said, needed to be more efficient and easier to use if metro Atlanta were to continue to grow.
A video Beach made of his journey attracted attention.
“It let people know how absurd the system had gotten,” said former state Rep. Kevin Tanner, R-Dawsonville, who served as House transportation chairman. “It changed the way people thought about the entire system.”
Beach later became Senate transportation chairman. Working with Tanner, he helped craft legislation that created a new board to oversee transit planning and expansion in metro Atlanta.
Expansion has proved elusive — voters in Gwinnett and Cobb counties have rejected proposals in recent years. But the legislation cleared the way for state funding of capital projects such as the renovations of MARTA’s Five Points and Bankhead rail stations.
Stopping the steal
Seven years after his transit odyssey, Beach found himself at the center of a very different fight.
It was a month after the 2020 election. At the state Capitol, Beach and other lawmakers had spent more than six hours listening to Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and a parade of witnesses spin tales of late-night ballot stuffing and voting irregularities that they said cast doubt on Biden’s victory in Georgia.
Beach told his colleagues about one voter — a woman who had been proud to stand for two and a half hours to vote at the Alpharetta Library. But now she believed her vote had been “compromised” and “diluted,” Beach said.
“We can’t just wait and think that things are gong to get better at the next election,” he said. “We need to take action.”
Beach was doing plenty to help Trump. He and a handful of other senators — including Burt Jones, now Georgia’s lieutenant governor — were among those calling for a special session of the General Assembly to investigate election irregularities.
When Gov. Brian Kemp and legislative leaders rebuffed their efforts, they tried to gather enough legislators’ signatures to convene a session to “take back” the power to appoint presidential electors.
They sided with Trump in unsuccessful lawsuits. And they wrote a letter to Mike Pence, urging the vice president to postpone the Jan. 6, 2021, certification of election results. That could have allowed the Georgia General Assembly to attempt to overturn the election when it convened for its regular session later in January.
“I believe if we can get a 10 to 12 day extension, we can blow this wide-open,” Beach wrote at the time.
But claims of widespread election fraud were false.
Pence ultimately certified the election, but not before a crowd of angry Trump supporters descended on the U.S. Capitol to try to stop him.
In the wake of the attack, Beach paid a price for his role in Trump’s “stop the steal” campaign.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Then-Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan stripped Beach and Jones of Senate committee chairmanships. And a member of the North Fulton Community Improvement District tried unsuccessfully to have Beach fired from his job as executive director.
“I didn’t think we should be paying tax dollars to an organization that was led by an election denier,” said Steve Berman, the office developer who lobbied for Beach’s ouster.
Some legislators marveled at Beach’s apparent transformation from chamber-of-commerce Republican to MAGA warrior. At the time, Beach insisted he hadn’t changed. He said he just wanted to get to the bottom of Trump’s election fraud claims.
And he doubled down on his support of Trump.
He was one of the few Georgia Republicans who endorsed former U.S. Sen. David Perdue in his Trump-backed campaign to unseat Gov. Brian Kemp in the 2022 Republican primary.
Kemp trounced Perdue and easily defeated Democrat Stacey Abrams in the general election. It seemed Beach had become an outsider within his own party. But that was more than two years ago — an eternity in politics.
Trump is back in the White House. Jones won the lieutenant governor’s job in 2022 and has his eye on the governor’s race next year.
And now Beach is leaving the Senate to become U.S. treasurer.
Justice or politics?
At his new job, Beach will oversee the production of currency at the U.S. Mint and keep tabs on the gold reserves at Fort Knox. He’ll also be a key adviser to the treasury secretary on community development issues and a liaison to the Federal Reserve, which sets interest rates and takes other steps to control inflation and unemployment.
“It’s all about relationships. I’m going to go up to D.C. and build relationships, learn and I’m going to help President Trump carry out his economic agenda,” he said. “We want to make this economy roll again.”
In his final days in the Senate, Beach was celebrated. He signed phony money. He accepted a jacket that featured a pattern of $100 bills. Presiding over the Senate, Jones praised Beach as a loyal friend who stuck by his beliefs when they were considered “toxic” at the Capitol.
“He stayed somebody who’s very passionate about what he was believing in, and he’s very passionate about supporting President Trump and the current administration, and it pays off,” Jones said.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
But before he left the General Assembly, Beach had unfinished business.
It rankled Beach that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis charged 19 people — including Trump — for their roles in trying to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia.
The case has foundered since defense attorneys last year disclosed that Willis had a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor she hired to help lead the case. A series of legal challenges has followed, and in December the Georgia Court of Appeals disqualified Willis. She has asked the Georgia Supreme Court to overturn that decision.
So, Beach introduced his bill allowing the defendants to collect attorneys fees arguing their reputations have been damaged and they deserve compensation. The money would come from Fulton County taxpayers.
“These aren’t criminals,” he said. “These are good, solid people.”
Campaign disclosure reports show Trump has paid his top attorneys in the case about $2.7 million, while the Georgia Republican Party has paid at least $2 million in legal costs for some of the other defendants.
Democrats say Republicans are using SB 244 as a means of political retribution. Rep Tanya Miller, D-Atlanta, called the bill “a brazen attempt to rewrite history” by casting Trump and the other defendants as victims of political persecution.
“It should offend every Georgian that members of this General Assembly want to use our taxpayer dollars to support individuals who tried to subvert the will of the people just because Trump wouldn’t accept that he lost the 2020 election,” Miller said.
Beach said it is Willis who has wasted taxpayer money on the racketeering prosecutions of the Trump and the Young Slime Life cases while Fulton County faces a backlog of ordinary criminal cases. He accused Willis of conducting a political prosecution against Trump — something the DA has repeatedly denied.
“It was a witch hunt. So, I don’t have any apologies about doing what I did,” Beach said.
“But it had nothing to do with me getting a job,” he said. “I’ve been fighting for him for four years to do the right thing.”
On the last day of the legislative session, the Senate approved a final version of the bill by a vote of 35 to 18, sending it to the governor’s desk.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Geoff Duncan.
Staff writer Greg Bluestein contributed to this report
About the Author
Keep Reading
The Latest
Featured
