Category: Neutral Objective Journalism

“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.”
— Neal Rauhauser (aka “Stranded Wind”), Aug. 29, 2010

“What I describe here is a textbook application of the principles of Open Source Intelligence. We’re going to observe, collect, and collate information. An orderly, professional effort here will counter the Open Source Stupidity we’re seeing from the radical right, providing an invaluable resource for civil and criminal actions.”
— Neal Rauhauser (aka “Stranded Wind”), Aug. 31, 2010

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
Neal Rauhauser has attacked his enemies with a “lawfare” strategy similar to the methods his client, Brett Kimberlin, used to get blogger Aaron Walker arrested last month. Last year, Rauhauser filed a spurious criminal complaint against an Alabama man whom he accused of “inciting people to find and harm me.”

Rauhauser last year joined forces with Kimberlin’s 501(c) tax-exempt non-profit Velvet Revolution and has evidently been engaged in a relentless Internet-based effort aimed at critics of Kimberlin, a convicted felon notorious as Indiana’s “Speedway Bomber.”

In 2010, Rauhauser was involved in a scandal known as “TwitterGate.” Using a Twitter account called @WingNutWatch, Rauhauser was accused of having “organized a group of E-Thugs meant to harass, threaten, provoke, disparage, intimidate, verbally assault, berate & employ hate-speech against those not in agreement with his brand of politics,” to cite blogger Patrick Read’s September 2010 description.

One of the primary targets of the TwitterGate harassment — by a group of Twitter accounts Rauhauser called his “beandog militia” — was an Alabama resident named Greg W. Howard. A Marine veteran and financial advisor who is also a political blogger, Howard is a popular Tea Party activist on Twitter, where his account has more than 20,000 followers. As part of an apparently orchestrated campaign of provocation, a series of vicious and obscene messages were directed at Howard in 2010. (Warning: Extremely graphic language.) Continue reading Neal Rauhauser’s Criminal Complaint Against Blogger Greg W. Howard →

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
Earlier this year, Neal Rauhauser “scrubbed” from the Internet several of his online writings in an apparent attempt to conceal evidence that he has been cyberstalking and harassing his enemies, including the late Andrew Breitbart, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe and the group of Tea Party activists who exposed Rauhauser’s role in the 2010 “TwitterGate” scandal.

Cached versions of Rauhauser’s deleted posts were preserved by some of the conservatives he targeted, and show Rauhauser’s fetish for secrecy and his obsession with his various enemies. For example, on March 14, Rauhauser published a post on his blog (nealrauhauser.wordpress.com) entitled “Playing Detective,” in which he described his attempt to find the real identity of a Tea Party activist who uses the Twitter handle @ZapEm. She produced on online video documenting evidence that Rauhauser organized the “beandogs” who harassed conservative Twitter users in 2010.

“Someone with some paid services I don’t have gave me the name of a couple in New Jersey,” Rauhauser wrote, describing his attempts to locate @ZapEm (see complete post below). “I wrote a nice note to the Morristown [i.e., New Jersey] Tea Party leadership, hoping that they may have had their fill of her antics. . . . Then I called the chief of police in Morristown and we spent a few minutes on the phone.”

In follow-up posts the next day, Rauhauser wrote that ZapEm is “mentally ill” from schizophrenia and has a “behavior disorder,” even as he described his own clearly obsessive search for the woman’s real identity. He described being contacted by a New Jersey Democrat with information potentially identifying the targeted woman, announced plans to hire a private detective to find her in New Jersey, and wrote that he had “started reaching out to Muslim attorneys in the area.”

Rauhauser, who previously worked as a consultant for Democratic politicians, has in the past year joined forces with Brett Kimberlin’s tax-exempt 501(c) activist group Velvet Revolution, and also has ties to the “Occupy” movement and the “Anonymous” computer hacking conspiracy. Kimberlin made headlines in the past month for his harassment of bloggers who have written about his criminal past as Indiana’s notorious “Speedway Bomber.” Last month, blogger Aaron Walker was arrested after a Maryland hearing about Kimberlin’s complaint against Walker’s writings.

Several of the posts deleted from Rauhauser’s blog (but preserved in cache form) relate to his penchant for maintaining secrecy in his online activities. In a March post entitled, “Hiding in Plain Sight,” Rauhauser described how to “truly, deeply hide” ownership of Web sites “from a server you control without revealing its location to others.” In other March postings, Rauhauser claimed to have been targeted by a “a violent, Islamophobic nativist hate group” and wrote about “various stuff I’ve done to confuse those intent on finding and harming me.” 

One undated article by Rauhauser (uploaded at Scribd.com and later deleted) is entitled “Geolocation Lulz” and describes methods by which Rauhauser masks his IP address and location while posting comments on Web sites to “goad” enemies. Another article by Rauhauser dealt with “persona management,” i.e., protecting secret online aliases, and he also wrote about offering three classes to teach his Internet strategies: “Security & Anonymity,” “Grassroots Intel Analyst,” and “Counter Intel/Counter Troll.”

Recently published e-mails show Rauhauser soliciting a California attorney, Jay Leiderman, to assist New Jersey conservative activist Mike Stack in filing a nuisance lawsuit against Los Angeles County deputy district attorney Patrick Frey. Both Stack and Frey were victims of so-called “SWATting,” a dangerous hoax in which calls to 911 emergency numbers are used to dispatch police to the target’s home with the false accusation that the target has committed a violent crime.

At his Patterico site, Frey published an account of his SWATting, and has mentioned that one anonymous Twitter account (“LulzShack”) exhibited inside knowledge of that 2011 incident. Stack was SWATted after he helped expose Rep. Anthony Weiner’s cybersex scandal. Patterico wrote on May 25:

As Andrew Breitbart noted, this happened to two people within the course of a single week: a man in New Jersey and myself. Both of us had had contact with Andrew Breitbart. Both of us were writing about the same story. And both of us received email threats days before we were swatted. The threat to me said, in part: “Please think about your family. This story is not worth it. I can assure you that.” . . .
Writing at Daily Kos, Rauhauser suggests I should be harassed online.
Three days after I was swatted, Rauhauser wrote a post titled “Patterico’s Penalization” that made bizarre accusations about me, and accused me of working with a “cyberstalker” named Seth Allen — a blogger who had criticized Brett Kimberlin so tenaciously that Kimberlin (frivolously) sued Allen for defamation.

In multiple postings at Daily Kos under his “Stranded Wind” alias, Rauhauser wrote obsessively about his theories that the so-called WeinerGate scandal was a hoax, which Rauhauser implied had been orchestrated by Frey.

Another obsessive interest of Rauhauser’s was O’Keefe, whose undercover video “sting” of the community organizing group ACORN launched Breitbart’s “Big Government” site in 2009. In posts that Rauhauser scrubbed from his blog, he describes his communications with Nadia Naffe, who admits having stolen O’Keefe’s e-mails, and who made headlines earlier this year by falsely accusing O’Keefe of sexual assault. Earlier this week, in an e-mail sent to blogger Paul Lemmen, Rauhauser claimed that he was working with the New Hampshire attorney general’s office in an effort to prosecute O’Keefe for a video “sting” operation about voter fraud in that state. Rauhauser said he had “hand carried a letter from [a New Hampshire associate attorney general] into an injunction hearing in New Jersey” involving Naffe and O’Keefe.

A September 2011 e-mail from Rauhauser to leaders of the “Occupy Boston” protests shows that Rauhauser was representing himself as an agent of Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution group, and that Rauhauser was acquainted with “Anonymous” hacker Gregg Housh. Last year, Housh’s colleague Barrett Brown announced that they had signed a book deal (reportedly for a “six figure” advance payment) to write about the activities of “Anonymous.” Brown had become a public spokesman for the computer hacking group, and was reportedly raided by the FBI earlier this year when charges were filed against the so-called “LulzSec” cell of Anonymous.

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.

Rauhauser’s tendency to boast — he frequently writes about his contacts with law enforcement and congressional staffers — and his demonstrable habits of deception make it difficult to take any of his claims at face value. In the sampling of Rauhauser’s writings that I have appended below, he makes a number of accusations of criminal wrongdoing against various individuals, attributing to these persons malicious intent. Readers are cautioned that many of Rauhauser’s claims about his chosen “enemies” are probably false, and may constitute libel. In republishing them here, I disavow any intent to endorse the claims made by Rauhauser and furthermore note that Rauhauser is a public figure who, by attempting to hide his potentially libelous writings by deleting them from his site, has waived whatever copyright claims might otherwise have prevented their republication under “fair use” doctrine.

– Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknown

 

* * * * * * *
** ARTICLES BY NEAL RAUHAUSER **

Playing Detective

March 14, 2012
I have a bit of quite time the next few weeks as some other stuff gets sorted out, so I am free to set aside my poor Google intelligence collection skills and actually do some genuine detective work.
First, for background, we’re talking about An Inconvenient Kook, a woman I’ve tentatively identified as Michelle Lessick aka ZAPEM. All I had to start was:

• The Twitter username @ZAPEM (now @Repository1) and a now defunct WordPress blog
• Records of various streams of tweets and writings, which are a fairly distinct personality showing delusions of persecution
• An email from Patrick Read aka @SwiftRead naming her as Michelle
• A tip that her last name was Reilly, perhaps Nagy-Riley, which I believe to be incorrect
• A tip that her name might be Lessick
• Assertions that she was a police dispatcher and her husband a police officer
• Many indications she lived in northern New Jersey

I did quite a lot of digging with Google and finally did locate the connection to the name Lessick, which can be seen in the link containing her name. I chased various permutations of this name and the Jascawow alias using a variety of search tools and came up empty.
Someone with some paid services I don’t have gave me the name of a couple in New Jersey with the last name of Lessick, Republicans in their mid fifties. For various subtle reasons I was fairly sure the wife was not the woman I was seeking, but I thought that perhaps Michelle was a daughter in her late twenties to early thirties who had developed schizophrenia, or another relative in the area who is on disability and not visible to typical search methods. I spent a few minutes on the phone with her last night and I’m sure that she is not the one, nor does she seem to be covering for someone she knows.
I wrote a nice note to the Morristown Tea Party leadership, hoping that they may have had their fill of her antics. My source for much of the information I do have is someone on the right who feels her conduct is weird, dangerous, and embarrassing to the rest of them. Maybe I’ll get lucky and find someone local who holds similar views of her.
I went through the Morristown Democrats I could find online, sending email and making calls. I signed up for Topix and posted a request there looking for an activist in the area who can help me make connections. Then I called the chief of police in Morristown and we spent a few minutes on the phone. They don’t have their own dispatchers and he gave me the number to call at the county dispatch center.
Due to Donald Payne’s death I’ve felt it was inappropriate to bother the folks on Capitol Hill, but I will probably go down and make a few inquiries next week.I’ve got fifteen more days to do such things until Aaron Walker’s assault trial. Maybe I will get a break on this, maybe I am going to have to grind through a civil suit, we’ll just have to wait and see how it goes.

—

Geolocation Lulz

(Undated)
When kooks follow you around mouthing off about “getting your IP” it’s game on. Check your IP every time you sit down in a coffee shop. Get a lulzy one, like you’re in Vienna, Virginia, but the address resolves to Staten Island? That’s a perfect time to post a comment on some dipshit’s WordPress. Goad them later, but give it a few weeks.
Happen to be visiting the U.S. Capitol? And the person who is going to “get your IP” suffers from delusions of persecution, believing the government is after her? There’s no better time than to visit the House cafeteria in the Longworth building, and post a comment to aforementioned dipshit’s WordPress, knowing your delusional kook will be brought in to investigate.
Keep that host name in mind, some weeks later set up a new Cisco router at home, and capture the mysterious looking ip nat translation table when two of your machines are running torrent. Replace your home IP with housegate12.house.gov, and post the pastebin link to Twitter with some cryptic comments. Hours of fun ensue as kooks go through the torrent peers, looking for ‘clues’.
Kooks once determined I lived in Bethesda, Maryland. Google “Bethesda IP address Comcast”, and in the first page you find a lovely map that leads to a house just north of the NIH complex. Take the IP, get the ‘show ip address’ and ‘show arp’ from your shiny new Cisco home router, edit in the IP from the map in place of your own, then fiddle the MAC address table so any pro will know it’s a game. Put this up on yfrog, then go away for twelve hours. Be sure to get a trollish friend to point it out, laughing at your rookie mistake, so that kooks will know it’s an important ‘clue’.
And then harden the perception that this is an actual address by using Foursquare to check in to a location at the NIH complex itself.
Tweet that you’ve finished receiving the backup torrent from Encyclopedia Dramatica (ie you’re a 100% peer) and that you’ve served up 101G to other EDiots. Promptly drop torrent 30 seconds later, lulz for hours as kooks waste the afternoon trying to dox the completed peers.
CODA
A competent adult, reading this, would say “LOL, internetz”. A troll would say “Hey, I gotta try some of this myself.” Here is how a delusional kook might interpret it. ••••Mention of Virginia address confirms the subject is stalking a Virginia resident –and that must be ME! I must seek a protection order at once. Posting from the Longworth building cafeteria is a lie, he works for a Congressman; we need a call/write in campaign to find out which office. There is a MAP. The map shows a HOUSE. That is where he lives, or it’s his girlfriend, or maybe it’s a safehouse for George Soros when he is in D.C. Mention of Encyclopedia Dramatica. This man is either Garrett, or Zaiger, or maybe he’s Joseph Evers. Look, there’s a cell phone number for him …
So that’s that. Maybe two or three hours of effort total, mostly the run to the Medical Center red line stop when I was in the area anyway, and kooks have been chasing their tails for weeks and weeks.
So, kooks … you guys want me to leak additional IP addresses for you to investigate?

—

A Woman’s Place…

March 24, 2012
Lately I have been chatting a bit online with @NadiaNaffe, the latest in a string of woman @JamesOKeefeIIIhas attempted to victimize by drugging them and then taking advantage of them. There are civil and criminal things afoot here, so I won’t say much more, but this is a trend for the American right … and it’s not working in their favor.
Nadia is the third case where I’ve seen a woman who was working with some right wing oppo thing end up facing sexual harassment/sexual assault. Each time the operation has been blown to bits by the inability of a male leader to respectfully handle the women around him.
As for the other two, one was brassy, aggressive, and after an initial period of shock she has heaped punishment on the ones who offended her, and that included giving me all sorts of things they really didn’t want the world to know. A similar event happened over a year ago, I happened to get into a conversation with the victim of that one, and now a packet of information goes to anyone new the ringleader recruits. He seems puzzled as to all the trouble he is having …
This failure to recruit and retain women, which is far different from having men running female sock puppets, is a deadly peril to the right. They’re already behind the eight ball demographically and at a top level the puzzling anti-contraception debacle is comical, yet painful to watch. I can’t tell what they were thinking –attack contraception, accept an end to abortion as a compromise? Instead a generation of women who enjoy active sex lives are feeling like they’ve had their privates groped by some dirty old man.
I’ve spent the last couple of years researching, teaching, and building capacity –opposition stuff, policy stuff, and if I couldn’t get along with women I wouldn’t have 10% of what I do now. Some examples of a woman’s place include …
I get several complex bits of intel daily –summaries of what is happening in various areas that interest me. Some are lone gun operations, others are teams, but the glue that holds them together are women who have picked a specific issue to stand guard over day in/day out.
I sometimes make new things that need testing –there are a quartet of women between thirty and fifty in my chat client who I can give something partially finished and they’ll grind on it to see if it’s any good. These three classes I’m working on, Security & Anonymity, Grassroots Intel Analyst, and Counter Intel/Counter Troll? My progress would be limited and one dimensional if I weren’t sharing the work with my relentless reviewers.
I get texts pretty much every day, invariably starting with “You need to look at” followed by a link. There are a couple of women who took off with my Analyst’s Shoebox method of handling Google Alerts over a year ago and not much gets by them. Friends, enemies, the issues of the moment, they all have alerts and I generally hear about stuff without having to spend a lot of time digging on my own.
If I want to know what’s happening with the Occupiers in New York, Washington D.C, Denver, Chicago, Oakland, or any of the other hot spots my sources are almost invariably women. This group is a mixed bag –most of my contacts have passed the age of thirty, but there are a few in their mid twenties out on the road who are intent on growing their influence networks, and they’re treasure.
You might start getting the idea that I’ve got some weird problem working with men, but that’s not the case. There are half a dozen toolsmiths in my close circle, men from their early twenties to early sixties, and the more aggressive personalities online, with two notable exceptions, are all male. This just seems to be a natural break point in duties –women will favor relationships, and words, and regular schedules, while men will favor tasks, math, and projects.
So that’s that. The right is old, white, male dominated, racist, misogynist, and they’re chewing up their record keepers, their peace keepers, sometimes with disastrous results.

—

In Which James O’Keefe Obstructs Justice

March 22, 2012
I recently wrote Deleting (Almost) All Your Email, where I talked about my scanty inbox, with just 68 messages as of this afternoon, and how reading the HBGary emails as I wrote this reportchanged my views. I just don’t keep email any more –I get up to 500 messages and it’s time to clean house. I do memorialize important discussions by printing to PDF, but I never want to face what Aaron Barr of HBGary did.
And I will never face what James O’Keefe is going to, because I couldn’t be as foolish, sloppy, and criminal as he is even as an act. I’ll explain …
James probably made his final error by getting into conflict with @NadiaNaffe. This is the third time he’s had some weird sex/refusal/attempt to video tape someone in the context of his ‘journalism’ and this young lady has a unique advantage over the other two, in that O’Keefe made one disastrous error.
Nadia was involved in a sting operation aimed at journalist Charles Seife. The roots of the failed “To Catch A Journalist” effort were simple –Seife knew something was up with O’Keefe’s Project Veritasand he was asking to see the IRS documentation. He isn’t the only one and that isn’t the only problem charity he is involved in –others have questioned the nature of the Muslim Education Action Center, a sock puppet O’Keefe rigged up to smear National Public Radio.
While Naffe was in the field O’Keefe gave her his iPhone and he remained nearby in a car, using her Android phone and laptop to conduct other business. He failed to delete his accounts when they switched phones.
So understand what happened –O’Keefe walked away leaving Naffe with his email going back to 2004. Shehas had this information since October of 2011 and he’s been jacking with her the whole time. She has already released details of Izzy Santa’s settlement with O’Keefe and Project Veritas.
So far the matters are civil in nature, revealing a troubled young man who is either unable to respect, or completely unaware of the boundaries a woman his age would have. But what is not being said here is even more interesting to me.
O’Keefe was caught attempting to wire tap Senator Mary Landrieu’s phones in the company of the son of one of the two U.S. Attorneys for Louisiana, which got him federal probation. His taping of ACORN workers in Maryland was a clear violation of state wire tap laws, and he recently found similar trouble in New Hampshire.
Despite the questions about IRS filing status for two non-profits and multiple wire tap events some mysterious force keeps the New Jersey federal probation office responsible for O’Keefe from having him picked up for probation violations and referring him for further prosecution.
The contents of Ms. Naffe’s phone are likely the tool needed to break loose that log jam and put an end to O’Keefe reckless endangerment of any young woman who makes the mistake of associating with him, as well as the hazard his smear operation represents to our democracy.
O’Keefe is scrambling to put a lid on this –suing Naffe for the return of these emails. If there is evidence of crimes committed in those messages, which seems certain given what is already known about O’Keefe’s activities, this is obstruction of justice.
The solution to this problem is quite simple –Naffe can provide the content to those who have already subpoenaed her, then turn the content into the FBIsomewhere outside of New Jersey. The combination of other O’Keefe victims, who have resources and no entanglement, coupled with the FBI receiving the email outside the reach of whatever is happening in New Jersey, will be an unstoppable combination.

Update (Smitty): welcome, Instapundit readers!

‘Speedway Bomber’ Brett Kimberlin was sentenced to 50 years in 1981

“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, “Kitty Genovese and the Conservative Media,” May 21

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
Until a month ago, Brett Kimberlin and his associates had recorded what must have seemed, from their perspective, to be an uninterrupted series of victories in their ruthless war against their chosen targets. They had sued Seth Allen, threatened Patrick “Patterico” Frey, gotten Aaron Walker and his wife fired from their jobs, and harassed or menaced in various ways a number of other people, including Mandy Nagy, James O’Keefe and the late Andrew Breitbart.

What is amazing is how this intimidation campaign had gone on for months, dating back at least to October 2010 and involving multiple targets, without gaining wider attention.

Today — 30 days since Walker published his 28,000-word account of how he says Kimberlin tried to “frame” him on a bogus assault charge — the tables have clearly turned. More and more people are learning the shocking truth about Brett Kimberlin, his criminal past, the suspicious activities of Kimberlin’s 501(c) non-profits, the bizarre behavior of Kimberlin’s associates and the still-mysterious “SWATtings” of Mike Stack, Patterico and Erick Erickson. Members of Congress have called for an investigation and major organizations like the American Center for Law and Justice have become involved.

Friday night, we got yet another Memeorandum thread, this one on David Hogberg’s report at Investors Business Daily that criminal charges against Aaron Walker have been dismissed, although the ridiculous “peace order” against Walker apparently remains in effect. Michelle Malkin calls it a “free speech win,” but warns that there is still “a long fight ahead on many fronts.”

Indeed, while we are clearly winning, we have not yet won, and there can be no letting up in this fight so long as “Team Kimberlin” (to use Ken at Popehat‘s excellent phrase) continues to menace innocent Americans whose only “crime” is telling the truth. Bob Belvedere at Camp of the Saints is fond of quoting General Patton’s famous lecture on tactics:

“Now there’s another thing I want you to remember. I don’t want to get any messages saying that ‘we are holding our position.’ We’re not holding anything. Let the Hun do that. We are advancing constantly and we’re not interested in holding onto anything except the enemy. We’re going to hold onto him by the nose and we’re going to kick him in the ass. We’re going to kick the hell out of him all the time and we’re going to go through him like crap through a goose!”

Every day, we grab hold of some piece of the Kimberlin saga — some previously unreported fact or overlooked detail, some development on the legal or political front — and we push it as hard as we can, making the story new and fresh every day. One month into this epic battle of informational warfare, there is now a nationwide readership of thousands following this story with fascinated interest, and I am keenly aware of the need to keep moving the ball down the field, like a football team driving toward a touchdown.

Thursday at Brooks Baynes’s site The Trenches, Patrick Read published an e-mail from Kimberlin associate Neal Rauhauser to Michael Stack that is another eye-opener about Rauhauser’s secretive disinformation operations:

Let this email serve as an example of how Neal Rauhauser . . . and his associates “infiltrate the right-wing,” per his now-deleted-from-the-internet article (here).He uses intimidation, references to the FBI & threatens others with “lawfare” (frivolous lawsuits) to gain alliance & information.

Please read the whole thing. As Patrick Read remarks, Rauhauser’s actions appear very much like witness tampering.

There is much, much more of this stuff that has yet to be revealed and explained. Like Patton said, “We are advancing constantly.”

UPDATE: Patterico has video of Michelle Malkin speaking at Right Online about the bloggers who have been threatened and harassed by Brett Kimberlin, and also video of a certain “hockey mom” from Wasilla saying “the SWATtings must stop.”

Unfortunately, although I was invited to Right Online, I wasn’t able to attend this year’s conference — I had to travel to the D.C. area Friday for a meeting with a source — but Ali Akbar is in Las Vegas representing the National Bloggers Club.

UPDATE II: Linked by That Mr. G Guy — thanks! — and by Doug Hagin at Daley Gator, who invokes a famous general’s words. The same general also once advised:

“Always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy, if possible; and when you strike and overcome him, never let up in the pursuit so long as your men have strength to follow; for an army routed, if hotly pursued, becomes panic-stricken, and can then be destroyed by half their number. The other rule is, never fight against heavy odds, if by any possible maneuvering you can hurl your own force on only a part, and that the weakest part, of your enemy and crush it. Such tactics will win every time, and a small army may thus destroy a large one in detail, and repeated victory will make it invincible.”

UPDATE III: Want to see something that completely exposes the dishonesty of Team Kimberlin? As I explained Thursday, Neal Raushauser has been obsessed with Patterico for nearly a year, and this obsession is shared by the site I call “Not Brett Kimberlin,” which denies its association with Kimberlin, even as it relentlessly targets the people on Kimberlin’s (and Rauhauser’s) enemies list. Here is the topic-cloud from that site:

You see that Patterico and Aaron Walker are the two most common topics on the Not Brett Kimberlin site, which is ostensibly devoted to “Unmasking the Hidden Truth About Andrew Breitbart.” Yet Breitbart himself (with whom, perhaps not coincidentally, Rauhauser was also pathologically obsessed) has been dead for three months, and this anti-Breitbart site continues stumbling on in zombie fashion, ranting against Patterico, against Walker, against me — against anyone, that is, who threatens to expose the misdeeds of the Kimberlin-Rauhauser axis.

Kimberlin, Rauhauser and their associates evidently think they are so much smarter than everyone else that they can do stuff like this without their motives and purposes being obvious to us all. Their imagined mental superiority leads them into foolish blunders — as when the Not Brett Kimberlin site hilariously declared in March that Ace of Spades is actually a woman — and is fundamentally symptomatic of their profound personality disorders.

There was some political utility, from the perspective of the Left, in having a site devoted to “unmasking” (by which they mean, smearing) Andrew Breitbart, a famous figure in conservative New Media. But now that Breitbart is dead, the Not Brett Kimberlin site exposes itself as the outworkings of a deranged mind, haphazardly smearing a bunch of people most Americans never heard of, but who loom large as demonized scapegoats in Rauhauser’s paranoid worldview. A couple of useful questions:

1. What was the very first post at Not Brett Kimberlin? It was an attack on Breitbart for his role in the Citizens United documentary Occupy Unmasked (the link is through an “anonymizer” filter, because that site is infested with spyware viruses and other creepy hacker stuff.)
2. What was the subject of Neal Rauhauser’s September 2011 e-mail on behalf of Kimberlin’s 501(c) Velvet Revolution? He was reaching out to leaders of “Occupy Boston,” via an introduction made through Gregg Housh of the “Anonymous” hacker conspiracy

Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

UPDATE IV: The new (anti-Kimberlin, pro-freedom) Velvet Revolution blog has video of the reaction when the latest news about Aaron Walker’s case reached a certain bunker in Berlin:

Friday at Right Online, they had a special remembrance of Andrew Breitbart, and let’s not forget this warning from Andrew:

 

– Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknown

 

UPDATE V (Smitty): welcome, Instapundit readers!

UPDATE VI (RSM): Also now a Memeorandum thread, and be sure and read the latest: “‘Scrubbed’ Writings Show Kimberlin Associate Neal Rauhauser’s Obsessions.”

 

 

THE KIMBERLIN FILES:

• May 17: Is Democrat Operative Neal Rauhauser an ‘Associate’ of Convicted Terrorist Brett Kimberlin? (And Why It Matters)
• May 17: Convicted Terrorist Brett Kimberlin Received $70,000 From Tides Foundation, $10,000 From Streisand, $20,000 from John Kerry’s Wife
• May 18: Who Warned Us About Brett Kimberlin?
• May 19: Domestic Terrorist Now Using ‘Lawfare’? Convicted Felon Kimberlin’s 501(c)3 Raised $1.8 Million in Six Years UPDATE: ‘Convicted of Perjury’
• May 20: Deadline Loometh, and the Raven Is Croaking Brett Kimberlin’s Name
• May 20: ‘Other Computer Savvy Activists’
• May 21: Never Doubt That God Answers Prayer
• May 22: Brett Kimberlin Saga Takes a Bizarre Turn, Forcing Me to Leave Maryland
• May 23: ‘He Has No F–king Soul’
• May 24: Lying Felon Can’t Stop Lying
• May 25: KimberlinFiles.org
• May 26: Kimberlin v. Walker Hearing Scheduled: 8:30 a.m. Tuesday in Rockville, Maryland
• May 27: Brett Kimberlin’s Heiress Aunt Helping Fund His Tax-Exempt Harassment
• May 27: ERICK ERICKSON GETS SWATTED
• May 28: Somebody Tell Nina Totenberg Her Buddy Brett Kimberlin Is Making News Again
• May 29: Matthew Vadum Talks Brett Kimberlin
• May 29: REPORT: Aaron Walker Arrested After Maryland Hearing on Kimberlin Case UPDATE: Walker Now Released
• May 31: Aaron Walker Court Hearing Confirms Kimberlin-Rauhauser Collaboration
• June 1: Radicals Justify Their Evil by Invoking Their Presumed Moral Superiority
• June 2: When Neal Rauhauser Complained About ‘Menacing’ and ‘Cyberstalking’
• June 3: The Profoundly Dishonest Brett Kimberlin
• June 3: Raw Story Disavows Ties to Kimberlin
• June 3: Inside Neal Rauhauser’s Twisted Mind
• June 4: ‘A Faint Whiff of Vigilante Hysteria’: Weinergate’s Kimberlin Connection
• June 5: Ali Akbar Says, ‘World War Three’
• June 5: Fear and Loathing on Capitol Hill: The GOP Caucus Is Decadent and Depraved
• June 6: Walker Files Appeal in Kimberlin Case; Ali Akbar Says: ‘We’re Not Stopping.’
• June 6: Sen. Saxby Chambliss Requests DOJ Investigate SWATting
• June 7: CNN Gets Scooped on Its Own Story UPDATE: ACLJ Joins the Fight!
• June 8: NATIONAL DAY OF BLOGGER SILENCE UPDATE: Remember Seth Allen
• June 8: @AceOfSpadesHQ BREAKS SILENCE: #BrettKimberlin’s Escalating Threat
• June 10: Brett Kimberlin, Neal Rauhauser, and Their Transparent Empire of Lies UPDATE: ‘Anonymous’ Connection
• June 11: Florida Rep. Sandy Adams Leads 85 House Republicans in ‘SWATting’ Letter
• June 11: #BrettKimberlin Says He Was ‘SWATted’; Why Do Maryland Cops Say Otherwise?
• June 11: HUGE! Neal Rauhauser’s Vicious Lies Exposed by Yet Another Leaked E-Mail
• June 12: ‘Team Kimberlin’ Meltdown Continues
• June 13: A High Time on the Low Road: Smears Target Brett Kimberlin’s Enemies List UPDATE: SWATting Supect ID’d?
• June 13: Time to Ask: What Did Brett Kimberlin Know and When Did He Know It?
• June 14: Patterico: ‘Certain Big Media Reporters Are Scared to Write About Kimberlin’
• June 14: ‘Real Reporter’ @NYT_JenPreston vs. Blogger @Prepostericity (Seth Allen)
• June 14: Neal Rauhauser’s Online Slander Factory
• June 15: Neal Rauhauser’s Game Plan Involving Velvet Revolution and Anonymous

 

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
And, indeed, he’s got a right to complain about not receiving appropriate recognition:

Nota Bene to those who are using the intel I gathered and shared without so much as a hat tip or other acknowledgment of my involvement: You’re welcome. I know you probably simply forgot where you got those 5K plus words or something.

Go tell Paul I said, “Good job burning Neal Rauhauser.” But nobody — nobody — can out-butt-hurt me!

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
Neal Rauhauser is crazy and not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, and his boastful arrogance has been his downfall before. So it is again.

In a message posted in the comments of a blog in October 2011, Rauhauser explained that he and someone he describes as “a very big dog from the Anonymous pen” conspired to use Brett Kimberlin’s non-profit Velvet Revolution as a vehicle to exact vengeance on (a) his personal enemies, (b) the security firm HB Gary and (c) “Breitbart associates.”

The campaign of harassment and intimidatiion we have seen carried out in recent months apparently is the product of that game plan — and Rauhauser boastfully explained how he developed that plan quite publicly more than eight months ago.

Rauhauser’s Familiar Pattern

Before I share that with you, however, let me preface it by explaining that the claim to victimhood that Rauhauser presents in this 970-word treatise is false. His exposure in the 2010 “TwitterGate” affair was the result of his open incitement of his s0-called “beandogs,” the gang of online thugs who obscenely harassed Tea Party activists on Twitter. His public Tweets to the “beandogs” were screen-capped and documented by Patrick Read, Michelle Lessick and others, and Rauhauser’s role was clearly evident.

Furthermore, exactly as with his current role in the Kimberlin case, Rauhauser had described — publicly and in advance — his plans for an online war against the Tea Party, in two posts at the forum Open Left:

• Aug. 29, 2010: Organized Intimidation? Ambush Time.
• Aug. 31, 2010: Social Media’s Neighborhood Watch

That was in August, not long after Rauhauser had been a speaker at the Netroots Nation conference. He was a consultant with the firm Progressive PST, which included several Democratic politicians (including Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva) among its clients.

Neal’s own description of his specialty? “Solving problems in the social media work space for political campaigns and causes.” But once he was busted in TwitterGate and someone called it to my attention, I did a post on Oct. 7, 2010 (“BUSTED! Video Documents Role of Democrat Consultant Neal Rauhauser in Smear Campaign Against Tea Party“) that was linked by Lonely Conservative, House of Eratosthenes, Liberty Pundits, Right Klik, Verum Serum, I Own the World, Memeorandum and The Blaze, to name a few. On Oct. 9, 2010, I did a follow-up post noting Rauhauser’s reaction to the exposure:

Rauhauser deleted [his “WingNutWatch” Twitter] account and protected [his personal Twitter account], the kind of gesture a detective might say was indicative of “consciousness of guilt.”
The obvious question: If Rauhauser has nothing to hide, why is he hiding? Let me suggest an obvious answer: Rauhauser is becoming an embarrassment to his Democratic clients, especially Arizona 7th District Rep. Raul Grijalva.
Rauhauser had boasted of his relationship with Grijalva — who sent the consultant a “thank you” note — and like so many other previously “safe” Democratic incumbents this year, Grijalva is in the toughest re-election battle of his career.

In late September 2010 — before I even noticed TwitterGate, but after Read, Lessick and others had begun exposing the “beandogs” operation — Rauhauser clearly realized his scheme was busted. Caught attempting to victimize others, Rauhauser declared himself the real victim in a Daily Kos post entitled, “Tea Party Stalks Me & My Kids.”

This tendency toward self-pity, blaming others for problems that he himself caused, appears to be a deeply engrained personality trait with Rauhauser. Incapable of accepting responsibility for his own failures, Rauhauser psychologically projects responsibility onto scapegoats, whom he demonizes and accuses of malicious motives and actions, as a means of justifying his attacks on them, attacks that he encourages others to join.

The Narcissist as Self-Imagined Hero

Soliciting assistance in his plots — recruiting a gang of followers — functions psychologically as a means for Rauhauser to validate his grandiose narcissistic conception of himself as a heroic leader.

Rauhauser is manipulative, and his boastfulness is part of his manipulations: He brags about his contacts with law enforcement, for instance, in an attempt either to intimidate his enemies or else to impress potential allies, conning them into believing he has “connections” who can help them accomplish his elaborate plans to inflict vengeance on their common enemies.

Keep all this in mind, then, as you carefully read the October 2011 comment Rauhauser posted at the Qritiq blog:

Neal Rauhauser (@NealRauhauser) Says:
October 5, 2011 at 3:08 pm
And here is the likely first cause behind all of this.
James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles clearly violated Maryland wire tap laws. You can’t record someone without their permission here — it’s just that simple.
The Baltimore city prosecutor begs off — too busy with violent crime, so the IndictBreitbart effort is launched.

http://indictbreitbart.org/index.php?q=node/237

This frightens and infuriates Breitbart, so his toadies come hopping along, they find poor Seth, and he’s just the right tool to get at the guys behind IndictBreitbart.org. The smear goes on for two long years, screwing up their fundraising.
Then HBGary CEO Aaron Barr mouths off about having information on Anonymous in the Financial Times. Sabu notices, and soon Mr. Barr is out of a job and his company’s email is spattered all over the net. I pick through the debris field, writing a report that is seen by House and Senate staff, and during that process I make contact with Velvet Revolution.
Now I had a problem last fall, some crazy guys making up this huge conspiracy theory about me (Google:Twittergate) and it did to me what Seth did to others — you can’t Google my name without seeing a big wad of troll droppings for results.
Greg W. Howard and Patrick Swift Read were always the public face of this attack on me, but hovering in the background was ZAPEM. I never could identify her, beyond knowing that she was female, and that she was probably in New Jersey.
But people just couldn’t shut up about Weinergate, and things started to fall out.
Howard and Read have offended a number of their supporters badly. I have a big dossier now on things they’ve done thanks to their poor relationships with others, stuff I’ve not released, stuff that doesn’t quite rise to the level of needing law enforcement attention, but I bet there will be civil suits sooner or later.
Patrick Read betrayed ZAPEM’s first name, Michele, in a ranting email to me a couple of months ago. We suspected that [redacted] was her last name from a slip she made in an obscure social media profile elsewhere.
Mandy Nagy, Liberty_Chick on Twitter, made another slip during hurricane Irene. She was having trouble traveling — a downed tree or some such, and she reached out to ZAPEM and Mike Stack, owner of the goatsred account of Weinergate fame.
I don’t have the specific tweet handy, but it basically indicated that they were near enough to rescue her and that she knew them well enough to trust them for this. Nagy, O’Keefe, Stack, and ZAPEM are all close enough to meet somewhere on short notice — if they feel the need for a long walk in an open area after reading this, Washington Valley Park is roughly the geographic center for their locations.
The name slips and the geographic slip, coupled with some other sleuthing I wasn’t directly involved in, yielded this Facebook profile. Others are quite excited, I am not yet 100% convinced that Michele [redacted] is both ZAPEM and sister or sister in law of Mandy Nagy.
I have to stress that this is NOT CONFIRMED. And all we need is another Jennifer George, dragged through the muck for something she didn’t do.
[link redacted – speculative]
Meanwhile, back on the intert00bz …
ZAPEM, determined to bring me down, unprotects her Twitter account, giving me all sorts of goodies, then she begins to harass various aspects of Anonymous. Not quite as grim as the provocation Aaron Barr offered, but eventually one of the little ones comes to me and asks about ZAPEM. I don’t share anything they couldn’t get from public searches, and I tease them with a bit of the information I provide here.
A few hours pass and then a very big dog from the Anonymous pen comes knocking, puzzled over why one crazy person with a Twitter account is so important.
People have a view that Anonymous is all crime, all the time, but that’s more properly the mysterious transnational behavior problem that is LulzSec. Most of the Anonymi are more interested in free speech and technology — “We don’t break into things, we break out of them”.
We start talking, comparing war stories clear back to the 1990s, and it turns out big dog and I didn’t know each other, but our circles did cross. Pretty soon an obscure IRC channel on an obscure network is full of people that went quiet ten years ago, all making popcorn and getting ready to watch the fun.
Fun? Absolutely — because now Anonymous understands that Velvet Revolution is the only victim of HBGary that has both standing and the will to pursue them. They understand that Velvet Revolution has faced an organized smear that is pretty transparently attributable to Breitbart associates. And now there may well be a connection between the two.
So ZAPEM went out in an ill advised effort to recruit Anonymous as her personal army, and instead she just put Breitbart & Co. square in their gunsights, with more than adequate reasons for them to take the same sort of interest in them that they did in HBGary.
Freedom of speech and association are inalienable rights. That isn’t a free pass to assemble a pack of yahoos and smear someone you disagree with, and if the purpose of that smear is covering a string of state and federal crimes calculated to interrupt the right of free assembly on election day for minorities and the poor?
No movie producer would go for this story line – it’s too far fetched. And yet here we are at the end of a long trail of bread crumbs, and while some of the particulars are up in the air, the overall pattern is pretty clear.
One final pithy quote:
“No one of us is as cruel as all of us.” -Anonymous

* * * * * *

The numerous falsehoods in this bizarre document — e.g., Rauhauser’s claim that Breitbart’s “toadies” had employed “poor Seth” [Allen] as “just the right tool to get at the guys behind IndictBreitbart.org” — are ultimately irrelevant, except as glimpses into the counterfactual conspiracy theories that seem to ricochet around constantly inside Rauhauser’s depraved mind.

What is actually important are these assertions by Rauhauser:

• After he wrote a report about the HBGary hacking that was “seen by House and Senate staff” — ! — Rauhauser made “contact with Velvet Revolution,” one of Brett Kimberlin’s tax-exempt non-profit groups.
• Rauhauser spent enough time cyberstalking various of his “enemies” — Michelle Lessick, Mandy Nagy, James O’Keefe and Mike Stack — to learn they all lived in New Jersey and that, according to his “sleuthing,” Lessick and Nagy are related by blood or marriage.
• Rauhauser is contacted by “a very big dog from the Anonymous pen” intrigued by Rauhauser’s interest in Lessick, and Rauhauser then engages in a conversation with Anonymous members on “an obscure IRC channel.”
• Evidently, during that conversation, Rauhauser convinced his Anonymous friends “that Velvet Revolution is the only victim of HBGary that has both standing and the will to pursue them” and “that Velvet Revolution has faced an organized smear that is pretty transparently attributable to Breitbart associates.”
• Rauhauser uses this argument to persuade Anonymous to assist him and Velvet Revolution in getting revenge on his enemies.

It is important to explain that the conspiracy theories Rauhauser purveys are all demonstrably false.

There were no “victims” of HBGary, because HBGary never got the contract to do the devious “Nixonesque” things that were discussed in the e-mails that the LulzSec hackers illegally obtained. Aaron Barr of HBGary mentioned Mandy Nagy’s October 2010 article about Brett Kimberlin in one November 2010 e-mail, with the note, “We could do so much with this.”

Imagined Victims, Imagined Villains

What that e-mail showed was not evidence of the conspiracy that Rauhauser claimed to have discovered. Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution had been publicly calling for criminal prosecution of the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the potential client that Barr was eager to impress. Barr had found Nagy’s article and evidently believed it would be useful in helping them impress the client and land the contract.

This e-mail got scrambled around in Rauhauser’s mind. Conveniently forgetting that HBGary never got the Chamber contract, and thus that neither Velvet Revolution nor anyone else was ever a “victim” of HBGary, Rauhauser interpreted that one e-mail as evidence of conspiratorial collusion between HBGary, Nagy and Breitbart. But it simply wasn’t so.

Nor, contrary to Rauhauser’s assertion, was there any conspiracy between Seth Allen and “Breitbart associates.”

What actually happened was this: When Nagy published her article, based on her own research, Kimberlin jumped to the erroneous conclusion that Nagy relied upon Seth Allen as her source. In fact, Nagy is a veteran researcher and writer who once worked as an editor at Lexis-Nexis. But by the time Nagy published her article in October 2010, Kimberlin had spent more than a year trying to shut up Seth Allen, a progressive who had been calling unwelcome attention to Kimberlin’s criminal past on liberal blogs.

This is why, when Patterico did a post based on Nagy’s article, Kimberlin mentioned Allen (“Socrates”) in threatening to sue Patterico. Kimberlin (who knew nothing of Nagy’s research skills) seems to have assumed that only Allen could have been the source for the  information about Kimberlin’s past. So Patterico was accused of “conspiring” with Allen.

By now the astute reader understands — and I don’t really have to point this out do I? — that Kimberlin and Rauhauser’s belief in an imaginary conspiracy of their enemies led them into creating an actual conspiracy of their own.

It’s all right there, you see: Presenting himself as an agent of Velvet Revolution, Rauhauser elicited assistance from members of Anonymous in a conspiracy that “put Breitbart & Co. square in their gunsights.” What did Rauhauser mean by that expression? What manner of activity did Anonymous agree to conduct against the target “in their gunsights”? We don’t know.

What we do know is that, once more, Rauhauser’s compulsive bragging has led to the exposure of one of his schemes.

I believe the appropriate word for such a situation is “lulz.”

– Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknown

Update (Smitty): welcome, Instapundit readers!

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
Lee Stranahan has obtained e-mails sent privately by Brett Kimberlin’s demented associate Neal Rauhauser in which Rauhauser makes what would appear to be false and defamatory statements about a number of individuals, including Patrick “Patterico” Frey:

Someone was funding Seth [Allen] and it was either John Patrick Frey, or Aaron Walker. . . .
Frey dropped Naffe’s dox in order to intimidate/guide people in how to attack her. This was done to protect James O’Keefe – Frey has been his most vocal defender, and I think they used to work together.

This idea that Patterico is a sinister Moriarty, an arch-conspirator who masterminds all manner of right-wing evil, became lodged in Rauhauser’s warped mind during the WeinerGate scandal. Regular readers will kindly excuse the repetition as I remind you that Patterico was targeted in multiple July 2011 posts by Rauhauser (“Stranded Wind”) on Daily Kos:

• July 4: Weinergate: Patterico’s Penalization
• July 4: Disingenuous Chart, Dishonest D.A. (Weinergate)
• July 17: Weinergate: Patterico’s Petulance
• July 19: Patterico’s Personal Pipsqueak
• July 23: In Which Patterico Imperils Breitbart
• July 25: Patterico’s Prattling Puppets

By July 27, 2011, Rauhauser declared that Patterico “looks to be a pretty good candidate for the planner/operator behind Weinergate.” Rauhauser’s ideé fixe — his bizarre delusion that Anthony Weiner was the victim of a conspiracy coordinated by Patterico — is a figment of his febrile imagination.

Yet when Rauhauser transmits these deranged and baseless claims via e-mail (and, as we have seen, he seems to do this routinely) he crosses a line between being a mere kook and being a slanderer. And when, as in his May 24 e-mail to Mike Stack and Jay Leiderman, Rauhauser attempts to orchestrate an unfounded nuisance suit against Patterico, he crosses another line into what would seem to be an interstate conspiracy to corrupt the justice system.

The e-mail published by Lee Stranahan shows Rauhauser not only falsely asserting that Patterico was “funding” Seth Allen and “used to work together” with O’Keefe, but furthermore saying that Allen, Walker, Ron Brynaert, Mike Stack and Michelle Lessick all have “psych[iatric] disabilities” or “mental difficulties.” Rauhauser says Stack “was steered to attack me — he’s another person on psych disability that Frey picked out and victimized” — an absolutely ludicrous smear.

Somehow, Rauhauser would have us believe, all of these crazy people (some of whom don’t even know one another) have been “victimized” by Patrick Frey and enlisted in a conspiracy against that upstanding citizen Brett Kimberlin and his eminently rational colleague Neal Rauhauser.

Are you aware, however — and perhaps even Rauhauser has forgotten — that Neal explained the game plan of his own conspiracy, involving both Velvet Revolution and “Anonymous,” in October of last year? Are you aware that O’Keefe has been the target of Rauhauser’s own malicious machinations?

Does the IRS consider slander a tax-exempt  activity?

Magic 8-Ball says . . . probably not.

– Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknown

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
Last night — as everybody on the blogosphere is now aware — Juan Williams got all snotty with Michelle Malkin on the Sean Hannity show:

“I’m a real reporter, not a blogger out in the blogosphere somewhere.”

Which is to say, he’s got a job at Fox News after having gotten fired from National Public Radio for bluntly expressing his concerns about terrorism, a fight in which bloggers — not “real reporters” — came to Juan’s defense. But this ingratitude for their efforts is something that bloggers have come to expect, eh?

Earlier today, I mentioned that Jen Preston of the New York Times might be one of those “big media” reporters whom Patterico accuses of being afraid to report about Brett Kimberlin.

Whether or not Patterico was aiming that remark at Preston, and whether or not the allegation of being scaredy-cats is fair to reporters who have ignored the Kimberlin saga, part of the problem is that the story may at first glance seem to be one of those silly ginned-up Left-vs.-Right dramas. This is why I keep returning to the same point: Seth Allen (@prepostericity) was the first to be sued by Brett Kimberlin.

With some assistance from Aaron Walker, Allen was able to settle that $2 million suit for the nominal fee of $100. [Please see the clarification in UPDATE III below. — RSM] It was Walker’s involvement in the Kimberlin-vs.-Allen case that exposed Walker to harassment from Kimberlin (and Kimberlin’s vicious associate Neal Rauhauser), ultimately resulting in the May 29 courtroom farce in which Walker was arrested.

There are many other aspects to this story. The SWATtings of Mike Stack, Patterico and Erick Erickson have gotten the most attention, but the fact that it started with Seth Allen, a progressive who persistently called B.S. on the activities of Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution, is important to keep in mind.

Seth got banned from site after site because he kept pointing out not just Kimberlin’s criminal record, but also the fact that Velvet Revolution (and Kimberlin’s VR partner, Brad Friedman) kept raising money with bogus allegations of GOP wrongdoing. All those claims of Republican vote fraud in Ohio, the conspiracy-theory stuff that Karl Rove had threatened a Republican operative (who subsequently died in a plane crash), the stuff about the Chamber of Commerce, etc. — nothing ever came of any of that. Liberals kept throwing money at Velvet Revolution, and Velvet Revolution kept failing to prove its accusations.

Seth Allen called B.S. on all that, and even after he was sued for blogging about Kimberlin, he has kept reminding readers at his blog, DFQ2 (named for one of Allen’s progressive blogger heroes, “Dave From Queens”) about what kind of rotten dishonest hustles Kimberlin and Friedman have promoted over the years. In February, citing a post in which Friedman urged his readers to support “the independent, progressive, aggressive, and investigative media,” Seth called attention to Friedman’s relentless hype of the Clint Curtis conspiracy theory.

To make a long story short, Velvet Revolution got a lot of attention in 2005 by offering a reward for evidence proving that the 2004 election had been stolen by Republicans. And as a result, Florida resident Clint Curtis became a celebrity on the moonbat circuit:

Curtis said he developed a program that included invisible buttons on touch screen machines that could alter vote totals, but he does not know whether it was ever used. He said he gave the program to one of his bosses, Li Yang, but did not keep a copy….
Curtis said he wrote the affidavit after reading about a reward for anyone who could verify vote fraud. He didn’t want the money, Curtis insists, but wanted to prove the elections had been stolen. He presented copies of his affidavit to several congressional staffers and testified before a Democratic committee looking at fraud allegations in Ohio.

Curtis’s claims were relentlessly flogged at BradBlog , capitalizing on the left-wing resentments going back to the contested Bush-Gore 2000 recount in Florida. That allegedly “stolen” election helped fuel a million e-mails from MoveOn.org, which spent years demonizing Bush, Cheney, Rove, et al., as Grand Conspirators of an illegitimate “regime.”

Much of the toxicity of our current politics stems from the fanatical mindset of leftists who bought into that misleading rhetoric. The point that Seth Allen kept trying to get across was that the Clint Curtis claims — like all the conspiracy theories promoted by Velvet Revolution — were never proven.

As Lucy Morgan of the St. Petersburg Times wrote in 2005, Friedman and others “fashioned something of a political thriller out of a series of apparently unrelated events they say prove the elections really were stolen,” allegations in some cases clearly contradicted by facts. For example, touch-screen computer voting machines were not in widespread use at the time — 2000 — that Curtis claims a Republican asked him to create the “invisible button” software. Yet as late as 2010, BradBlog was still promoting Curtis as a hero of their so-called “election integrity” crusade.

It’s a free country, and if people want to pay money for snipe hunts and wild-goose chases, that’s their business. Hell, it might even be legitimate political “activism” under IRS 501(c)4 rules. But when somebody starts denouncing such conspiracy-theory stuff as a hoax and a waste of time, as Seth Allen did, it is clearly wrong — if not actually illegal — to try to silence the critic via harassment.

Does a “real reporter” like Jen Preston have any interest in a fascinating story like this? Or will she continue being scooped by “a blogger out in the blogosphere somewhere”? You should ask her: She’s @NYT_JenPreston on Twitter.

UPDATE: David Horowitz and Jacob Laskin:

Kimberlin’s seamless transition from prison inmate to the beneficiary of left-wing philanthropy offers a stark illustration of the radical course that progressive foundations have adopted.

Hat-tip: The Lonely Conservative.

UPDATE II: We are grateful to Michelle “Out in the Blogosphere” Malkin for reminding us about the real Velvet Revolution, which was a heartbreaker for Stalinist scum everywhere. Please link the Original Velvet Revolution blog — and read their explanation of why this matters.

UPDATE III: Clarification about Kimberlin’s lawsuit against Seth Allen, sent in an e-mail by . . . an informed reader:

First, Seth didn’t settle anything. He had a default judgment against him. Then on November 14, 2011 he had a hearing to determine damages. The $100 plus court costs was a judgment against him.
So he was found to have defamed Kimberlin because… he didn’t show up to fight. Then when he did show up to fight, it was only $100 damages. And the judge made it clear that it was only a nominal sum.
And frankly [Aaron Walker’s] slight help contributed almost nothing to that victory. Which makes Kimberlin’s decision to come after [Walker] even more absurd.

There are many absurd things in the world, including the ruling of Judge Cornelius Vaughey that infringes First Amendment rights not merely for our informed reader, but ultimately restricts freedom for everybody else, too.

– Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknown