THE KIMBERLIN FILES:
Three days of exposure — “The Army of Davids” effect that the Lonely Conservative cleverly invoked — looks like it was enough to push convicted terrorist Brett Kimberlin right over the edge. After nearly two years of Kimberlin apparently stalking and harassing his adversaries, the sudden burst of online publicity occasioned by Aaron Walker (aka Worthing) writing up a 28,000-word account of his own legal dispute with Kimberlin seems to have done the trick.
Remember that the “Breitbart Unmasked” Web site has denied — in a Twitter colloquy with me Thursday night — being run by Brett Kimberlin, which Worthing, Patterico and others long suspected.
OK, asked and answered — the denial is duly noted. Why, then, does that site exhibit such an obsessive interest in attacking those who tell the truth about Kimberlin? And why would the recent flurry of attention to Kimberlin’s activities cause Not Brett Kimberlin (as I’ve begun to think of “Breitbart Unmasked”) to post an unhinged 467-word rant on Saturday afternoon? Quoting that rant in its entirety:
Yes, This is Aaron Justin Walker Attorney at Law who blogs as Aaron Worthing @AaronWorthing and is a major Islamophobe who hates Muslims with a passion. He runs a blog called Everyonedrawmohammed.blogspot.com which is now set to private while he battles it out with the non profit Velvet Revolution, who had called him out on his Islamophobia. This is the face of dark evil. This is the man who would assume the mantel of launching a major assault on the institutional left, and with it a solid non-profit organization whose work has helped tens of thousands of people gain a better understanding of the process of voting and how that system has become corrupted by the influence of corporate money into the system. This is the man who has taken upon himself to launch an all out attack on everything that the left stands for. His lies are legend. His claims against Velvet Revolution and its foundations are nothing short of an attack on everything the left holds dear. Over the course of the next few weeks we will document everyone involved in this plot against this small non-profit organization that has taken everyone from Karl Rove, to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to the out of control U.S. Chamber of Commerce to task. Yes, this small non-profit has called for massive investigations against these behemoths of the organized right to hold them accountable to the people. And because of that the right has responded with a full on outrageous assault on this non-profit in an effort to destroy everything they have accomplished. They call it #WAR. They call it #IAMANDREWBREITBART they call it a total commitment. OK, if its total commitment you want, it will be total commitment you will get.
Velvet Revolution has worked hard at dealing with this issue with the courts, and has contacted the FBI, the Attorney Generals Office, and everyone else that one can go to seek relief. The end result is that all of the parties that have been approached, contacted, or otherwise utilized, have all said that this is a battle they will not get involved in. So that is the way it will be. This will be a man to man knock down drag out fight for the hearts and minds, and a battle it will be. The message to the right wing extremists out there from BU is this: If you think we are going to be punked out and or bend over and let you stick it in then you are dead wrong. The rules you set up say that you and you only can attack people and get away with it, well, OK. Stand back and let loose the dogs of war then..
I hope you get that message loud and clear. Deal with it…
Oh, you are so frightened, aren’t you, Mr. Not Brett Kimberlin? Kind of externalizing and projecting your sociopathic habits on others, eh?
Horrified at the prospect of exposure, aren’t you? Trying to rally everybody around to protect your dishonest felonious self by conflating your own narrow interests with “the institutional left,” and exaggerating Aaron Walker into an all-powerful Right-Wing Ringleader, whom you accuse of orchestrating “all out attack on everything that the left stands for” and “everything the left holds dear” — like blowing up innocent people with bombs, for example?
Douchebag.
Your liberal buddies might be stupid, but I don’t think they’re so stupid they can’t recognize you as the selfish gutless weasel you are.
Let’s just state a fact that should be blindingly obvious: Stalking, harassing and attempting to intimidate bloggers who tell the truth about Brett Kimberlin’s notorious criminal history is not the kind of philanthropic activity for which federal law grants tax-exempt status.
Yesterday I posted links to the two most recent IRS Form 990’s for Kimberlin’s 501(c)3 organization, the Justice Through Music Project (JTMP), for which Kimberlin has collected $1.8 million since 2005, reporting $223,739 in contributions for 2010. If you’ll go to Page 7 of JTMP’s 2010 IRS filing (link is to PDF document), you will see that Kimberlin reported a salary of $19,500 for his full-time 40-hour-a-week job as JTMP’s director.
Forty hours a week. Full-time. Says so right there on the IRS Form 990 signed by Kimberlin “under penalty of law,” etc.
