Category: Patterico

Neal Rauhauser, Who Drove Barrett Brown Off the Deep End, Continues Unrelenting Harassment of His Targets

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Neal Rauhauser was a speaker at the 2010 Netroots Nation conference

“There’s nothing stopping them. They feel like they have the right to do anything they want to anyone who gets in their way.”
– Jennifer Emick, describing the online savagery she’s experienced since exposing “Anonymous”

When last we took note of Brett Kimberlin’s evil minion Neal Rauhauser on Oct. 2, Rauhauser had helped instigate Nadia Naffe’s lawsuit against Patterico. Being busy with campaign coverage, I overlooked Patterico’s Oct. 4 post about that lawsuit:

Kimberlin’s associate Neal Rauhauser recently admitted in a complaint to my office that he introduced Naffe to attorney Jay Leiderman:

I brought this situation to the attention of Los Angeles attorney Jay Leiderman, then introduced he and Naffe, and he is now representing her in a civil case against Frey.

In the same document, Rauhauser declared that if Naffe is successful, he believes it will put an end to my career as a Deputy D.A.:

[T]he lawsuit he faces from Nadia Naffe is another matter and it is understood that if she prevails that may put an end to Frey’s career in the DA’s of?ce.

That’s how Rauhauser operates: Once he targets somebody as an enemy, he becomes fixated and obsessed, and endeavors to get others to assist him in harassment of the target. Be sure and read the entirety of Patterico’s post, and especially notice the March 23 Tweet from the “Breitbart Unmasked” account.

Keep in mind that Rauhauser’s implacable hatred of Patterico dates back to July 2011, in the wake of the Anthony Weiner sex scandal when (a) Patterico was “SWATted,” and (b) Rauhauser posted a series of diatribes at Daily Kos under his “Stranded Wind” alias:

In a July 27 post, “Weinergate Perps Pay Dearly,” Rauhauser said Patterico “looks to be a pretty good candidate for the planner/operator behind Weinergate.” Rauhauser has never produced a scintilla of evidence to support that bizarre accusation. Weiner had resigned from Congress on June 16, 2011, after admitting “he had in fact sent the [Twitter] image and had had inappropriate online exchanges with at least six other women. ” So there was no reason at all — in late July, six weeks after Weigner resigned — for anyone to imagine a “planner/operator” as being “behind” the scandal, let alone to accuse Patterico.

Rauhauser was Patient Zero in a weird epidemic of left-wing paranoia that became known as “Weiner Trutherism.” Rauauser’s irrational demonization of Patterico might be laughed off, were it not for the fact that several people — now evidently including Nadia Naffe and attorney Jay Leiderman — have assisted Rauhauser in his harassment of Patterico. And what Rauhauser has done to Patterico is typical of what he does to everyone he targets.

Take, for example, Jennifer Emick, an online researcher who last year helped expose members of the “LulzSec” criminal hacker conspiracy, a rogue offshoot of “Anonymous.” Rauhauser discovered that Emick was an acquaintance of Aaron Barr, the former CEO of HB Gary Federal, a security firm that had unsuccessfully sought a contract to provide its services to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which had been targeted by “Anonymous.”

Rauhauser magnified the association between Emick and Barr into one of his typical conspiracy theories. It was apparently Rauhauser who got Barrett Brown so stoked up with paranoid rage last month that Brown unleashed a crazed video rant that got him arrested for threatening an FBI agent:

“I got to find out, thanks to a hack — thanks to another f–king stroke of luck, thank God — that HB Gary, since mid-February, had hired an FBI informant . . . making up reasons to raid Barrett Brown and get his information. . . .
“It turns out — from the e-mails that were stolen two months ago and that, thank God, I have — that that guy was an old military buddy of HB Gary executive Jim Butterworth. . . . I know what’s been done to me by these f–king contractors . . .
“FBI agent Robert Smith is a criminal who’s involved in a criminal conspiracy that has, thank God, been revealed, part of which was evident months ago, because I told the f–king FBI agent Daniel Forseck . . . when his f–king little Jennifer Emick — f–king informant, HB Gary employee — bragging about the sh-t, she gave me the number. I guess she wanted to talk to me and see what I’d say.”

