89 Facts About David Perdue

David Perdue later joined PillowTex, a North Carolina textile company; the company went bankrupt and folded shortly after his departure in 2003.

David Perdue first ran for the US Senate in 2014, defeating Democratic nominee Michelle Nunn, daughter of former US Senator Sam Nunn.

David Perdue ran for reelection in 2020, losing to Democrat Jon Ossoff, a former investigative journalist and filmmaker, in a January 5,2021, runoff election.

David Perdue was linked to the 2020 congressional insider trading scandal for allegations of STOCK Act violations.

David Perdue sought the Republican nomination in the 2022 Georgia gubernatorial election against incumbent Brian Kemp, and was endorsed by former President Donald Trump.

David Perdue was born in Macon, Georgia, the son of David Alfred Perdue Sr.

David Perdue was raised in Warner Robins, Georgia, and graduated from Northside High School in 1968, where he was an excellent student, a varsity athlete, and class president.

David Perdue went to college for one year at the United States Air Force Academy starting in June 1968, after receiving an appointment from Congressman Jack Brinkley of Georgia, but dropped out after earning low grades.

David Perdue later transferred to Georgia Tech, where he earned a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering in 1972, and a master's degree in operations research in 1975.

David Perdue is the first cousin of former Governor of Georgia and former US Secretary of Agriculture Sonny David Perdue.

David Perdue began his career in 1972 at Kurt Salmon Associates, an international consulting firm, where he worked for 12 years as a management consultant, leaving in 1984.

From 1991 to 1992, David Perdue was a managing director at international clothing company Gitano Group Inc in Singapore.

In 1992, David Perdue took a position as senior vice president of Asia operations for Sara Lee Corporation.

Two years later, David Perdue became senior vice president of operations at Haggar Clothing, increasing international production in lower-cost countries to 75 percent of the company's operations.

In 1998, David Perdue joined Reebok as a senior vice president, eventually rising to president and CEO of the Reebok Brand.

David Perdue negotiated a contract with the National Football League that a former Reebok executive called "revolutionary" for repositioning the company's shoe brand.

David Perdue left Reebok in June 2002 to become the CEO of PillowTex, a North Carolina textile company.

David Perdue had recently emerged from bankruptcy with a heavy debt load and an underfunded pension liability.

David Perdue overhauled the company's inventory line and logistics network and updated its marketing strategy.

David Perdue is credited for arranging the sale of Dollar General in 2007 to private equity investors KKR.

From 2007 to 2009, David Perdue worked as a senior consultant for Indian chemical and textile conglomerate Gujarat Heavy Chemicals Ltd.

In July 2010, his cousin, then-governor Sonny David Perdue, appointed him as a director of the Georgia Ports Authority.

In December 2012, David Perdue Partners acquired Benton Express, an Atlanta-based logistics company, and renamed it Benton Global.

From 2010 to 2014, David Perdue served on the board of directors of the data marketing firm Cardlytics.

David Perdue acquired 75,000 shares in compensation for his board service.

When Cardlytics became publicly owned, David Perdue made $6 million from the shares.

David Perdue touted his business experience, and particularly his experience at Dollar General, in running for political office as a Republican candidate.

David Perdue said he was "proud of" finding lower-cost labor for some companies.

David Perdue's campaign paid a $30,000 fine due to violations in fundraising reports from the 2014 election.

David Perdue's campaign had raised nearly $14 million, setting records for funds raised in a Georgia Senate election.

On October 13,2018, David Perdue visited the Georgia Tech campus to campaign for gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp.

David Perdue snatched away the student's phone, which was recording the exchange.

David Perdue became Georgia's senior senator after Johnny Isakson resigned on December 31,2019.

In 2019, David Perdue wrote Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin a letter expressing concern that owners of professional sports teams could not take advantage of certain tax breaks.

David Perdue requested Mnuchin change the regulation to benefit the owners, but Mnuchin made no change.

In 2019, David Perdue sold his Washington house for $1.8 million to a governor of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which the Senate Banking Committee that David Perdue sits on oversees and FINRA lobbies.

The buyer disputed the agent's claim that David Perdue received an "above market price" with an appraisal that determined that David Perdue actually sold for slightly under market value.

Also, a fifth expert stated that the price David Perdue received was "squarely fair market value".

Many trades were in companies with interests in the committees David Perdue sat on, including banks, cybersecurity firms, and defense firms.

David Perdue's office maintains that all of his stock trading activities were conducted independently through his broker.

In January and February 2016, David Perdue invested in Halyard stocks shortly before and after the Senate first held a hearing on the opioid epidemic in the United States.

In February 2017, David Perdue attempted to remove regulations the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had imposed on the prepaid debit card industry.

The regulations were not removed, but they were scaled down, with David Perdue taking credit in May 2017 for having solicited "significant concessions".

David Perdue's office denied that he knew of the merger before it happened.

Shortly before becoming chairman of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower in January 2019, with jurisdiction over the Navy, David Perdue bought $190,000 of stock in BWX Technologies, which builds nuclear power components for submarines.

Later, David Perdue secured almost $5 billion in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act to build Virginia-class nuclear submarines built with BWX parts.

