Category: Neutral Objective Journalism

They’re Still Hating Breitbart

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After screaming into the phone in frustration, I caught my breath and calmed down, finally paraphrasing scripture: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Never mind to whom I was talking or what the original subject of my rant was, the bottom line is something some of us have been saying for months: “Damn, I miss Andrew.”

Of course, Breitbart himself was often frustrated — in his “righteous indignation” mode — at the apathy and incompetence he encountered when dealing with the ossified GOP Establishment.

Despite the mythical image of Breitbart as an invulnerable superhero who went from one triumphant victory to another in his war against the “Democrat-Media Complex,” Andrew experienced discouragement just like anyone else. While he was always sanguine in public, understanding his role-model status in exemplifying the “happy warrior” spirit, he didn’t mind sharing his disappointments privately with friends.

This morning, Da Tech Guy had Aaron Walker’s attorney Dan Backer on his radio show for a two-hour special about the Kimberlin saga. The astonishing news this week — Judge Richard B. Potter’s dismissal of the Virginia lawsuit Walker v. Kimberlin, et al. — was a main topic. I called in during the second hour of the show, and there was extensive discussion of how to get courts, cops and reporters to start taking this story seriously. People have been SWATted, other people have been sued, arrested, wrongly accused, threatened, harassed and cyberstalked, people have lost their jobs or had their employment jeopardized, and yet there continues to be a false narrative about this story that it’s “just about politics” or “just a bunch of crazy people arguing on the Internet.”

Frustration and discouragement are natural, and it is difficult to see the way forward without visionary leadership. “Damn, I miss Andrew.”

OK, so . . . Bill Schmalfeldt.

Bill Schmalfeldt of Elk Ridge, Maryland, a.k.a. “Liberal Grouch”

You remember: Two weeks ago, the deranged Schmalfeldt threatened to call my wife and, over a span of 48 hours, sent me more than 200 Twitter messages inspired by his obsessive rage. He had been attacking me since June, but I’d tried to ignore it until Schmalfeldt’s madness escalated to such an intensity that I felt obliged to turn on the light and let people watch the cyberstalking cockroach scurry away.

Do you know how much Bill Schmalfeldt hated Andrew Breitbart?

Two weeks ago — the day after Thanksgiving, the same day he went nuts on Twitter — Schmalfeldt took over the “Breitbart Unmasked” site that for the past nine months has been used to attack various targets of what I’ve called the Kimberlin-Rauhauser Axis. But even before that, four months ago, Schmalfeldt did something so perverse and hateful that decent people can scarcely comprehend it.

In July, Schmalfeldt created a Web site called “Big Damnation” which he promoted with a Twitter account called @DeadAndrew that mocked Breitbart as supposedly repenting his conservative “sins” (and denouncing his former colleagues) while suffering in Hell.

Bill Schmalfeldt is a remorseless liar and, after this vile project was exposed, Schmalfeldt deceptively used his phony “Bill Matthews” alias at the Examiner to promote his dishonest (anti-Breitbart) version of this controversy. In doing so, Schmalfeldt (a) defended Brett Kimberlin and (b) pretended that he wasn’t responsible for the “Big Damnation”/@DeadAndrew atrocity, as Lee Stranahan has explained.

This is important to understand because, as I have previously pointed out, the original reason Aaron Walker became a target of Kimberlin is because Walker was CC’d on an e-mail sent to Andrew Breitbart that became part of a police report.

That is to say, Walker was collateral damage, a target of convenience, in Kimberlin’s larger project of destroying Breitbart. This project has continued even after Breitbart’s death, and Schmalfeldt appears very much to be part of that project, although whether he’s being paid or is just a moonbat volunteer is not clear.

Two weeks after his “Big Damnation”/@DeadAndrew atrocity project was exposed, Schmalfeldt used his “Bill Matthews” alias at the Examiner to attack me as “one of the few odious wisps of intestinal gas still floating in the air, emanating from the decomposing empire of the late conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart.”

