Joseph Nassralla of Way TV and Media for Christ has contacted me to issue a statement about his role in producing the film “Innocence of Muslims.” The last time I saw Nassralla, he had come to our Summer Night for Civil Rights in June in California, and before that I saw him at our September 11, 2011 rally. But now he is being hunted like an animal because of the media’s relentless campaign to destroy and target innocent civilians whom they believe have been critical of Islam. Nassralla is currently in hiding after multiple death threats from Muslims, because of his purported role in producing this video. Now, for the first time, Nassralla has revealed to me the inside story of the making of “Innocence of Muslims.” . . .
“And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.”
— II Thessalonians, 2:11-12 (KJV)
* WARNING: INTENSIVE WEIRDNESS! * Do Not Read This If You Can’t Handle
Full-Strength Industrial-Grade Crazy
The latest bizarre turn in the strange saga of Barrett Brown came to my attention Wednesday evening while I was on the phone with a friend talking about the (equally bizarre) attacks against me by Larry Sinclair, notorious for his claim of having once been Barack Obama’s gay lover.
Damn, I get some of the weirdest enemies, don’t I?
So I was on the phone talking about this and related stuff, and I’m not quite sure how the name Barrett Brown came up, but my friend said, “Have you seen his latest videos?”
When I said I had not, my friend said, “Oh, man, you’ve got to go check it out. It’s funny as hell. He’s talking all kinds of crazy stuff about the FBI and HBGary. It’s hilarious.”
This aroused my curiosity. When last I encountered Brown, it was Tuesday, Sept. 4, and I’d just gotten a call from Charlotte, informing me that they were waiting for me to come pick up my media credentials for the Democratic National Convention. The day before, Brown had gotten up in my face on Twitter, threatening to sue me for having reported the widespread suspicion that he was cooperating with authorities investigating the “Anonymous” hacker conspiracy.
Now, this is simply a fact: A lot of the Anonymous people never trusted Barrett Brown, regarding him as an untrustworthy egomaniacal fame-seeker trying to cash in. He did a TV interview with Michael Isikoff of NBC and announced a book deal with Gregg Housh, and did all of this while promoting himself as the official spokesman for Anonymous, whose members are . . . well, anonymous, and with good reason, because the cops would very much like to put a lot of them in prison.
Hackers are generally smart enough to add 2 + 2, and if Brown’s get-out-of-jail-free card was contingent on him becoming an FBI informant, he had a serious problem, because none of his hacker buddies trusted him as far as they could throw him.
All of this was just plain fact, and when Brown threatened to sue me for having reported it, I laughed off his threat as absurd. I sent him an e-mail reply that ended with this advice:
You don’t need a lawyer, Barrett. You need a psychiatrist, or perhaps a priest to exorcise your demons. You are traveling a road to destruction, as harmful to yourself as to any of your chosen enemies. Get help.
Evidently, Brown refused to heed this advice. And so Wednesday when my friend told me about Barrett’s latest “hilarious” video, I was curious — and shocked by what I saw when I clicked on his YouTube channel. Are you sure you can handle the intense craziness? Because this is 13 minutes of absolute 100% bugfucking nuts:
Somebody should transcribe that before it’s deleted. You may not get all the references — HB Gary is the security firm that got hacked by LulzSec, Aaron Barr is the executive whose e-mails were stolen in the hacking, and Jennifer Emick is the former Anonymous member who identified LulzSec leader Sabu. A lot of this “Team Themis” stuff that Barrett Brown was ranting about shows up, by the way, in Neal Rauhauser’s conspiracy-theory document “Andrew Breitbart’s ISR Cell?”
Being a paranoid conspiracy theorist is not illegal, and Brown’s tinfoil-hat rantings about HB Gary and Jen Emick were just so much noise. But his threats to “destroy” FBI agent Robert Smith? Yeah, the feds don’t take that kind of talk lightly:
Dallas law enforcement authorities have arrested self-professed Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown in what appears to have been a dramatic raid of his apartment late Wednesday night.
Barrett was having a live online video chat session with a few others when law enforcement officers can be heard storming into the room and shouting at him to comply with their commands to submit to his arrest. . . .
A spokeswoman for the Dallas County Sheriff’s office confirmed the arrest and said Brown was booked into the county jail at around 11 p.m. CT and has since been transferred to an FBI facility. A spokeswoman from the FBI field office in Dallas said the agency had no comment on the arrest. . . .
No official reason has been offered yet as to why Barrett was arrested. But it may be connected to a YouTube video Barrett released yesterday in which he appears to threaten an FBI agent named Robert Smith. In the rambling 13-minute expletive-laced video, Barrett accuses Smith of getting his mother into trouble on obstruction of justice charges over a laptop that Barrett had attempted to conceal from authorities. . . .
You can read the whole thing, which actually has video of the raid, which went down while Barrett was having an online video chat with his fellow crazies. Hilarious? Not at all.
Brown is mentally ill, but he’s also young and handsome and intelligent, which permitted him to attract a sort of fan club of enablers who encouraged his anti-social deviance and — hey! — it’s all just fun and games until somebody goes to federal prison.
What did Barrett Brown think he was doing? How has he come to this sorry end? He was playing at being an “investigative journalist,” hoping to achieve fame and fortune by exposing those corrupt evildoers using his amazing Internet skilz.
The White Knight rides forth in shining armor on his noble steed to slay the dangerous dragon!
It’s a common enough amateur fantasy nowadays, and these cyber-Walter Mitty types magnify their dragons — “Islamophobic extremist” Aaron Walker, “convicted felon” Ali Akbar, “racist neo-Confederate” Stacy McCain — in order to inflate their own glory as the triumphant White Knight. The Narcissist as Self-Imagined Hero — they’re a dime a dozen nowadays. When his long-awaited exposé of the evildoers falls flat, when the long-promised triumph doesn’t result in fame and fortune, the narcissist can’t comprehend his own failure.
“Who the hell is Jen Emick?”
You see? There is a tiny fringe of kooks who are obsessed with Jen Emick, Aaron Barr, HB Gary, yadda yadda, and a guy like Barrett Brown plays to that kook fringe, imagining that their fixation with these things represents a potential worldwide interest.
If only Barrett can prove what the fringe kooks believe — that the villains they hate are part of a vast Watergate-sized scandal — then he can imagine the unspeakable glory that awaits.
“Yesterday began releasing revelations from stolen e-mails and other research on Holder/HBGary/Endgame Systems conspiracy against myself and potentially other activists associated with the transparency movement,” he wrote to TheDC late Wednesday afternoon. . . .
“My previous leaks … got me banned from Daily Kos last week after 8 years of writing there,” Brown told TheDC.
This is not merely bovine excrement, it’s delusional. Once you understand paranoia as a narcissistic disorder, you see that Barrett’s fantasy of becoming a latter-day Sy Hersh involves a vast chasm between his grandiose ambition and his actual abilities.
Barrett Brown is not as smart as he thinks he is. More to the point, Stephen Hawking is not as smart as Barrett Brown thinks he is.
Delusions of grandeur are symptomatic of a damaged ego, but we’ll leave aside the armchair analysis and deal with the reality: Barrett Brown went chasing a dream of eternal glory, and had contempt for lesser mortals who were merely trying to make a living as reporters or bloggers, and he actually had a better-than-average run, as such things go. He got himself interviewed by NBC News, was quoted by multiple publications as the spokesman for Anonymous, and even scored a book deal.
And it’s all fun and games until somebody goes to federal prison.
Probably there’s a Moral of the Story, but I’m too tired and depressed to figure it out today. All this swirling craziness — thank you, savage Islamic movie critics! — has pretty much ruined my entire week. Remember, I’m supposed to be covering a presidential campaign, instead of writing 1,500-word dissertations about Internet fame junkies.
[Saturday] at sundown begins the Jewish New Year, Rosh HaShanah.
Rosh HaShanah signifies the beginning of the Jewish New Year, as well as the beginning of the creation of the world. In addition, Rosh HaShanah begins the 10 days of repentance, leading up to Yom Kippur, the day of atonement.
The Lefties just keep it classy, but we should press for elaboration: does Tamara Holder think that Michelle Malkin’s spouse is inattentive, or, alternatively, does Holder mean ‘laid in a grave’?
Stay classy, @tamaraholder: Tells Imus on FBN that “I need to get laid.” I’m happily married with two children. You?
“It all was part of a group effort . . . to shift the focus from the death of a U.S. Ambassador on a day when all the warning signs of trouble were in place but the U.S. government did little if anything to beef up security.
“It was a day on which the media could have been reporting facts as to the absentee President, the failure to heed the warnings and protect our diplomats, the failure of Muslim outreach, in fact, the failure of U.S. Mideast policy since the Arab Spring.
“But no, all the media wanted to talk about was their own opinions as to how badly Romney supposedly screwed up, with quotes from unnamed former Republican sources as the excuse for reporting it as news. This was . . . a clear attempt to frame the narrative to help a favored candidate presented as fact reporting.”
— Professor William Jacobson, “Middle East and Journalism in Flames,” LegalInsurrection.com, Sept. 13, 2012
Lee Stranahan is already pursuing legal action against Bill Schmalfeldt, aka “Liberal Grouch,” a blogger who apparently decided to make his bid for online immortality by assisting the attacks on enemies of what I’ve called the Kimberlin-Rauhauser axis.
Stranahan says Schmalfeldt has made grievously defamatory accusations against him, the accuracy of which Stranahan disputes, and the case has already proceeded far past the point that a wise lawyer would advise Schmalfeldt to exercise his constitutional right against self-incrimination. One does not defend oneself in such a dispute by “doubling down” with further accusations against the plaintiff and — important point — the plaintiff need not be wholly innocent in order to do you damage, especially if it can be proven that the defendant is motivated by malice.
All of which is a necessary preamble to this:
Every editor in Christendom just drew a sharp breath at this folly. Reporters know to be very careful in describing their sources, especially if they are engaged in what a lawyer once described to me as “asserting private knowledge.”
Now, Stranahan says he has been falsely defamed by Schmalfeldt. What would be Schmalfeldt’s motive to do so? What did Stranahan ever do to Schmalfeldt that would inspire this?
Stranahan’s attorneys might reasonably suggest to a court that the source of the misidentified photos — “someone I trust” — is someone who bears a grudge against Stranahan, and who has been feeding defamatory information to Schmalfeldt, thereby using Schmalfeldt as the agent (witting or unwitting, it makes no difference) of a personal vendetta.
And because this particular material — the misidentified photos — is admittedly false, then the source of this false material cannot be protected under a First Amendment claim. As long as Schmalfeldt’s attacks on Stranhan consisted of true and accurate facts, he could not be compelled in discover to reveal his sources for these materials. Once he published a clear falsehood and said that this falsehood originated with “someone I trust,” then the identity of that trusted source is directly material to any case Stranahan may bring against him, because it at least seems to suggest that Schmalfeldt may be acting as the agent of a third party in his attacks on Stranahan.
When I tried to explain this to the thick-headed Schmalfeldt, he seemed incapable of comprehending his error. Well, said he, I have retracted the falsehood, which was not libelous.
Yes, but insofar as you have revealed that you are not doing your own research, but are relying on the work of “someone I trust” — now proven to be unreliable — then it is reasonable for Stranahan to suspect that every other accusation you’ve made against him, whether true or false, originated with this same source.
There must be some reason Schmalfeldt’s source was concealing himself — i.e., using Schmalfeldt as a proxy, rather than making this claim under his own name — and this erroneous claim to have photos of Stranahan’s wife is just the sort of seemingly minor mistake that can sink a defendant in a libel case. The plaintiff’s lawyer starts pulling at that one tiny thread, and the whole sweater might come unraveled.
Advice to Bill Schmalfeldt (and to any other journalist paying attention): Be careful about jumping into purely private disputes, and claiming to “know” things about the disputants that cannot be clearly demonstrated from publicly available materials.
Whatever made Schmalfeldt decide to start attacking Stranahan, at some point during his attack, Schmalfeldt was relying on an unreliable third party as a source for private information.
Readers will recall that in June, Screed of Momus published what was asserted to be information from an interview with Neal Rauhauser’s ex-wife. This was the exact sort of thing that I would never publish myself. I think no reporter of any experience would touch a story about allegations in a divorce or a custody dispute without actual documentation — transcripts of depositions, etc. But Screed of Momus did publish it, and we’ve seen nothing in the past two-and-half months contesting that report, which thus acquires credibility simply by the lack of rebuttal.
At the same time, however, any reporter would be unwise to claim to know — independently of that source — anything about the marriage and divorce between Neal and Nancy Rauhauser. This is what attribution is all about, and is why relying on anonymous sources is so inherently risky, which is where the “two source” rule comes in. There have been times in the past where I’ve been lied about, and have not bothered to disprove the lie, knowing that if someone should then try to attack me with secondhand lies of which they have no direct knowledge, I could then destroy them. All of which is by way of caution.
No one’s paying me to teach a seminar, however, and if Schmalfeldt is taught a lesson, it will not be my lawyers who do the teaching: He has zero credibility, there is no reason anyone should believe anything he says about anyone and, heeding the sage advice of Andrew Jackson’s mother, I’ve never sued anybody for libel or slander.
There will be a hearing on the Motion to Compel Discovery on Friday, 14 September.
Hmmm. What if I told you that Kimberlin has invoked his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination — a most unusual claim in a civil lawsuit — in attempting to avoid discovery? And what’s this?
The name redacted in Exhibit B is that of someone who was a minor child at the time of the events in question.
“Americans woke up this morning with tragic news and felt heavy hearts as they considered that individuals who have served in our diplomatic corps were brutally murdered across the world. This attack on American individuals and embassies is outrageous, it’s disgusting. It breaks the hearts of all of us who think of these people who have served, during their lives, the cause of freedom, and justice and honor. We mourn their loss and join together in prayer that the spirit of the Almighty might comfort the families of those who have been so brutally slain.
“Four diplomats lost their life, including the U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, in the attack on our embassy at Benghazi, Libya. And, of course, with these words, I extend my condolences to the grieving loved ones, who have left behind, as a result of these who have lost their lives in the service of our nation, and I know that the people across America are grateful for their service and we mourn their sacrifice.
“America will not tolerate attacks against our citizens and against our embassies. We will defend also our constitutional rights of speech and assembly and religion. We have confidence in our cause in America. We respect our Constitution. We stand for the principles our Constitution protects. We encourage other nations to understand and respect the principles of our Constitution because we recognize that these principles are the ultimate source of freedom for individuals around the world.
“I also believe the Administration was wrong to stand by a statement sympathizing with those who had breached our embassy in Egypt instead of condemning their actions. It’s never too early for the United States Government to condemn attacks on Americans, and to defend our values. The White House distanced itself last night from the statement, saying it wasn’t ‘cleared by Washington.’ That reflects the mixed signals they’re sending to the world.
“The attacks in Libya and Egypt underscore that the world remains a dangerous place and that American leadership is still sorely needed. In the face of this violence, America cannot shrink from the responsibility to lead. American leadership is necessary to ensure that events in the region don’t spin out of control. We cannot hesitate to use our influence in the region to support those who share our values and our interests. Over the last several years, we have stood witness to an Arab Spring that presents an opportunity for a more peaceful and prosperous region, but also poses the potential for peril, if the forces of extremism and violence are allowed to control the course of events.
“We must strive to ensure that the Arab Spring does not become an Arab Winter.”
Is there anything wrong with that? I see no problem, but there’s a lot of kvetching out there, some of it from Republicans.
Meanwhile, following on the theme established by the New York Times — “It’s that evil anti-Muslim movie to blame!” — an MSNBC host decides that the producer of the evil movie should be prosecuted, because obviously this obscure video (that nobody ever heard of before) is the only reason America is hated by the savage mobs whipped up by Muslim Brotherhood propagandists.
Predictably, in the past 24 hours we’ve seen a blitz of harassment and distraction from various pro-Kimberlin accounts on Twitter. Among the memes they’ve been pushing: Lee Stranahan once took pictures of naked women — shocked! shocked! — and Patterico once said bad stuff about people (including me and Jeff Goldstein) in chats with notorious douchebag Barrett Brown.
Yawn.
It’s all a familiar “accuse the accusers” ploy and, having watched for nearly four months as Team Kimberlin used these tactics used to foment animosity and suspicion among their targets, it doesn’t deceive or distract me for a minute. If these sockpuppets and trolls posted indisputably authentic video of Aaron Walker and Mandy Nagy having a three-way with a goat, I’d shrug it off as just another lame distraction attempt. As I told someone in a phone conversation this morning, these tactics can only deceive the weak-minded.
The details of their accusations are irrelevant to the purpose — i.e., to obstruct justice by attempting to discredit anyone who might possibly pose a threat to Kimberlin’s tax-exempt hustle.
Brett Kimberlin has basically admitted this in court documents: He regarded Seth Allen’s blogging, and Mandy Nagy’s October 2010 article about his heinous criminal history, as endangering his support from liberal donors. Once the falsehood of his denials had been exposed — once his self-serving claims to have been framed and subsequently “secretly exonerated” were understood to be outright lies — it was understandably more difficult for Kimberlin to solicit big-money contributions to his “progressive” 501(c) empire, which collected more than a half-million dollars in 2008.
All the attacks Kimberlin and his friends have made against Seth Allen, Mandy Nagy, Patrick Frey, Aaron Walker, et al., must be understood in this context: These are defensive counter-attacks, an attempt by Kimberlin to protect himself from the ugly truth about what kind of monster he really is.
Some of the sockpuppet trolls on Twitter were just now mocking my occasional references to prayer. Kimberlin has been an avowed athetist since childhood. So it would never occur to Brett that it was anything more than an unfortunate coincidence when his progressive buddies at the Justice Department had their jobs endangered because a bunch of jihadist savages in Libya went nuts about an obscure video. The FBI might be under new management come next January, and who knows what they’ll find if they start investigating Kimberlin’s racket?
God moves in mysterious ways.
And the prayers of the faithful are answered every day.
