Kelly Loeffler

Kelly Lynn Loeffler is an American businesswoman and politician who served as a United States senator for Georgia from 2020 to 2021. A Republican, Loeffler was previously chief executive officer (CEO) of Bakkt, a subsidiary of commodity and financial service provider Intercontinental Exchange, of which her husband, Jeffrey Sprecher, is CEO. She co-owns the Atlanta Dream of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA).

Brian Kemp, the Republican governor of Georgia, appointed Loeffler to the Senate in December 2019 after Republican senator Johnny Isakson resigned for health reasons. Loeffler ran in the 2020 Georgia U.S. Senate special election, seeking to hold the Senate seat until January 3, 2023. She finished second in the November 3 election, advancing to a runoff with Democrat Raphael Warnock held on January 5, 2021. She lost the runoff election to Warnock. In the same election, her fellow Georgia senator, David Perdue, also lost. When Perdue’s term ended on January 3, 2021, Loeffler ascended to be the “senior senator” from Georgia, an honor she held for about three weeks, until Warnock was sworn in.

Loeffler strongly aligned herself to President Donald Trump and touted her “100 percent Trump voting record” during the campaign. She was investigated in connection with the 2020 congressional insider trading scandal after selling stock in companies vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic valued at several million dollars the same day she attended a private briefing of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions on the disease, before the public had been alerted to its severity. Both the Department of Justice and the Senate Ethics Committee eventually dropped their probes of Loeffler, with the Senate Ethics Committee not finding any evidence of her violating federal law, Senate rules or standards of conduct.

After the November 2020 election, Loeffler and fellow senator David Perdue claimed without evidence that there had been “failures” in the election, and called for the resignation of Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, who rejected the accusations. She later supported a lawsuit by Trump allies seeking to overturn the election results, and also announced her intention to object to the certification of the Electoral College results in Congress. After the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Loeffler announced that she would vote to certify the election after all, and did so that evening.