David Perdue profited between $15,000 and $50,000 when he sold the shares while writing the bill.

David Perdue's office reiterated that he was not personally involved in the stock-trading decisions.

On January 23,2020, David Perdue directed his financial advisers to sell over $1 million in stock of the finance firm Cardlytics weeks before its shares fell significantly.

The Department of Justice investigated this incident, and concluded that David Perdue had not engaged in insider trading.

On January 24,2020, David Perdue bought around $65,000 of stock in DuPont, a company that makes personal protective equipment, on the same day as a private Senate briefing on the spread of COVID-19.

David Perdue bought up to $245,000 in stocks of the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, and sold up to $165,000 in stocks of the casino Caesars Entertainment, which closed its doors during the pandemic.

In May 2020, after his portfolio was scrutinized, David Perdue announced that his financial advisers would no longer buy and sell individual stocks.

David Perdue was criticized for his stock-trading during the coronavirus pandemic, with allegations of insider trading.

David Perdue has said advisers made the trades without his influence.

David Perdue has asserted that the Senate Ethics Committee investigated the incident and in June 2020 privately concluded that it "did not find evidence that [David Perdue's] actions violated federal law, Senate Rules, or standards of conduct".

In May 2020, David Perdue argued that the United States "had ordinary flu seasons with more deaths" than the COVID-19 outbreak in the country.

David Perdue ran for reelection to the US Senate in the 2020 election.

David Perdue ran an ad in which Ossoff's nose was enlarged; the apparent use of an anti-Semitic trope was criticized as a dog-whistle reference to Ossoff's Jewish heritage.

David Perdue's campaign pulled the ad after receiving criticism, saying it was an "inadvertent error" and that his design firm had applied a filter that distorted the image.

In October 2020, David Perdue mocked Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris by repeatedly mispronouncing her name during a campaign event.

Some commentators noted that David Perdue, who had been serving with Harris in the Senate since 2017, undoubtedly knows how to pronounce her name, and some said he deliberately pretended otherwise to appeal to a largely white audience.

Raffensperger is a Republican for whom David Perdue campaigned in the 2018 Georgia Secretary of State race.

In December 2020, David Perdue supported a lawsuit by Trump allies seeking to overturn the election results.

In January 2021, after an audio recording captured Trump pressuring Raffensperger to overturn Georgia's presidential election results and "find" enough votes for him to win, David Perdue responded by criticizing Raffensperger for recording the conversation, while David Perdue downplayed the significance of Trump pressuring Raffensperger.

On January 1,2021, David Perdue absented himself from the override of Trump's veto of the defense spending bill.

David Perdue's term expired on January 3,2021, leaving the seat vacant pending the runoff's outcome.

David Perdue initially seemed reluctant to accept the outcome with his campaign sending out a message saying that once every legal vote was counted David Perdue would win.

However, David Perdue did later acknowledge his defeat and concede to Ossoff, two days after the election.

In February 2021, David Perdue filed paperwork to run against incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock in the 2022 election.

That same month, David Perdue said he would not have certified the 2020 elections if he had been governor at the time, and he filed a lawsuit that recycled false claims of fraud about the 2020 election.

David Perdue pledged to create a new separate police unit for investigating electoral fraud and electoral crimes and to abolish the state income tax.

David Perdue faced criticism from Governor Kemp around his prior history of outsourcing jobs in the companies he has run.

David Perdue had been a close ally of Trump while in the Senate.

David Perdue was initially reluctant to support Trump's proposed tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum, but came to support them.

On January 11,2018, David Perdue attended a meeting at the White House at which, according to people with direct knowledge of the conversation, Trump called Haiti, El Salvador and African countries "shithole nations" and said the United States should not take in immigrants from them.

David Perdue said he did not recall Trump making those statements.

Three days later, on ABC's This Week, David Perdue changed his position, saying definitively that Trump "did not use that word", and that the accusation was "a gross misrepresentation".

Three White House officials told the Washington Post that David Perdue privately expressed belief that Trump had said "shithouse", not "shithole".

On January 1,2021, David Perdue absented himself from the override of Trump's veto of the defense spending bill.

In December 2017, David Perdue voted for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

David Perdue voted for the 2017 budget, which could add as much as $1.5 trillion to deficits over ten years, because he said the tax cuts could lead to more revenue due to the economic growth they would encourage.

In September 2018, David Perdue was one of six Republican senators, as well as Bernie Sanders, who voted against a $854 billion spending bill for the Defense, Health and Human Services, Labor and Education departments, meant to avoid a government shutdown.

In March 2017, David Perdue co-sponsored the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, a bill that would make it a federal crime for Americans to encourage or participate in boycotts against Israel and Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories if protesting actions by the Israeli government.

In November 2019, at the White House's request, David Perdue blocked a vote on recognizing the Armenian genocide.

In January 2020, David Perdue expressed support for the US military's assassination of Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani by drone strike at the Baghdad International Airport.

David Perdue opposed the Affordable Care Act and voted to repeal it.

In June 2019, David Perdue supported Trump's decision to place tariffs on Mexico unless illegal immigration from Mexico stopped.

David Perdue opposed the Common Core plan, which Georgia Republican leaders adopted in 2010, and then turned against.