While thus serving as full-time director of a 501(c)3 non-profit, however, Kimberlin is also an “interested party” in the 501(c)4 non-profit Velvet Revolution, the director of which is Brad “Bradblog” Friedman. Now, if you will look at the IRS 2010 filing for Velvet Revolution (PDF), you’ll see that on line 38, they answer “yes” to this question:
“Did the organization borrow from, or make any loans to, any officer, director, trustee, or key employee or were any such loans made in a prior year and still outstanding at the end of the tax year covered by this return?”
Answering “yes” to question 38 required Velvet Revolution to attach Schedule L, “Transactions With Interested Persons,” wherein we discover that this 501(c)4 received a $4,500 loan from — OK, you guessed, didn’t you? — Brett Kimberlin. For the purpose of “paying bills.”
(CORRECTION: Dianna Deeley in the comments tells me I got this wrong, mistaking a loan from Kimberlin to Velvet Revolution for a loan from VR to Kimberlin. Fixed now. — RSM.)
So, riddle me this, Batman: How was it that Brett Kimberlin was serving as full-time director of the 501(c)3 Justice Through Music Project in 2010, while simultaneously serving as an “officer, director, trustee, or key employee” of the 501(c)4 Velvet Revolution. And why did he give them a $4,500 loan for “paying bills”?
Three words: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
Stipulate that there may be an entirely innocent explanation for this, and that we have no reason to believe that this apparent double-dipping by Kimberlin violated any actual law or regulation. But to cite noted legal scholar Ricky Ricardo, “You got some ‘splain’ to do, Lucy.”
Furthermore, the stated non-profit purpose of these organizations — the work which justifies their tax-exempt status — has no apparent relationship to the stuff they are accused of doing.
For example, why was Brett Kimberlin suing a blogger named Seth Allen? It was Kimberlin’s suit against Allen, remember, which led to the January courthouse encounter between Aaron Walker and Kimberlin that finally blew the lid off this mess. How is it that Kimberlin, while supposedly toiling 40 hours a week as director of JTMP and also being an “officer, director, trustee, or key employee” of Velvet Revolution, finds himself with enough spare time to go around suing measly bloggers nobody ever heard of before?
Who was Seth Allen until tort-happy Kimberlin decided to engage in an evident campaign of “lawfare” harassment against him?
Swear to God: I’ve been a full-time conservative blogger since March 2008 and never heard of Seth Allen until his name turned up in Aaron Worthing’s post Thursday. Exactly what did this hitherto unknown blogger do, that he became the object of this legal blitzkrieg by Kimberlin, who tells the IRS he’s working 40 hours a week as full-time director of a 501(c)3 tax-exempt non-profit, and who is also somehow simultaneously doing quite valuable work for 501(c)4 tax-exempt non-profit Velvet Revolution, yet finds time out of his busy day to go chasing after Seth Allen and declaring Aaron Worthing “The Face of Evil”?
Something is not adding up here, OK? Frankly, it reeks to high heaven, and I sure as hell ain’t the only one noticing the putrid stench emanating from the general direction of Brett Kimberlin. It smells a lot like the acrid odor of desperate crazed fear, don’t you think?
Aaron Worthing writes today about the “Streisand Effect,” by which Kimberlin’s attempt to suppress the truth has had the opposite effect.
More to come in a bit, but meanwhile, think about something a little birdie told me: When Democrat political operative Neal Rauhauser made an appearance in a New Jersey court Tuesday for a proceeding related to a criminal harassment complaint, guess who showed up at the courthouse with the defendant Rauhauser?
Yeah: Convicted terrorist Brett Kimberlin — or at least that’s what the little birdie says, and we have not yet seen any denial of that claim from “Breitbart Unmasked” Not Brett Kimberlin.
UPDATE: This is a huge story, and the problem — the reason it’s been fought out almost unnoticed in the blogosphere and on Twitter — is that it has so many different aspects that any attempt to tell the whole story all at once is nearly impossible.
As I’ve said before in trying to explain complicated weird stuff like this, when crazy things start happening, any person who tries to tell the story may sound crazy, because it’s hard to believe stuff like this really happens: Barbra Streisand gives money to a convicted terrorist? Crazy. Aforesaid terrorist starts getting his fingers into all kinds of pies, including WeinerGate and sundry lurid accusations against James O’Keefe? Crazy. Terrorist joins forces with Democrat campaign operative, pushing bogus legal hassles against a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney? Crazy.
