It’s generally not a good sign when your senior people and especially your lawyers flee for the hills.
ActBlue is the backbone of Democrat and especially leftist fundraising. It’s huge in a way that few can fathom. And something is going on inside. The New York Times promises to explain it and then fails to explain anything.
Except that something is clearly going on.
What prompted so many longtime ActBlue officials to leave is not clear — none of the former officials agreed to be interviewed on the record.
… the senior staff departures began on Feb. 21. That day, ActBlue’s customer service and partnerships directors, who had both worked at the group for more than a decade, left…the next week, several other senior officials left, including the associate general counsel — who was the highest-ranking legal officer at ActBlue — the assistant research director, a human resources official, the chief revenue officer and an engineer who had spent 16 years building and maintaining the electronic pipes through which the group’s donations flow.
As these people left, Zain Ahmad, who was the last remaining lawyer in the ActBlue general counsel’s office, wrote in an internal Slack message on Feb. 26 that his access to email and other internal platforms had been cut off and that other messages he had posted in Slack had been deleted, according to a screenshot obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Ahmad is now on leave from ActBlue, according to a person briefed on the group’s staffing.
Some turnover may be natural, but having your lawyers head for the exit, and then the last remaining lawyer having his access cut off, suggests something big is in the work.
Republicans, both state and federal, have belatedly been investigating ActBlue and we know over what, but normally that’s what lawyers are for. Having your lawyers exit suggests that they don’t want to be in the position of defending an organization whose leadership has done something indefensible even by leftist standards.
Let’s see if we find out what.
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
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