The derangement evident in Brown’s 13-minute video reflected many of the same weird obsessions — HB Gary, Team Themis, Tom Ryan — that have crowded Rauhauser’s mind since his “Kookpocalypse” rant in February. (See my June 19 post, “Neal Rauhauser: Internet Super-Spy!” Patterico also has more background on Rauhauser’s “Kookpocalypse” episode.) Given that Barrett Brown had also been attacking Rauhauser’s enemies (me and Patterico) a couple weeks earlier, it was obvious who was feeding Brown’s paranoia.

Since Brown’s arrest in September, the harassment of Jennifer Emick has escalated and Neal Rauhauser has directly involved himself in this harassment, filing a false report with the city where Emick lives and sending defamatory e-mails to the sheriff’s department in the county where Emick lives. In his report to the city, which he posted on his blog, Rauhauser wrote:

I am being harassed by a mentally ill resident of the city . . .
I have worked as a political consultant since 2010 and Emick is one of a handful of deeply disturbed persons who have become fascinated with me. This all seems to be connected to events in the spring of 2010, when I worked for the primary challenger to pro-life Democrat Bart Stupak in Michigan’s 1st Congressional District.

This is a bald-faced lie. This has absolutely nothing to do with the Bart Stupak campaign, Emick never wrote a word about Rauhauser until he began attacking her — because of her online acquaintance with Rauhauser’s nemesis “Zapem” — and his claim that Emick is harassing him is the exact opposite of truth.

We are looking at another classic example of Rauhauser’s “accuse the accusers” strategy: Malign the target to pre-emptively discredit them, and to create confusion on the part of courts and police as to who is the victim and who is the victimizer.

Rauhauser’s assertion that Emick is “mentally ill” or “deeply disturbed” is part of this strategy. Rauhauser himself is a twisted Gordian knot of sociopathic tendencies, exhibiting habitual dishonesty, narcissistic grandiosity, persecutorial delusions and a sadistic delight in inflicting suffering on others. He has the sociopath’s cunning intuition, an ability to spot weak-minded people who are vulnerable to his manipulative behavior, and to solicit their assistance in his various schemes.

Neal also has the narcissist’s arrogance, so that he boldly lies to law-enforcement officials without any apparent fear of apprehension, because he thinks himself infinitely smarter than those to whom he lies. And why shouldn’t he believe this?

Rauhuaser has sent his conspiracy-theory treatises — filled with all manner of false and defamatory assertions — to the FBI, to various state and local law enforcement agencies, and even to members of Congress, and never once suffered any serious legal consequence for this peculiar habit. Probably, officials receiving his e-mails dismiss Rauhauser as a harmless kook, and underestimate the harm done by his online behavior. (Cops are apt to view such conflicts as  “just a bunch of crazies arguing on the Internet.”) 

One of the best analyses of Rauhauser’s personality is Ladd Ehlinger Jr.’s “A Breathtaking Lack of Empathy.”

Rauhauser seems incapable of caring about the harm he does to others. Barrett Brown is now in federal custody, and perhaps headed to prison, because of Neal’s manipulations, yet rather than acknowledge his role in inciting Brown’s meltdown and repenting of his evil behavior, Rauhauser just moves on in search of other targets to menace and manipulate.

Soon, however, a Virginia court may bring a certain amount of justice to Rauhauser, who is a co-defendant in Aaron Walker’s lawsuit against Brett Kimberlin. William Hoge has been chronicling the procedural progress of that lawsuit, and if you have followed the case, you know that at the next court hearing on Friday, Oct. 26, it’s possible that Kimberlin will be held in contempt of court.

And those who have studied Rauhauser’s modus operandi will perhaps not be surprised to learn that Neal has begun touting the “Kookpocalypse Konclusion . . .  I just got the word – close of business next Friday it’s all gonna happen,” with a countdown clock to Friday, Oct. 26.

So Rauhauser’s recent flurry of online evil — the “doxing,” the posting of photos of his targets and their homes, the e-mails to law enforcement, et cetera — could be interpreted as reactions to the legal pressure being brought to bear against Rauhauser’s client/associate Kimberlin. Neal exhibited a similar pattern of behavior in the weeks before the March raid on “LulzSec.”

