Albers left his job after the Lincoln Project targeted his employer and clients on Twitter.
A state senate leader in Georgia lost his job at a law firm after he says he was smeared online by the Lincoln Project, which published a series of since-deleted tweets late last week accusing him of co-sponsoring “a bill meant to suppress black votes” and “institute a new Jim Crow.”
In its tweets, the disgraced anti-Trump organization also tagged Senator John Albers’s employer, and many of the company’s top clients, writing that they are helping to pay his salary “and strip votes away from millions of black Georgians.” The tweets concluded by declaring that “It’s time to stand on the right side of history,” and “It’s time to make a decision.”
But Senate Bill 62, which Albers co-sponsored but did not author, has virtually nothing to do with stripping votes from anyone. Rather, it is a seemingly innocuous piece of legislation that would require ballots to include a precinct name and number, and “overt, covert and forensic” security elements to make them harder to illegally copy and reproduce.
“It’s to just make sure that nobody can mass produce absentee ballots that aren’t actual, real ballots,” Albers said in an interview with National Review “This is a best practice. And, by the way, lots of other states do it. It’s not controversial. It’s security 101.”
According to the Lincoln Project tweets on Thursday night, the bill was “racist.” The tweets tagged Albers’s then-employer, Fisher Phillips, an Atlanta-based labor and employment law firm that had more than $252 million in gross revenue last year and employs 421 attorneys nationwide. The tweets also tagged a series of prominent Fisher Phillips clients, including Walmart, Starbucks, FedEx, Wells Fargo, Publix, and United Airlines.
“This is what I call economic terrorism,” said Albers, who had worked as Fisher Phillips’s chief information officer for just shy of three years.
Albers said Fisher Phillips has systems monitoring social media, which alerted them to the tweets on Thursday night. The company’s leaders discussed the tweets on Friday morning. He said he explained everything, and “it all seemed reasonable that it was just a bunch of B.S.”
But as the tweets gathered steam on social media, things changed by Friday afternoon.
“The typical corporate America response to that was, ‘Oh my God, cut all ties. This is terrible.’ Even though those folks didn’t actually read the truth,” Albers said.
Because of a non-disclosure agreement, Albers can’t say exactly what happened next, but he’s no longer employed by Fisher Phillips, which he called “my most favorite job I’ve ever had in my life.” Officially, Albers resigned, but he added that “I certainly wish I was still working at the firm as normal. I have the utmost respect for the people there, and I loved my job.”
He said he considers Fisher Phillips a victim of the Lincoln Project’s attack “as much as I was.”
On Monday, Albers released a statement about the situation, and gave an emotional speech about it on the Senate floor. “The Lincoln Project knowingly lied about me in a desperate attempt to remain relevant and distract the public from its own transgressions,” he said on the Senate floor, calling the organization’s tactics “disgusting” but “nothing new.”
“Even though the Lincoln Project is a flailing organization plagued by scandal and hypocrisy, its words matter and have devastating consequences,” Albers said in his speech. “Obviously, their strong-arm strategy of tagging my employer and some of its biggest clients with their false and defamatory tweets about me was intended to destroy my career. And of course, regardless of the truth, I have already been falsely labeled, and I lost my job, a job I loved.”
In a prepared statement provided by spokeswoman Jeannie Muzinic, Fisher Phillips said the company “concluded that John Albers’ role as a state legislator is incompatible with his role as our chief information officer.”
“We are grateful for John’s many accomplishments at the firm as an excellent professional and wish him well,” the company said.
The Lincoln Project did not respond to a message sent by National Review to an email address specifically designated for media inquiries. In a statement to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the group took a dig at Albers for comparing their tactics to “economic terrorism,” but did not really address the allegation that the group had misrepresented the bill as racist.
“Economic terrorism is denying voting rights to the taxpayers who pay their salaries. Economic terrorism is making it more difficult for every Georgian to participate in democracy,” Nate Nesbitt, the organization’s director of strategic partnerships, told the newspaper.
“If the Georgia Republican Party is troubled when attention is drawn to their actions, the answer is simple: stop making it harder for Georgians to vote.”
The Lincoln Project, one of the most prominent and controversial anti-Trump organizations during the last presidential campaign, has had a difficult 2021 so far. Its co-founder, John Weaver, is facing allegations from at least 20 young men who say he sent them overt sexual solicitations online. Weaver eventually admitted he was “living a deeply closeted life,” and apologized. An Associated Press investigation found that other leaders of the group had repeatedly been told about the accusations against Weaver, but ignored them and lied when they came to light.
The AP investigation also showed how Lincoln Project leaders used the political action committee to enrich themselves. Of the $90 million the group raised from donors, more than $50 million went to firms controlled by the group’s leaders, who collected “exorbitant consulting fees.”
Albers said the Lincoln Project tweets against him were deleted on Sunday. He provided screen shots of them to National Review. He believes the Lincoln Project people probably “knew they’d crossed the line,” and called the group “a very discredited organization.”
In many ways, Albers would appear to be an unlikely target to go after in the ongoing debate over election security in Georgia. He was one of only four Republicans who voted against a Senate omnibus elections bill because it would have eliminated “no-excuses absentee voting” in the state. And while debate over eliminating Sunday voting was limited to the House, Albers said he “very publicly” opposed the effort. That proposal was considered by many critics an overt effort to curb “souls to the polls” events held by black churches.
“If anything, I think we should make (voting) more available on the weekends, because that’s when folks have more time to vote,” he said.
Albers believes he was targeted by the Lincoln Project because of his job. While Albers is one of 27 co-sponsors of the bill, he said he was the only one the Lincoln Project called out on Twitter.
“I think they’ve done a lot of research on all of us,” said Albers, who noted that many state lawmakers are self-employed, retired or work for small companies. “I think they saw me, who worked at a very large nationwide firm with nationwide clients, and thought, ‘Aha, this is an opportunity.”
Albers described the Lincoln Project’s attack as “cancel culture at its worst.” He declined to discuss his next steps in the “legal matter,” saying only that “we’re working with a lot of smart people, and action will be taken.”
“This could happen to anybody. This is much bigger than me or one person,” Albers said. “If a group like the Lincoln Project, that has no credibility and nothing but scandals and problems, make up a lie, and tweet out a lie and destroy a person’s career, to what end does this all go?”
“They want a fight? They got it,” he said. “It’s time we draw a line in the sand once and for all.”