Like everything else Schmalfeldt writes — his initials are “B.S.” — this is laughably wrong. I was never part of Breitbart’s “empire,” never contributed to nor was paid by any of Breitbart’s enterprises.

Rather, I was just one of many friends that Andrew made over the course of his career. I first met him at CPAC 2007, and interviewed him later that year for a Washington Times feature story. This friendship continued over the next five years and, as chance would have it, I was among a dozen or so people hanging out with Breitbart in a hotel lobby on the eve of an AFP Michigan conference the weekend before he died. Somewhere online, there’s video of the speech I gave at the D.C. memorial for Breitbart, but I’m not in a mood to look that up now.

My point is that (a) Schmalfeldt is a liar, (b) he’s part of a much larger project aimed at destroying the conservative citizen-journalism movement that Breitbart helped inspire, and (c) the reason I became a target is that, like so many other targets of the Kimberlin-Rauhauser Axis, I’m trying to carry on this movement. As I wrote on May 18: Who Warned Us About Brett Kimberlin?

People better wake up. Where there is no vision, the people perish.

And remember the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

 

 

 

 


WALKER V. KIMBERLIN: DISMISSED

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MANASSAS, Virginia
Prince William County Circuit Court Judge Richard B. Potter has just dismissed Aaron Walker’s civil lawsuit against Brett Kimberlin, Neal Rauhauser and Ron Brynaert. Will have further details momentarily.

UPDATE: Today’s hearing began shortly after 11 a.m. and was over by noon. Several preliminary motions had been consolidated into one hearing, and the motion heard first was Kimberlin’s motion to dismiss. Clearly, Judge Potter had already decided to grant Kimberlin’s motion, but went through the formality of a hearing.

Acting as his own attorney, Kimberlin argued first, and showed a disposition to argue the facts of the case rather than to argue law.  Walker’s attorney Dan Backer objected to this, and his objection was upheld, Judge Potter ordering Kimberlin to stick to the law. Backer briefly countered each of Kimberlin’s points, and then Kimberlin was given an opportunity to respond, once again arguing facts more than law.

Then Judge Potter called a 10-minute recess and returned to read a decision — dismissing the case — that quite obviously took a lot longer than 10 minutes to write. In other words, the judge’s decision was written in advance of the hearing.

UPDATE II: John Hoge is here at the McDonald’s where I’m filing this. My co-blogger Wombat is here, as is Walker’s attorney, Dan Backer, who is obviously disappointed. Particularly disturbing was that Kimberlin never complied with discovery requests in the case, while Walker did — and Kimberlin used documents supplied by Walker to argue that the case was without merit, while Walker never got the opportunity to depose witnesses in the case.

“The precedent set here is just terrible,” Backer said, talking about how Judge Potter ignored Kimberlin’s violation of court orders to seal the discovery materials. “Why should anyone comply with discovery?”

Backer discussed the possibility of appeals in either the federal suit in Maryland or the Virginia suit, but for today it’s a complete bummer.

UPDATE III: Da Tech Guy writes that “the big story is not so much the details but the emboldening of some very bad characters.” It’s actually worse than that: It’s not just bad characters, but bad behavior that have been emboldened. Why shouldn’t everyone with a grudge resort to the methods Kimberlin & Co. employed against Walker?

The targeting of political bloggers, the cyberstalking and harassment, are all now acceptable tactics for which there is evidently no legal recourse. Thanks, Judge Potter.

UPDATE IV: Linked by The Lonely Conservative — thanks!