Weird things involving Rauhauser’s targets are happening on a daily basis, and these things should not be dismissed as coincidences.

‘Someone Trying to Breathe Life into a Three-Year Old Dead Horse’

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Thus does John Fund dismiss an attempt by Nadia Naffe to create controversy around James O’Keefe III over a planned “sting” video that never happened, as embarrassing as the details may be.

O’Keefe, as you certainly know, is the young activist who became famous for his collaboration with Hannah Giles in the 2009 undercover videos that destroyed ACORN, and which sparked the successful launch of Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website. Naffe is a former Republican operative who worked with O’Keefe until, in March of this year, she accused O’Keefe of sexual harassment and worse.

Naffe had been “terminated” by the Florida GOP in 2004, which led to a lawsuit that, if O’Keefe knew about it before he hired her, should have given him pause. Who would knowingly hire anyone whose former employment resulted in litigation? And this is especially true of someone whose work would require a high degree of confidentiality.

So now Naffe has made herself a weapon with which O’Keefe’s enemies seek to destroy him. She has made league with Neal Rauhauser — assisting Rauhauser in an attempt, on behalf of Brett Kimberlin, to get access to e-mails that Naffe wrongfully obtained from O’Keefe — and is now apparently ready to file a lawsuit against Patrick “Patterico” Frey:

Rauhauser has been obsessed with Patterico for more than a year, going back to the 2011 WeinerGate scandal, when Rauhauser (under his “Stranded Wind” alias) published a series of posts at Daily Kos accusing Patterico of all manner of wrongdoing:

It was in the aftermath of the WeinerGate scandal that Rauhauser evidently joined forces with Brett Kimberlin and Kimberlin’s tax-exempt 501(c)4 group Velvet Revolution. Kimberlin had his own grievance against Patterico dating back to October 2010, when Kimberlin threatened a lawsuit against Patterico.

Similarly, both Rauhauser and Kimberlin had been striving for some time to destroy Andrew Breitbart and James O’Keefe, which is how Nadia Naffe’s complaints against O’Keefe brought this together with their grievances against Patterico. When Naffe made her accusations against O’Keefe in March, Patterico raised questions about Naffe’s story and subsequently discovered the public-record documents relating to her 2004 lawsuit against the Republican Party.

Patterico’s criticism of Naffe and his publication of those documents is, so far as I can tell, the only grounds for complaint Naffe has against him and I can’t imagine any court finding Patterico guilty of anything, but this lawsuit is just another typical product of the Kimberlin-Rauhauser “accuse the accusers” strategy. Once they target someone, the accusations proliferate endlessly as part of an orchestrated effort to discredit anyone who might accuse them of wrongdoing. (See my June 17 article, “‘Scrubbed’ Writings Show Kimberlin Associate Neal Rauhauser’s Obsessions,” for some relevant examples.)

Remember that Rauhauser solicited the same California attorney, Jay Leiderman, in an attempt to get SWATting target Mike Stack to file a nuisance suit against Patterico.

It is most unfortunate that Rosie Gray of Buzzfeed has assisted O’Keefe’s enemies in what is, in fact, nothing more than the latest manifestation of a bizarre personal vendetta. “Dead horse” though the story may be, innocent people still suffer real harm from these deliberate attacks. Assisting sadists in the satisfaction of their depraved appetites is not properly the business of a journalist.

UPDATE: Linked by Jackie Wellfonder and Bill Hoge — thanks! — and thanks likewise to the commenter who points out that Jay Leiderman is also the attorney who represents imprisoned former “Anonymous” spokesman Barrett Brown.

Brown’s involvement with Rauhauser became public last month when Barrett threatened me, then published a series of private online chats he had with Patterico, evidently in an effort to defame Patterico as being party to a (wholly imaginary) conspiracy.

Brown’s motives in that incident are impossible to determine, nor do we know what (if anything) connects that failed smear with Barrett’s subsequent public meltdown that led to his arrest. Absent such knowledge we can only observe that, in general, bad things happen to people who actively ally themselves with evil.

 

Neal Rauhauser’s Crazy-Evil Obsession

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Neal Rauhauser was a speaker at the 2010 Netroots Nation conference

“I’ve been all over Patterico for the last several weeks, as he looks to be a pretty good candidate for the planner/operator behind Weinergate . . .”
— Neal Rauhauser (“Stranded Wind”), Daily Kos, “Weinergate Perps Pay Dearly,”July 27, 2011

“Frey is often at the center of questionable activity, lending undue legitimacy to things that border on criminality . . . I have long felt that he was misusing his position and abusing the public’s trust, and these logs presented me a chance to file a formal complaint.”
— Neal Rauhauser, “Pat Frey – Safe, At Least For Now,” Sept. 21, 2012

Why did Neal Rauhauser become obsessed with Patrick “Patterico” Frey? Well, Patterico had done valuable work writing about the Anthony Weiner cybersex scandal, but you see that he assumed an inordinately large significance in Rauhauser’s mind. Why?

Long story short: It’s the day job, stupid.

It seems that once Rauhauser learned that Patterico works for the L.A. County District Attorney’s office — which was not a secret, by the way — this offered what must have seemed to Neal a chance at an easy “win”: He would get Patterico fired, and this scalp on his belt would then become the symbolic trophy that certified Rauhauser’s vindication.

Neal was Patient Zero in the epidemic of Weiner Truther madness on the kook fringe of the Left. Rauhauser had convinced himself (and staked his credibility on the claim) that Weiner was the victim of a heinous conspiracy.

“Congressman Weiner was stalked and set up by a Christian Infowar Militia cell based largely in Oklahoma City,” Rauhauser wrote at Daily Kos under his “Stranded Wind” alias on June 4, 2011.

Looking at the elements of that accusation — “Christian,” “Militia” and “Oklahoma City” — you have a tight cluster of right-wing demons, calculated to inspire Fear and Loathing in the hearts of the type of liberal who, as soon as Gabby Giffords was shot, leaped to the conclusion that her killer must have been a deranged Tea Party extremist. (Jared Lee Loughner was, in fact, a psychotic 9/11 Truther obsessed with the cult conspiracy film Zeitgeist.) This is where we arrive at a basic point of debate about Neal Rauhauser: Crazy or Evil?

That is to say, in examining his behavior, we are forced to consider two alternative explanations:

A. He’s crazy. Rauhauser seriously believes the lunatic conspiracy theories he promulgates online.

or

B. He’s evil. Rauhauser is a vicious cynic, who creates elaborate fictions carefully calculated to appeal to the kook-fringe types, thus enabling him to manipulate them for his own selfish and malevolent purposes.

Of course, we cannot rule out the hybrid theory:

C. He’s both crazy and evil.

At some basic cognitive level, Rauhauser appears aware that his conspiracy theories are ludicrously false. There are times when the cynicism is so apparent — e.g., Neal’s manipulation of his gullible Twitter defender (and devoted Weiner Truther) “Occupy Rebellion” — that it seems obvious that he knows it’s all nonsense.

So that would seem to support the “evil” theory, but the “crazy” explanation is bolstered by Rauhauser’s strange persistence in his obsessive pursuit of certain targets. More than two years after the 2010 TwitterGate scandal, for example, Rauhauser still continues to lash out compulsively at “Zapem,” the woman whose research did so much to expose Rauhauser’s role in that bizarre episode.

No rational person would continue pursuing her in the same mad way Don Quixote pursued windmills, as Rauhauser has done. And I think that Ladd Ehlinger Jr. came closest to identifying the exact nature of Rauhauser’s madness:

[Rauahsuer’s behavior] displays a breathtaking lack of human empathy. He thinks of people as playthings to be toyed with. By categorizing them as “trolls” he can do to them whatever he wishes, and creates all sorts of elaborate games to entrap them. His revelry in their misery is quite apparent, justified by dehumanizing those he manipulates.

In other words, Neal Rauhauser is a sadistic sociopath who enjoys inflicting suffering on others, for whom he is incapable of feeling empathy. Furthermore — and I’ll ask readers with psychological training to tell me how common this is — Rauhauser’s sociopathic tendencies are closely associated with narcissistic grandiosity and paranoia.