Here I have just touched a few points on the tip of a vast submerged iceberg of craziness in this story. Yesterday’s 2,800-word “Joe Friday”-style report attempting to summarize clearly the main thread of the saga took me 13 hours to write and edit. And I was so busy yesterday, I didn’t even have time to do linkbacks to most of our many blogger friends who’ve linked that story.
Meanwhile, several bloggers who’ve been pushing on this Kimberlin/Rauhauser angle for months are kind of peeved at me for not having linked the work they’ve done. My apologies:
- There’s a crapload of this stuff scattered all over the place;
- Sources inform me of all kinds of internecine rivalries and mistrust among these bloggers, some of whom have said nasty stuff about Breitbart or other of my friends; and
- Kimberlin/Rauhauser have thrown up a lot of smear stuff about some of these bloggers, which I don’t have time to vet.
Most of (3), I’m sure, is just the usual smear stuff, but especially on yesterday’s main “Joe Friday” article, I didn’t want to muck it up with links to people whom I haven’t had an opportunity to vet, which might have given Kimberlin & Co. a chance to say, “A-ha! You cited so-and-so, who has three DUIs, two bankruptcies and a divorce” — you see what I’m saying, eh?
So, I’m not trying to glory-hog or ignore work done by others. I was just trying to boil down the main Kimberlin story into a tight narrative, so that the average reader could understand it and perceive the newsworthy relevance. Meanwhile, just for a sample of some of the stuff that’s being going on for months, here’s Dave in Queens from Feb. 7:
Ron Brynaert recently became a frontpaged blogger at BradBlog. Brad Friedman is a co-founder of Velvet Revolution. Hmmm. . . .
According to a court document from my case, it appears, imho, that by no later than December 21st, Neal Rauhauser had already obtained Aaron’s real full name.
What does this mean? I don’t know. Somebody sent it to me and said it was significant. Brynaert is a journalist who spent several years as an editor at Raw Story, and who might be grateful nowadays for paid work as a front-pager at BradBlog. My own personal hunch — and this is nothing but a hunch, mind you — is the Brad Friedman might be ready to throw Brett Kimberlin under the BradBus, and nobody in the progressive blogosphere would blame him.
There was evidently some point in time where Kimberlin appeared to have been an asset to Friedman, helping publicize and raise money for his blog, but put yourself in Friedman’s shoes now: Aren’t Kimberlin’s increasingly deranged antics making him a liability? Wouldn’t you hate to have your name continually linked with Mr. Perjury McTerrorist?
I think you would.
My hunch, then, is that at some point Friedman will weigh his options and tell Kimberlin, “Sorry, pal. Been nice working with you, but there’s only so much of your sociopathic crap I can deal with and still be an effective voice for the progressive cause. Bye, now.”
And by the way: One of those little birdies tells me there may be a connection between the “Anonymous”/”LulzSec” international hacker conspiracy and Brett Kimberlin. I know: Crazy.
UPDATE II: One of the pro-Kimberlin Twitter-troll accounts is now mocking me for having linked the awful nasty “Dave From Queens” blog, saying that “Dave” is actually Seth Allen, who has allegedly made himself a nuisance online but who — so far as I can tell — has never gone on a weeklong bombing spree in Indiana.
Which kinda matters, I think.
My point is that I’m trying to get at the facts of the case, rather than trying to judge the moral character of the people who are providing the facts. If Charles Johnson were to come up with something truly useful (and I’m told that Neal Rauhauser has now drifted into the LGF orbit), I might even be forced to quote CJ.
Keep in mind that if Rauhauser realizes his connection to Brett Kimberlin is exposing him (Rauhauser) to jeopardy, then Brett might also go under the wheels of the NealBus as well as the BradBus.
If my hunch about how this story plays out is correct — and hey, it’s just a hunch — then the Kimberlin/Friedman/Rauhauser nexus could explode into a frenzy of backstabbing and finger-pointing, as each tries to make his colleagues the fall guys for whatever evil craziness gets exposed, with no one wanting to become the scapegoat for the whole busted enterprise.
UPDATE III: One guy who did a lot to expose Neal Rauhauser’s “Beandogs” gang in the so-called 2010 “TwitterGate” episode is Patrick Read at Swift Read, who last month put up a post detailing the background on Rauhauser’s modus operandi, for anyone who might want to understand what a left-wing “hacktivist” can do.
