The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

A High Time on the Low Road: Smears Target Brett Kimberlin’s Enemies List UPDATE: SWATting Supect ID’d?

Posted on | June 13, 2012 | 34 Comments

When “Speedway Bomber” Brett Kimberlin was convicted in 1981,
he could have been sentenced to 230 years in federal prison.

“Brett C. Kimberlin schemed to elude justice with a series of bizarre plots designed to murder, maim and rob his enemies, create havoc . . . and discredit the chief government prosecutor.”
– R. Joseph Gelarden, “Kimberlin Case a Maze of Murder, Deceit,” Indianapolis Star, October 18, 1981

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
As soon as any blogger becomes a nuisance to Brett Kimberlin, that person is targeted by the Web site I call “Not Brett Kimberlin,” and harassed on Twitter by a number of pseudonymous trolls, including the one that on Monday viciously attacked Mandy Nagy.

Over the weekend, the Not Brett Kimberlin site — which I neither link nor call by its actually name, so as not to publicize it — was shut down for a while because it was clearly in violation of its hosting provider’s Terms of Service. Yesterday, Not Brett Kimberlin came back online and posted a dishonest disclaimer that it was taking “the high road” and then immediately published an attack on Lee Stranahan.

Why Lee Stranahan? Because he has been doing yeoman’s work in exposing Kimberlin’s menace to the First Amendment. It was, of course, Stranahan who declared May 25 “Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day,” producing a YouTube video that made clear who Kimberlin is. More recently, when Kimberlin’s 501(c) Velvet Revolution claimed that Kimberlin had been the victim of a “SWATting,” Stranahan contacted the Montgomery County (Md.) Police Department, who said that no such incident had occurred.

So, naturally, Stranahan must be targeted for the same kind of character assassination that has been aimed at all others who have written the truth about Brett Kimberlin. These attacks are merely an attempt to change the subject, to divert attention from Kimberlin’s own dishonest criminality, and wise men will not be deceived by such tactics. Let us pause, reader, to ask a few questions:

  • Why have the operators of the “Not Brett Kimberlin” site taken extraordinary steps to conceal their own identities?
  • What would we discover about the operators of this site, if their identities were known?
  • Most importantly, who is paying for this elaborate ongoing effort to smear and defame Britt Kimberlin’s critics?

We know that Brett Kimberlin’s tax-exempt non-profit organizations have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, and we furthermore know that Kimberlin is now a client of Neal Rauhauser, who in 2010 was accused of organizing a gang of foul-mouthed thugs to harass Tea Party activists on Twitter.

Is the “Not Brett Kimberlin” site part of Rauhauser’s operation? Whatever the strategic wisdom of this “brass knuckles reputation management” — as Professor Glenn Reynolds has called Kimberlin’s campaign of harassment and intimidation — one thing should be clear: Such activities are clearly not legitimate uses of tax-exempt funds. Here are the most recent available IRS 990 forms for Kimberlin’s outfits:

People experienced in the management of non-profit organizations who have examined those 990s describe them as “thinly documented.” The phrase “red flag” occurs when discussing these IRS forms with such experts, who marvel that anyone would contribute to groups that exhibit such an astonishing lack of tranparency about exactly how they spend the money they collect.

When Velvet Revolution claimed (apparently falsely) that Brett Kimberlin had been “SWATted,” Lee Stranahan published a statement by Kimberlin associate Kevin Zeese who said that “we are cooperating with the FBI.”

But aren’t Zeese and Kimberlin also ”cooperating” with the shadowy online presences that are attacking Stranahan and other names on Brett Kimberlin’s enemies list? Isn’t Velvet Revolution employing the paranoid self-proclaimed “hacker” Neal Rauhauser, who appears to be conducting a secretive campaign against Kimberlin’s enemies? Isn’t all of this extraordinary effort to intimidate Kimberlin’s critics — including Kimberlin’s “lawfare” harassment of Aaron Walker — being funded with proceeds of tax-exempt non-profit organizations?

These are reasonable questions, given the evident facts, and many other people are now asking such questions. It is high time that the people asking these questions include members of Congress, who have already called for Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate SWATtings, but who have yet to invoke the independent authority of Congress to investigate Brett Kimberlin’s profoundly suspicious “non-profit” activities.

UPDATE: The details of the alleged SWATting suspect described in the e-mail to Brooks Bayne are certainly very interesting:

Last year, under Twitter handle @solaar, he trolled Greg W. Howard and threatened to slit his throat, among other things. He ran with the beandogs, specifically leducviolet and methadonna. . . .

Those are Twitter handles of two of the most vicious members of the “beandogs” crew that Rauhauser was accused of organizing against Tea Party types in “TwitterGate,” a 2010 online scandal that was unfortunately ignored by most in the media at the time. Greg W. Howard was one of the primary targets of “beandogs” harassment. Baynes’s e-mail informant further adds:

Brett [Warren] had contact with Neal R. under both of his Twitter accts (Stranded Wind and the name one). Neal wasn’t quite aware of how busy Brett had been. Trust me on this. He tried to dissociate himself, but it didn’t work out too well. . . .
Neal did attempt to contact my law school and stir up shit, but that didn’t work because I had screenshots and email trails of everything.
Both Neal and Brett contacted me via VOIP numbers on Google phone.

Readers will excuse me for smiling at this tidbit of info about the alleged SWATting suspect:

Brett also got busy as the University of Florida fan in an infamous video in which he professed to know four types of martial arts and challenged University of Alabama fans to meet him at a gate and fight him.

Heh. Roll Tide.

UPDATE: Linked by Bill Quick at Daily Pundit and Dan Collins at The Conservatory — thanks!

– Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknown

 

 

 

THE KIMBERLIN FILES:

 


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