He is a sort of cyber-serial killer, stalking prey on the Internet, seeking to inflict on them virtual torture and destruction.

Rauhauser thinks of his evil acts as heroic, avenging the wrongs he alleges have been done by the dehumanized scapegoats whom he alternately diminishes (as insignificant “trolls,” etc.) and magnifies as dangerous enemies, as suits his selfish purposes. And so we go back to the WeinerGate scandal and the beginnings of Neal’s obsession with Patrick Frey. Patterico was targeted in multiple July 2011 posts by Rauhauser (“Stranded Wind”) on Daily Kos:

Unlike some other of Rauhauser’s targets, Patterico has the kind of day job where such defamatory accusations can cause him real harm. Although his supervisors seem to understand that the false accusations against Patterico are just psychological side-effects of Rauhauser’s conspiratorial fixation — Patterico is never going to get fired because of this crap — being the target of an obsessive cyberstalker’s repeated attacks is nonetheless harmful and annoying.

Furthermore, the rational (evil, not crazy) side of Rauhauser’s mind functions well enough to inform him that his target’s ability to retaliate is impeded by the very fact that Patterico has a day job with serious responsibilities.

Whereas Neal can spend all day every day smearing Patterico, Patterico cannot turn around and do the same to Rauhauser. And while Neal has been able to incite his own basement-dwelling troll army (including “Occupy Rebellion,” among others) to parrot his smears against Patterico and other targets, Patterico’s potential allies are for the most part responsible job-holding professionals who would think it unseemly to spend time refuting the crazy-evil lies of such an odious and obscure person as Neal Rauhauser.

The advantages enjoyed by Rauhauser in such a situation — what we might term assymetric online warfare — are not neglible, and his sadistic personality delights in nothing so much as the cruel exploitation of such an advantage. Crazy evil is like that.

 

Speaking of Distractions …

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. . . the Obamaphiliac media has spent today trying to convince us that what Mitt Romney said about Obama’s self-inflicted foreign policy debacle is actually a worse disaster than the failed policy itself. Here is Mitt Romney’s statement:

“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.

Ed Morrissey noted that Romney took questions after his press conference, whereas President Gutsy Call did not.

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.

Why do they hate us? BECAUSE THEY HATE.

When you know that people are attempting to distract you, it’s a lot easier to pay attention to what they’re trying to distract you from.

This is also true, by the way, of Brett Kimberlin and his friends trying to distract us from their increasing legal jeopardy. Yesterday, I told you that Aaron Walker’s attorney has filed a motion to compel Kimberlin to stop delaying discovery in Walker’s Virginia lawsuit against Kimberlin, Neal Rauhauser and Ron Brynaert.

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.

C’mon, Brett: Who killed Julia Scyphers, and why?

You don’t decieve me. You don’t distract me. You don’t scare me. And there is no statute of limitation on murder, Brett.

William J. Hoge has now posted the interrogatories in the case of Walker v. Kimberlin, et al., and there will be time later to discuss these very interesting questions.

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.

SWAT an L.A. County Deputy D.A.? That’s Not News. SWAT a Teen Starlet …?

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Has the Los Angeles Times ever written about the SWATting of Patrick “Patterico” Frey? Never mind: Miley Cyrus is victim of a “prank”!

On Wednesday night, Cyrus was the target of “swatting” — a prank in which an anonymous caller reports a heinous crime to authorities so a SWAT team will swarm an innocent person’s home — TMZ reported.
The caller, whom Los Angeles police are said to be tracking, told a 911 operator that Cyrus’ property had been invaded by a kidnapper and there had been a shooting.
At least a dozen officers and firefighters responded to the scene, according to L.A. Now. Luckily for all involved, it turned out to be a hoax.

Pranks! They’re so hilarious! But “pranks” are only news when they happen to famous celebrities. Did Miley eat at Chick-fil-A or something?

UPDATE: A guy who’s not a famous celebrity writes:

The more people do this without consequence, the more it will happen. One day someone is going to get hurt.

Yeah, but unless the victim is a famous celebrity, who cares? It’s Hollywood. We probably never would have heard of Charles Manson except for the fact that Sharon Tate was one of his victims.

‘I Know This All Sounds Crazy, But …’

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FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
The title quote is from Patterico’s post noting the one-year anniversary of his SWATting, as he was handcuffed and talking to police:

I said something like this: “Look. This is a hoax. I think I know what’s going on here. I’m a blogger. I’m also a Deputy D.A., but I don’t think this is about my job. It’s about things I wrote on my blog. This same thing happened to someone else last week, in New Jersey. Someone called and said he killed his wife, and the police showed up at his house and pointed guns at him, just like this. He and I were writing about the same story. We were both writing about Congressman Weiner, the Congressman who sent the picture of his underwear. We were both writing about that. We both got threatened by email. Check my phone. I talked to a New Jersey detective about it. His name is Jason Larson. His name and number are on my phone. I know this all sounds crazy, but that’s what’s going on.”

Read the whole thing. You might suppose that law enforcement would make such a crime a high-priority investigation. You might suppose that the news media would treat SWATting, as a terrorist threat to First Amendment rights, with at least as much attention as they give to SWATting of adolescents playing online video games.

You would be wrong on both counts. And that’s why it’s no joke when I dateline these dispatches “From An Undisclosed Location.”

– Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknown

How Stupid I Was: 2011 Edition

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FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
How easy is it to miss a big story? This easy: While I was packing up my desk to move to our new home — thanks, Brett! — I found some notes I’d taken of a phone interview I’d done with Andrew Breitbart in the wake of Rep. Anthony Weiner’s resignation. I’d meant to write an article for The American Spectator based on that interview, but the GOP primary campaign started heating up before I could complete the article, and so I just forgot about it.

The other day, I was packing my desk and came across the notes — as usual, scrawled on the back of an envelope — and saw the names “Mike Stack” and “Lee Stranahan” and I was like, “Holy sh*t!” 

A big chunk of the same story I’m now covering so intensively was right there in my notes, taken in late June 2011, and I hadn’t realized it. How had I lost track of that story, so that when I bumped into it almost accidentally on May 17 of this year, it caught me by surprise?

Well, something else was happening in late June 2011: Herman Cain’s campaign operation in Iowa was in disarray. Staffers were quitting or being fired, and so I put aside the Breitbart/WeinerGate article and spent the Fourth of July weekend on the phone with various sources, eventually writing an article entitled “Iowa Calling” (The American Spectator, July 6, 2011). And I never got back to that Breitbart feature, until Andrew died in March.

Like a lot of other political reporters, as soon as Anthony Weiner resigned in disgrace, my attitude was: End of story. Move on.

For a week or two after Weiner’s resignation, I noticed some people arguing over things like “Betty and Veronica” and “Who was Dan Wolfe?” But all that struck me as useless trivia. The scandalized politician resigns and the story is Officially Over, as far as the press corps is concerned. Even though I’m now in the blogosphere, when I’m actually reporting news, I still think like an Old School newspaper reporter, and arguing over obscure details of Last Week’s Sex Scandal is (pardon the pejorative) amateurish.

So that’s how I missed it, see?

Yeah, I was mystifed by the “Betty and Veronica” angle, and the Dan Wolfe angle was peculiar, but that was “Grassy Knoll” stuff, not something I could afford to waste time worrying about while there was a presidential campaign to cover. In all honesty, my feeling was, “Look at those amateurs, running off on a useless snipe hunt.”

Bah, humbug.

I didn’t know Mike Stack and Patterico got SWATted. I didn’t even know what SWATting was. It never occurred to me that the fallout from WeinerGate might be far more serious than the GOP primary campaign (which turned out to be kind of a useless snipe hunt, too).

Now, however, I look back with regret at my stupid failure to recognize the significance of elements of WeinerGate I dismissed as trivial. All of which is prelude to pointing out that Patterico stayed on the story with an intense focus long after I forgot all about it:

I was very interested in these two pieces of information, because I knew that Mike Stack had been SWATted on June 23, 2011. I knew that the caller from Mike Stack’s June 23, 2011 SWATting had been (incorrectly) described by the police as having a British accent. And I knew that some suspected that a woman in Boston named Jennifer George was behind some of the fakery that could be related to Mike Stack’s SWATting — and that she had accused Lee [Stranahan] of threatening her.