 


The Continuing Newsworthiness of the Weird Kimberlin-Rauhauser Story

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Brett Kimberlin could have been sentenced to 230 years in federal prison

“Keep in mind that Rauhauser, by inciting Nadia Naffe’s lawsuit against Patterico, has obligated Patterico to avoid writing about this subject on advice of counsel, and Aaron Walker‘s attorneys have advised him likewise. So two of the bloggers most knowledgeable about what I call the Kimberlin-Rauhauser Axis are not in a position to tell readers what’s happening on that front. William Hoge has been keeping tabs on the court proceedings, but Rauhauser’s methodical cyberstalking required my special attention.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Oct. 21

“It’s as if the whole matter is just being treated as a blogger war, as opposed to something that could have gotten multiple people killed.”
— Patrick “Patterico” Frey, Nov. 8

“I believe this to be reckless endangerment if not attempted murder. The intent there was to cause harm.”
— Aaron Walker, Nov. 27

When Neal Rauhauser’s blog went dark (and Neal’s pet Twitter troll, “Occupy Rebellion” went silent) Friday, it didn’t make big headlines — even most blogs ignored it — despite the fact that it involves one of the central figures in one of the most bizarre stories of the year.

Among the minor frustrations of covering this story has been the occasional accusation that I’ve gone down a rabbit hole, chasing an inconsequential controversy that boils down to “just a bunch of crazy people arguing on the Internet.” Yet the story remains every bit as newsworthy today, in early December, as it was on May 25, when it accounted for the top seven threads on Memeorandum.

As a matter of fact, with a key court date approaching Tuesday — when Prince William County Circuit Court Judge Richard B. Potter will hear several motions in the Virginia case of Walker v. Kimberlin, et al. — the story is now more newsworthy than ever. Furthermore, the possibly related incidents of “SWATtings” (which have targeted conservative bloggers including Patrick “Patterico” Frey) recently gained notice in the mainstream press:

So here we have a story with a celebrity angle and nationwide significance, related to the Anthony Weiner scandal, and also involving Brett Kimberlin, the infamous “Speedway Bomber” who gained notoriety for claiming to have sold drugs to a youthful Dan Quayle. In addition, this story involves the late Andrew Breitbart because, as I explained Nov. 24, Aaron Walker first came to Kimberlin’s attention after Walker was CC’d on an e-mail that liberal blogger Seth Allen (who had been sued by Kimberlin) sent to Breitbart last year. And, if all of that is not enough to make the story sufficiently interesting:

The strange relationships between all these incidents and individuals could scarcely be sorted out and explained in a single blog post, but as confusing as it may be, the point is — as Patterico told L.A. Weekly‘s Simone Wilson — this isn’t just “a blogger war.”

The Internet is being used as a weapon of what Patterico has called “political terrorism.” Law enforcement seems indifferent to this threat to First Amendment freedoms, and a similiar indifference has been shown by many journalists and bloggers.

“It is very easy to decide ‘this isn’t any of my trouble’ and permit vicious behavior. . . . Who wants to get involved? Easier, and surely safer, just to duck one’s head and hide, and hope the danger visits someone else.”
— Ace of Spades, May 22

Over the past six months, the danger of which Ace spoke has been visited on many innocent law-abiding American citizens, some of whom had nothing to do with the Kimberlin story. Neal Rauhauser has boasted of his skill at playing “conflict cupid” with his enemies, and has evidently incited several vile creatures to join a sort of troll army, attacking not only those who have spoken out against Rauhauser’s client Kimberlin, but also anyone who has rallied to the defense of Kimberlin’s targets. Larry Sinclair, Bill Schmalfeldt and Brooks Bayne are among those who have assisted in sowing confusion, conflict, suspicion and fear around these targets. This is part of what I’ve called the “accuse the accusers” strategy and, as I said in September:

I am not deceived. I am not distracted. And I sure as hell ain’t afraid.

There was an election campaign to cover and so, except for the occasional mention of new developments, “The Kimberlin Files” were laid aside until that ended. Now I’m back on the story.

Aaron Walker’s lawsuit against Kimberlin, Rauhauser and Ron Brynaert aims to hold people accountable for their dangerous and harmful activities. The hearing Tuesday in Manassas, Virginia, will resolve several preliminary motions in that case:

Kimberlin’s conduct in the case, acting as his own attorney, has been decidedly weird. At one point in August (see “Exhibit J” here), Kimberlin sought to delay the case to Dec. 15 and e-mailed Walker’s attorney Dan Backer:

“I am cooperating with the FBI and other law enforcement officials regarding several issues involving your client and I believe that the resolution of those matters will have a bearing on this case.”

The idea that a notorious criminal like Kimberlin would be “cooperating with the FBI” is strange enough, but what “issues involving” Aaron Walker could be of interest the FBI?

My guess is that Kimberlin was talking about Rauhauser’s effort to depict Walker (along with Patterico, HB Gary, Jen Emick and others) as part of a conspiracy that exists only in Rauhauser’s twisted imagination. Rauhauser has been pushing this craziness for months. In February, it was the “Kookpocalypse“; a few months later, Rauhauser adapted the conspiracy theory to his false claim that Brandon Darby was to blame for the SWATtings. By September, Rauhauser (aka “Carlito2000”) was pushing this insanity at Barrett Brown.

If Kimberlin thought he could save himself the trouble of defending against a lawsuit by getting the feds to prosecute Walker based on Rauhauser’s false “Kookpocalypse” theory, wouldn’t that implicate Kimberlin in an attempt to obstruct justice? What other purpose could Rauhauser’s falsehoods serve, except to distract and confuse authorities investigating the SWATtings? And, as Patterico points out, why would Kimberlin plead the Fifth Amendment when asked what he knows about SWATting?

There are people who think they know the answers to those questions, just as there are people who think they know why Rauhauser’s blog suddenly went “dark” on Friday. Rather than supply the common-sense inferences — readers may connect the dots however they please — my main goal is to encourage journalists and bloggers to bring attention to this case as Tuesday’s hearing approaches.

More than six months after I canceled a planned trip to the G-8 Summit in order to cover this story, Walker’s lawsuit against Kimberlin promises to bring some sort of clarity (and, perhaps eventually, closure) to this savage tale. Reader contributions to The Shoe Leather Fund have permitted me to stay on this story despite every effort by Kimberlin and his henchmen to intimidate me into quitting, and I know readers don’t want me to quit now. So once again I remind you of the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

 

 

 

 

THE KIMBERLIN FILES:

 

 


Neal Rauhauser Goes Dark?
UPDATE: Law Enforcement?

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UPDATE 4:45 p.m. ET: At least two people who have been following this story tell me they suspect the unexplained disappearance of Neal Rauhauser’s blog may be a consequence of a criminal investigation. While these explanations are merely speculative at this point, one possibility is that Rauhauser has attracted FBI attention because of his involvement with the “Anonymous” hacker group. One source mentioned a certain hacker whose chat logs on a computer hard drive have come under scrutiny by the FBI.

A law enforcement angle in the shutdown of Rauhauser’s blog related to his Anonymous invovlement would, perhaps, explain the simultaneous silence by the “Occupy Rebellion” Twitter account, which openly supported the Anonymous hackers.

*** PREVIOUSLY (2:37 p.m. ET) ***

Mike Stack informs us that Neal Rauhauser’s blog has disappeared, after two months of cranking out smears and conspiracy theories about the alleged evils of various enemies of Rauhauser and his client Brett Kimberlin. Meanwhile, Rauhauser’s pet Twitter troll, “Occupy Rebellion,” has switched her account to “private” setting.

Why this happened or what it means is purely a matter of speculation, but one obvious possibility is that it may have become apparent to Brett Kimberlin that these cyberstalking presences were jeopardizing his case as defendant in the Walker v. Kimberlin, et al. lawsuit in Virginia.

UPDATE: John Hoge suggests:

Perhaps, he needs to coordinate a defense for the hearing on Tuesday. Maybe he’s just tying to hide.

There’s a key hearing in the Virginia case on Tuesday, and one of the motions to be heard will be Aaron Walker’s motion for a default judgment against Rauhauser. If Neal has belatedly decided to contest the suit, then trying to make the evidence of his continued harassment disappear would be an obvious move. Another possibility is that one of the various innocent people Rauhauser has dragged into his bogus conspiracy theories — and trust me, I hear from such people routinely — decided to take legal action against him.

UPDATE II: Mike Stack updates to say that the disappearance of Rauhauser’s blog will be permanent, but doesn’t say why it happened.

Anyone who’s studied Rauhauser’s methods know that this is typical: Neal has deleted more Internet content than most people have ever created — blogs, Scribd files, PDFs, Twitter sockpuppets, you name it. He has a childish love of the “you can’t catch me” game, and when his online mischief inevitably leads to trouble, Rauhauser tries to scrub the evidence off the Web. Then, when he re-emerges from hiding, Neal has some self-serving excuse about how he did nothing wrong, he was a victim of right-wing enemies, and anyone who claims otherwise is a paranoid wingnut.

Unfortunately, the truth accumulates and Rauhauser eventually runs short of people who believe his lies. There are always telltale clues that Neal can never quite explain away entirely, e.g.:

Hmmm. It seems to me that “Liberal Grouch” (Bill Schmalfeldt) is saying that his cyberstalking and harassment — which he ludicrously describes as “investigating” — are part of an organized intimidation campaign to shut up Brett Kimberlin’s critics. And seeing as how Schmalfeldt has taken over the “Breitbart Unmasked” site that many suspected was originally a Rauhauser project, maybe this reveals a fundamental truth about events of the past several months.

UPDATE III: Becca Lower offers a line from Sir Walter Scott:

The consequences of our crimes long survive their commission, and, like the ghosts of the murdered, forever haunt the steps of the malefactor.

“Consciousness of guilt,” as the detectives like to say. Throwing things in the river is only a misdemeanor littering offense, unless what you’re throwing in the river is the weapon used in a murder.





Auto-Marginalization: @BrooksBayne Decides to Jew-Bait (!) Aaron Walker

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Did I ever mention that I was friends with the late Sam Francis? That I have shaken hands with Pat Buchanan and once interviewed the late Joe Sobran? I’m bringing this up — doing “guilt-by-association” against myself, as it were — to make the point that I’ve hung out with Thought Criminals of the Dreadnaught class, the kind of right-wing extremists your nice Republican mother warned you about.

Having been smeared as a “hater” myself and having seen good people suffer from intra-conservative factional infighting, I am loath to support purges of people on the basis of cheap attacks from the Left or flimsy accusations of ideological impurity.

Ask Pamela Geller who stood up for her when Charles Johnson accused her of abetting “Euro-fascism.”

So now we confront the problem of Brooks Bayne.

Exactly who he is, or thinks he is, or has convinced other people that he is, Brooks Bayne has recently decided to auto-marginalize himself. It’s a hell of thing to say about somebody that I’d rather link a Firedoglake article about them than to link anything they ever wrote.

The Entire Internet Hates Brooks Bayne’s Guts

That was in March, when Bayne decided to go off on a weird tangent about Sandra Fluke’s boyfriend being Jewish and the scion of a family who subscribed to “the typical Jewish variant of socialism.” Marc Tracy offers an examination of Bayne’s rant at Tablet Magazine.

Just to demonstrate that one can speak of “the typical Jewish variant of socialism” without being a Jew-hater, I would direct you to David Horowitz’s memoir Radical Son, in which he ponders how and why his Jewish parents became members of the Communist Party U.S.A., and thus idolators in the totalitarian personality cult of a mass murderer named Josef Stalin. Horowitz recognized the cultural roots of this and discussed it in the context of tikkun olam. As I wrote in February 2011:

Tikkun olam is a rabbinical concept that might properly be translated as “for the public good,” but which in the modern era has been politicized by many on the Left, so that it is indistinguishable in their interpretation from “social justice.” Most famously, Michael Lerner — a 1960s anti-war radical who once led an SDS splinter group called the Seattle Liberation Front — named his magazine Tikkun.

“Social justice” is, as Hayek said, a mirage. Whatever you call it, and whatever compels you to pursue it, chasing the mirage of social justice will eventually bring about disillusionment, if you are intelligent and honest with yourself. It would be good if more Jewish conservatives spoke bluntly about this, just as it would be good if more Catholic conservatives spoke bluntly about how various “social justice” teachings of their church empower Welfare State liberalism that is ultimately hostile to faith and morality. For that matter, most Protestant churches could use a stern lecture or two about this perverse and nonsensical misinterpretation of Christian teaching.

As Ludwig von Mises observed nearly a century ago, “Christian Socialism is nonetheless socialism.” But I digress . . .

Brooks Bayne rather reminds me of another enthusiastic political parvenu, Glenn Beck, in that during his famed chalkboard lectures, Beck was often teaching his viewers facts that he himself had just learned. Not that there was anything wrong with that — Beck’s genuine excitment as he traced the historical background of current politics was quite infectious — but there is always a danger that such student-teachers will let themselves be sidetracked into well-known dead-ends that more experienced teachers might have warned them about.

The origins of the Federal Reserve system are indeed a frightful mess, but if you start ranting too excitedly about Jekyll Island and “international bankers,” you’ll sound like a kook — and might actually become one. More than a few well-meaning folks have started down that path and ended up on the paranoid fringe, barking madly about the Bildebergers, the Bavarian Illuminati and the New World Order.

It is in such light that we must evaluate Brooks Bayne and the suspicious whiff of anti-Semitism that surrounds him. I don’t want to be hasty. It takes more than a few sharp jabs at “neocons” to arouse my suspicion in this regard; many of my good friends are paleoconservatives, traditionalists or libertarians who have their own legitimate complaints against neconservatives. Such an éminence gris as Russell Kirk once infamously quipped that it seemed some neocons “mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.” Unless we’re willing to airbrush Kirk from the conservative pantheon, then, we can’t be haphazardly purging people on the basis of random remarks.

Nevertheless, Brooks Bayne keeps tallying up marks against himself, and has managed to alienate so many conservatives that it’s difficult to find anyone willing to defend him anymore. And this brings me to the incident that inspired this long rumination: After a U.S. District Court judge dismissed Aaron Walker’s federal lawsuit against Brett Kimberlin — I blogged about that decision, and the PDF of the judge’s ruling is here — Brooks Bayne made a comment at his own blog mocking the plaintiff as “Walkerwitz.”

WALKERWITZ?

What the hell is this? Never mind why Bayne, who endlessly celebrates himself as a True Conservative, would take sides with Brett Kimberlin. Why would Bayne make this bizarre anti-Semitic jest about Walker, a conservative Presbyterian from Texas? Maybe because Brooks got this idea (as he has seems to have gotten so many other falsehoods) from the pro-Kimberlin “Breitbart Unmasked” site.

More than two months ago, Aaron Walker explained how “Breitbart Unmasked” began harassing him in March on Twitter with claims that records at Yale Law School showed Walker as being Jewish.

This was preposterous. And where did “Breitbart Unmasked” get that silly idea? From an anti-Semitic site whose idiot author evidently decided anyone with the first name “Aaron” must be Jewish.

So, a falsehood makes its way from a Jew-hating site to a pro-Kimberlin Twitter account and now, it seems, to Brooks Bayne, “True Conservative.”

Anyone care to defend Bayne in this? Anyone? Bueller?

UPDATE: Phillip McGuire on Twitter informs me that Bayne has been throwing this “Walkerwitz” idiocy at Aaron Walker for weeks now, and Google confirms this as true, raising the question: Why were none of Bayne’s fanboys troubled by this? And why do mainstream conservatives think they can safely ignore people like Brooks Bayne?

On the one hand, he may be an irrelevant distraction. On the other hand, he seems to have made himself the center of gravity of a minor galaxy of “True Conservative” posturing, so that when he starts Jew-baiting a Presbyterian, maybe we ought to take time to warn people about this dangerous fool.

UPDATE II: Back in September, Ladd Ehlinger Jr. subjected Bayne to a memorable satirical beatdown.

 


U.S. District Court in Maryland Dismisses Walker v. Kimberlin Federal Lawsuit

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Just got this from an attorney for Aaron Walker, reporting that the federal lawsuit against Brett Kimberlin was dimssed today:

The court decided to duck the entire matter as a “dispute between political enemies”, and we disagree with his assessment as to the Court’s inability to grant the remedies sought. We disagree with the ruling and its failure to address in any way even a single point of substantive law raised by either party, nor did it take into consideration our response to Rule 11 filed yesterday, or our forthcoming Opposition to the Motion to Dismiss by the Organizations, which the court should have considered before granting that particular motion.
We plan to pursue all available options, including an appeal, once our focus is no longer on the 12/04 hearing in Virginia.

Will provide more information as it becomes available. Next week’s hearing in Prince William County, Virginia, involves pre-trial motions in the separate lawsuit under Virginia state law.

UPDATE: John Hoge has posted copies of U.S. Judge Frederick Motz’s decision in the federal case, including the judge’s rejection of Kimberlin’s request for so-called “Rule 11” sanctions against Walker.

UPDATE II: Click here for the judge’s decision in PDF.

‘Neal Sounded Weird’ — Did Rauhauser Interfere in a Texas Harassment Case?

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Becca J. Lower has transcribed a BlogTalk Radio interview that Heather Chase did with Lee Stranahan. The backstory of the situation involved is convoluted in the extreme, and requires this brief explanation: In June, it was revealed that one of the leaders of an anti-Rush Limbaugh boycott (Matt “Shoq” Edelstein) had claimed connections to top Obama re-election officials during a conference call secretly recorded by a Texas man named “Randy Hahn” a.k.a. Jason Wade Taylor.

Taylor has subsequently been accused of harassing a Texas woman named Heather Chase. There are people who say bad things about Chase, just as there are people who say bad things about Taylor and Edelstein. However, I have no direct interest in trying to figure out who the villains and heroes are in that story. It may be that they’re all a bunch of kooks, but the point is, I just don’t care enough to bother attempting to unravel the accusations and counter-accusations about who did what to whom. What does interest me is the fact that Brett Kimberlin’s associate Neal Rauhauser got involved in this dispute — which centers on an allegedly threatening message Taylor sent to Chase — and in the process confirmed a lot of what we know about Rauhauser’s modus operandi.

In the interview (Lee has posted the audio at his site) Chase says that she got in touch with Rauhauser after Matt Osborne and others vouched for Rauhauser’s good intentions. Excerpts from the interview transcript:

STRANAHAN: Okay, so– before you talk about this, you’re kind of reticent to talk about the Neal Rauhauser thing, right?
CHASE: Yes, I am.
STRANAHAN: Why is that?
CHASE: Well, a lot of that is crazy and seems to be involved in a lot of political bickering, and possibly criminal stuff. But I don’t think that it’s directly related to Randy, except that now it seems that things are getting weird for this, too.
STRANAHAN: Yeah. And you– so, let’s talk about that: how did you end up in a position where Neal Rauhauser was texting with you? What happened there?
CHASE: Well last week I heard that Matt Osborne was interested in calming things down between people that have been having conflict with that group, which includes me and some of the other women who have been arguing and having a lot of trouble with Shoq because of some of his behavior. So I reached out to him, because I agree that we shouldn’t be having this sort of thing happening so we can all move on. Particularly because to me, the important thing here is this man, Jason, who’s been incredibly destructive.  . . .
STRANAHAN: Was Neal Rauhauser helpful at all?
CHASE: No, at least not according to the investigator who said that he spoke to Neal, that Neal sounded weird and was talking about a lot of other things that had nothing to do with this case. And so I contacted Matt Osborne, after I got back with my meeting with the investigator and asked him about it. And I was told that [Raahauser] had a higher agenda, I was told that the feds would be brought in on this. I have no idea if any of that is true. I have not been contacted by anybody like that. I’ve just been working with my investigator and my local police about this.  . . .
STRANAHAN:  Do you regret dealing with Neal Rauhauser and Matt Osborne on this at this point?
CHASE: I do.
STRANAHAN: Why is that?
CHASE: Because I think that it’s complicated what should be a very straight-forward case of this man [i.e., Taylor] who’s acting crazy and way out of bounds, and has threatened a lot of people and caused a lot of destruction. I don’t know why anybody wouldn’t want to make this as easy as possible for the investigators.

Hmmmm. So, on the recommendation of Osborne and others who were “interested in calming things down,” Rauhauser contacted police who were investigating Taylor’s alleged harassment of Heather Chase. But police told Chase that “Neal sounded weird and was talking about a lot of other things that had nothing to do with this case.” When Chase asked Osborne about Rauhauser’s involvement, she was told Neal has “a higher agenda” and “that the feds would be brought in on this.”

Let us ask: What interest do “the feds” have in the dispute between Chase and Taylor? What kind of “other things” did Rauhauser talk to the police about? And why was Rauhauser so eager to become involved in this dispute? We could speculate on answers to these questions, but what intrigues me is what it tells us about Rauhauser’s “higher agenda” and the means by which he pursues that agenda. If Chase’s description is accurate, then Rauhauser deliberately interefered in her harassment case and the effect of his interference was to confuse investigators with a lot of irrelevant crazy-talk.

There are many questions in need of answers here, among them a question recently asked by Patterico:

Why does it matter that Neal Rauhauser sounds so very, very much like “LulzShack”?

The answer to that question would seem to be quite interesting.

UPDATE: In comments below, Heather Chase explains that it was she who asked Rauhauser to provide specific information about Jason Wade Taylor to police investigating her claim that Taylor harassed her. Rauhauser and his associate Matt Osborne had said they had information about Taylor’s past behavior, Chase explains:

The part I found confusing was the officer’s reaction. First, Neal said in his text messages to me that the officer was concerned about my credibility and that he “took care of that” for me. When I showed the officer those text messages, he denied that stridently and explained that wasn’t what he’d said at all. He’d said that having other case numbers regarding Taylor’s actions toward others would help give the case as a whole more credibility.
He then told me that Neal sounded strange and talked about a lot of things that had nothing to do with the case. He seemed very skeptical of Neal and told me that he had not actually given him anything I’d specifically requested (case numbers, evidence, etc.).

That clarifies the reasons for Rauhauser’s involvement, but not what “things that had nothing to do with the case” Rauhauser talked to investigators about. Meanwhile, in a somewhat related development, a U.S. district judge in Maryland has dismissed Aaron Walker’s federal lawsuit against Brett Kimberlin, although Walker’s state lawsuit against Kimberlin (and Kimberlin’s co-defendant Rauhauser) in Virginia is still going forward.

 

Pray for Ten Thousand Angels

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Bill Schmalfeldt of Elk Ridge, Maryland, a.k.a. “Liberal Grouch”

Well, how’s your Thanksgiving weekend going, huh? Yesterday, Bill Schmalfeldt harassed me all day long on Twitter, at one point sending me 20 messages in less than an hour. Schmalfeldt was inordinately proud of merging his former site (which he used to smear Aaron Walker, Lee Stranahan, Ali Akbar and others) with the “Breitbart Unmasked” site that has been smearing various enemies of Brett Kimberlin and Neal Rauhauser for the past nine months.

When people are targeted by this kind of online harassment, their friends tell them, “Just ignore it.” But until it happens to you, it’s very difficult to understand how serious it really is. It’s online terrorism, and the people who engage in it do so habitually.

Even if you ignore it, and your harasser eventually gets bored with you and moves on, this doesn’t mean they’ll stop. They’ll just find a new focus of their hateful sociopathic behavior.

It’s not about you. It’s about them. Continue reading Pray for Ten Thousand Angels →