Read the rest. Damn, I was so stupid.

‘The Gaped Crusader’: Brett Kimberlin Associate Neal Rauhauser Stalked and Taunted SWATting Victim Patrick Frey

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Neal Rauhauser: Democrat consultant at 2010 Netroots Nation conference

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
A Democratic political consultant harassed the victim of a SWATting hoax, employing the online alias “The Gaped Crusader” to taunt popular conservative blogger Patrick “Patterico” Frey and others.

Neal Rauhauser became obsessed with Frey during the 2011 Anthony Weiner cybersex scandal, declaring in a July 2011 post at the Daily Kos blog that Frey “looks to be a pretty good candidate for the planner/operator behind Weinergate.” Both Frey and Mike Stack — a New Jersey resident who helped expose Weiner’s online activities — were targeted by so-called “SWATting” hoaxes in June and July 2011.

Frey published a 3,000-word post at his Patterico.com site Wednesday morning that provides extensive evidence showing Rauhauser, a consultant who has previously worked for Democratic politicians including Rep. Raul Grijalva, used the “Gaped Crusader” alias in a two-month cyberstalking campaign in November and December 2011.

The dates of the “Gaped Crusader” online harassment of Frey, Stack and others are important because Rauhauser has boasted of his connections to Brett Kimberlin, director of the tax-exempt 501(c) group Justice Through Music Project (JTMP), and to another non-profit group, Velvet Revolution (VR), co-founded by Kimberlin and progressive blogger Brad Friedman. Rauhauser has described Kimberlin as a “client” and represented himself as an agent of VR in a September 2011 e-mail to leaders of the Occupy Boston protests. Rauhauser accompanied Kimberlin to a May 29 Maryland court hearing where blogger Aaron Walker was arrested for having written about Kimberlin’s criminal past.

Kimberlin has become the subject of widespread controversy since May 17, when Walker published a 28,000-word account of how he says Kimberlin tried to “frame” him for an assault charge earlier this year. Walker, a Virginia attorney, had provided legal assistance to Seth “Socrates” Allen, a progressive blogger who criticized Kimberlin, Friedman and VR in postings at a variety of liberal Web sites, including Daily Kos and Democrat Underground.

Kimberlin is a convicted felon who in 1981 was sentenced to 50 years in federal prison for a weeklong bombing spree in Indiana that maimed a Vietnam veteran and blew up a police car. Released from prison in 2001, Kimberlin founded JTMP and VR in 2005; the two groups have since raised more than $2 million in tax-exempt contributions.

Rauhauser, a founder of the Democrat political consulting firm Progressive PST, was a featured speaker at the 2010 Netroots Nation conference organized by the Daily Kos blog. He described his specialty as “solving problems in the social media work space for political campaigns and causes.”

Rauhauser’s reputation was damaged by his role in the so-called “TwitterGate” scandal in 2010, when he was accused of organizing an online harassment campaign against Tea Party activists. The association between Kimberlin and Rauhauser evidently began in July 2011, when Rauhauser used his “Stranded Wind” account at Daily Kos to write, “someone forwarded me the complaint [made by Kimberlin] regarding Frey running a cyberstalking campaign in conjunction with South Easton, Massachusetts resident Seth L. Allen.”

Rauhauser has called himself a computer “hacker,” and is a known associate of Gregg Housh, a figure connected to the “Anonymous” hacking conspiracy. In a comment posted at a progressive blog in October 2011, Rauhauser described being contacted by a “very big dog from the Anonymous pen” who agreed to assist Velvet Revolution in an apparent plan to attack enemies of Rauhauser and Kimberlin.

In a May 25 blog post at Patterico, Frey described how he was “SWATted” in July 2011, handcuffed in a police raid prompted by a fake phone call. Frey identified Kimberlin, Rauhauser and former Raw Story editor Ron Brynaert as those he suspected of complicity in that incident.

In identifying Rauhauser as “The Gaped Crusader,” Frey noted multiple similarities between Rauhauser and his online alias, including an obsession with the 2011 WeinerGate scandal, which forced a formerly popular New York congressman to resign in disgrace.

Rauhauser claimed that Anthony Weiner was the victim of a conspiracy, and elaborated his theories in multiple postings at Daily Kos under his “Stranded Wind” psuedonym. On July 4, for example, Rauhauser claimed — without citing any evidence — that a “Christian Infowar Militia” had attacked Weiner. Rauhauser then repeatedly attacked Frey in a series of Daily Kos posts:

Rauhauser has boasted of his contacts with law enforcement — including the FBI — and routinely accuses his enemies of criminal activity. Among the targets of Rauhauser’s accusations was an Alabama man, Greg W. Howard, who was viciously harassed during the 2010 TwitterGate scandal. In August 2011, Rauhauser filed a criminal complaint against Howard with the Alabama attorney general’s office, saying that Howard “has constantly menaced me via the Internet.”

In fact, Rauhauser had described in two August 2010 articles at the Open Left site his plans to use “a synthetic presence” — i.e., false identities colloquially known as “sockpuppets” or “trolls” — against conservative activists online, to “penetrate their anonymity,” in order to ”get up inside their network and collect actionable information.” Rauhauser explained that he hoped to be able to bring civil lawsuits or criminal charges against his political enemies:

“People engaged in provocative online conduct feel insulated; they’re in the comfort of their own home, if they’ve engaged in a little bit of caution they may feel completely anonymous, and this emboldens them. Specifying the strategy we’ll use to break their anonymity won’t permit any mitigation on their part without adjusting their behavior, which counts as a win for us. We’re dealing with people who have likely had no interaction with the court system beyond a traffic ticket; the potential for a pro se litigant to force them into expensive, long distance, lengthy, discovery laden litigation doesn’t seem to cross their minds.”

Rauhauser was subsequently accused of recruiting a number of individuals whom he called “beandogs,” who used Twitter to engage in an orchestrated campaign “to harass, threaten, provoke, disparage, intimidate, verbally assault, berate & employ hate-speech against those not in agreement with his brand of politics,” as conservative logger Patrick Read described it in September 2010.

The use of Internet aliases was the subject of an article Rauhauser posted online, describing “Persona Management” methods for maintaining online secret identities in order to avoid detection by others, including law enforcement agencies.

One of the targets of Rauhauser’s online activities was a conservative activist who uses the Twitter handle “@ZAPEM,” who Rauhauser believed to be a New Jersey woman named Michelle Lessick. ZAPEM played a key role in exposing Rauhauser’s role in the TwitterGate scandal.

Frey’s exposure of Rauhauser’s “Gaped Crusader” persona highlights the ways in which Rauhauser has employed deceptive methods in his online activities. In February, Rauhauser sent to law enforcement agencies (including the FBI) a bizarre document titled, “Andrew Breitbart’s ISR Cell?”

This document described a far-fetched conspiracy theory involving Frey, Andrew Breitbart, Mike Stack and the HBGary firm, among others. Rauhauser’s accusations, which seem implausible, may have succeeded in confusing officials responsible for investigating the SWATtings of Stack and Frey, crimes that have remained unsolved for the past year.

Red State editor Erick Erickson was SWATted in May. Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss, Texas Rep. Kenny Marchant and more than 85 House Republicans called on Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate these crimes. Despite increasing pressure, sources say, the federal investigation has lagged, perhaps because of the indifference of political appointees in the Justice Department.

Meanwhile, Kimberlin has continued filing a series of lawsuits and criminal complaints against bloggers in an attempt to silence his critics. In a Maryland court hearing Tuesday, Judge Nelson W. Rupp Jr. issued an emergency ruling that lifted a gag order that had prevented Aaron Walker from blogging about Kimberlin, who responded by filing his own motion that accused Walker of inciting harassment against Kimberlin. The same day Walker scored his courtroom victory in Maryland, he was targeted by a SWATting attack.

PATTERICO: Brett Kimberlin Associate “Gaped Crusader” — And the Evidence Connecting Him to Neal Rauhauser

(Note: This report was originally posted in a series of updates. The “update” notations have been removed for ease of reading.)

– Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknown

 

 

 

THE KIMBERLIN FILES: