Brooks Bayne Pushes the Brett Kimberlin Narrative and Defames the Late Andrew Breitbart

This is the latest post in what I half-jokingly call The Kimberlin Saga^®.  If you are new to the story, that’s okay! Not everyone reads my blog.  The short version is that Kimberlin has been harassing me for over a year, his worst conduct being when he attempted to frame me for a crime.  I recognize that this might sound like an incredible claim, but I provide video and documentary evidence of that fact; in other words, you don’t have to believe my word.  You only have to believe your eyes.  So, if you are new to the story, go to this page and you’ll be able to catch up on what has been happening.

So yesterday at Brooks Bayne’s site The Trenches they choose to post his grand conspiracy theory of why we are picking on poor little Brett Kimberlin.  And their explanation?  It was to cover up a crime most foul: illegal wiretapping!

It starts with the ACORN stings.  You might remember them.  James O’Keefe and Hanna Giles, working with his Veritas project, appeared in various ACORN offices across the country in hidden camera investigations, pretending to be a pimp and prostitute, looking for tax help in setting up a brothel for underage Salvadoran girls who would work in said brothel as prostitutes.  There is no truth to the rumor that they would name it the Menendez House.  And joking aside, rather than be completely horrified by what O’Keefe and Giles were pretending to be planning to do, ACORN staffers provided a disturbing amount of help, which became a national scandal, resulting in legislation cutting off all federal funding to them and ultimately destroying them as a corporate structure.

But, according to Brooks, in doing so O’Keefe and by extension, the late Andrew Breitbart, made a mistake:

In the first video from the ACORN series, the Baltimore, MD branch was the target. The fatal mistake that O’Keefe, and by extension, Breitbart, made, was apparently not realizing that Maryland is a two-party consent state. For those unfamiliar with the term, a two-party consent state means that when someone is being recorded with either an audio or visual device, they have to explicitly give their permission to be recorded. In most states with such laws, the clear presence of the recording device and the subject communicating with the interviewer is viewed as consent.

However, as anyone familiar with the story knows, the ACORN employees in all the offices were apparently never made aware they were being recorded. In short, in Maryland, O’Keefe broke the law in order to get his damning evidence.

The problem is that the entire paragraph is false.  O’Keefe did not break the law in his recordings.

For review purposes, here are the two recordings from Baltimore:

Now you can watch and try to see what I see as a lawyer, but I won’t keep you in suspense.  First, let’s look at the statute involved.  This comes from Md. Courts and Judicial Proceedings Code §10-402:

§ 10-402. Interception of communications generally; divulging contents of communications; violations of subtitle

(a) Unlawful acts. -- Except as otherwise specifically provided in this subtitle it is unlawful for any person to:

(1) Willfully intercept, endeavor to intercept, or procure any other person to intercept or endeavor to intercept, any wire, oral, or electronic communication;

(2) Willfully disclose, or endeavor to disclose, to any other person the contents of any wire, oral, or electronic communication, knowing or having reason to know that the information was obtained through the interception of a wire, oral, or electronic communication in violation of this subtitle; or

(3) Willfully use, or endeavor to use, the contents of any wire, oral, or electronic communication, knowing or having reason to know that the information was obtained through the interception of a wire, oral, or electronic communication in violation of this subtitle.

(b) Penalty. -- Any person who violates subsection (a) of this section is guilty of a felony and is subject to imprisonment for not more than 5 years or a fine of not more than $ 10,000, or both.

Now, to the untrained eye, that sounds open and shut.  But any lawyer knows to be more cautious before drawing that conclusion.  If you look in the entire title (you can do this, here), you can see that just before §10-402 there is a §10-401 entitled “Definitions.”  Every lawyer knows that the definitions of words can be vital in determining whether a criminal law has been broken.  Now there are lots of words defined in that statute, but I am going to focus on one phrase in particular.  “Oral communications” is defined in § 10-401(2)(i) as “conversation or words spoken to or by any person in private conversation.” (Emphasis added.)

The key word, there, is “private.”  The Maryland Judiciary has read this one word so that an element of the offense is that the person have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” when they have this conversation.  As the Maryland Court of Appeals said in Fearnow v. The Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company of Md.,  “when an oral communication is intercepted, determining whether a violation of the Wiretap Act occurred hinges on a jury determination that at least one of the parties had a reasonable expectation of privacy.”  Indeed, since the definition of “wire communications” in the same act did not include the term “privacy,” the court also stated that when wire communications are intercepted, whether either party had a reasonable expectation of privacy is irrelevant.  So in this case, oral communications were intercepted (video, without sound, is generally not covered by these laws), and as a result if the State of Maryland wished to prosecute James O’Keefe, it would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the ACORN workers had a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Now, while that quote suggests that the issue is never determined by a judge, in Malpas v. State (1997), the court did exactly that.  They ruled as a matter of law no reasonable expectation of privacy could be found as a matter of law, when a man in his own home was shouting so loudly that a person in the next house could hear it and record it. Normally if you speak conversationally in your own home you almost always have a reasonable expectation of privacy; but if you are yelling, you know your neighbors will hear and thus no reasonable expectation of privacy.

And if you watch the video closely, any lawyer can see that the ACORN workers didn’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy either.  Let me show you a still image from the video and ask you, do you see what I see?

You see an open door into the hallway.  And you can hear people out there who plainly aren’t employees.  You can even hear a little girl talk now and then.  Every lawyer knows that in order to protect attorney-client privilege in that circumstance, you are required to close the door, and the same thing is required if you want to maintain a reasonable expectation of privacy.  In other words, those women might have expected their conversation to remain private, but no court would recognize it as a reasonable expectation.

So, in fact, Brooks’ site has defamed James O’Keefe and the late Andrew Breitbart by claiming that “O’Keefe broke the law.”  And as you will see that fundamental error undermines his entire thesis.

So who was it that realized O’Keefe had broken Maryland’s wiretapping laws? Brett Kimberlin.

Yes, according to Brooks’ site, Kimberlin was heroically blowing the whistle on O’Keefe’s and Breitbart’s lawbreaking!

In the summer of 2010, Kimberlin announced that his organization, Velvet Revolution, had filed a request for Maryland authorities to investigate O’Keefe and Breitbart for the ACORN videos, citing the wiretapping law as their reasoning. A letter released by Kimberlin was posted to Kimberlin associate Brad Friedman’s blog, BradBlog. A copy of the letter can still be found on BradBlog here.

Indeed the interesting thing is that the letter posted on Bradblog doesn’t mention this legal requirement that the recording be made when there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.  Which is odd, because it cites Bodoy v. North Arundel Hospital (D. Maryland 1996) which quoted that exact phrase “reasonable expectation of privacy” and referenced Benford v. ABC, Inc. (1982).  Any lawyer of minimal diligence would have read Benford, if only because the very name of the case suggested the facts were similar—after all, ABC was one of the parties.  And indeed it was similar: it involved an undercover sting where a door-to-door salesman was having a conversation in a person’s home.  Any lawyer reading that case would have been forewarned that O’Keefe could not be prosecuted unless he violated someone’s reasonable expectation of privacy.  So why didn’t the Kimberlin-allied attorney who wrote the letter even notice that?

[Please note: none of this should be construed as legal advice.  I discuss the law purely for the purpose of informing the public.  If you wish to know how the law applies to your particular case, I suggest you hire a lawyer.]

And pointing out how easy it was to find this complete defense to the charges not only makes us question the honesty of the attorney who wrote this letter, but it also brings up another point.  Andrew Breitbart had lawyers, too.  Certainly they would have told him with all of five minutes' investigation that he and O’Keefe had nothing to worry about, legally speaking.  And that is assuming no one advised them before O’Keefe carried out the stings.

But in the fevered minds Brooks’ writers (who refuse to identify themselves), this sent Breitbart and company into panic!

Obviously this had the potential to be incredibly damaging to both O’Keefe and Breitbart. Their direct hit on the left could finally be discredited all because of an apparent oversight on O’Keefe’s part that he couldn’t do his unique style of investigation in the state of Maryland. So what happened next?

In October of 2010, Breitbart’s Mandy Nagy seemingly dropped a story out of left field on Kimberlin’s checkered past. Titled “Progressives Embrace Convicted Terrorist”, it outlined the man’s serious run-ins with the law.

So you see?!  This was part of a revenge plot to get the virtuous Kimberlin back for coming after Breitbart and O’Keefe!

And of course does it surprise you to find out that this just happens to be the same grand conspiracy theory that Kimberlin has been peddling?

And it outlines how Patterico wrote about Kimberlin as well--pillorying Brad Freidman for associating with a terrorist--and this anonymous author writes that the story about Kimberlin was a dud.

So what do we have so far with Kimberlin? Another leftist with a criminal past that the left overlooks because he holds the “correct” views, and now holds a minor place of prominence in the world of leftist politics. Nothing too startling or interesting.

And I actually agree.  I never found the story terribly compelling in the beginning.  I think if Kimberlin left it alone few people would have been interested in writing a story about him.  What has happened to his reputation—it is truly beyond repair with all this truth getting out—is solely because of his tactics of brass knuckle reputation management.  It is such a perfect example of the Streisand Effect, I propose renaming it the Kimberlin Effect.

But that isn’t what happened in Brooks’ writers’ minds.  No, it was a conspiracy--a conspiracy I tell you--that the story grew:

According to both Nagy and Patterico, Kimberlin sent them cease and desist/remove immediately orders shortly after their posts were published in October of 2010. Patterico made a brief post about this  that same month. The first kernel of the “Kimberlin uses lawfare to silence critics/conservatives” was born.

Got that?  The anonymous writer is insinuating that this idea that Kimberlin is a threat to First Amendment is just a Breitbart-klan concocted myth.

Their tale goes on repeating Seth Allen’s false and self-aggrandizing claim that Mandy had stolen his research:

Somewhere along the way, the blogger Seth Allen, who writes at davefromqueens2.blogspot.com, is put on Nagy’s radar, at least. According to Allen, much of the research and investigating Nagy did for her piece, came from his work, especially the parts linking Kimberlin and Friedman together. Unfortunately for Allen, he has a real penchant for poking at Kimberlin, and ends up in court himself.

Notice that phraseology, the use of the passive voice.  Allen just ends up in court.  It wasn’t because Kimberlin filed an abusive defamation suit, where Kimberlin claimed he was defamed by being called a “perjurer” and a “terrorist” despite the fact that Kimberlin is in fact a convicted perjurer and terrorist, was it?  Well, they don’t want to admit that, because then that suggests that the narrative of Kimberlin as a man who tries to silence people--and indeed not just conservatives, since Allen is liberal--by lawsuit abuse and false charges might and other criminal acts, you know, be true.  And the purpose of this post is to put Kimberlin in the best light possible.  Sure, they insult him now and then, but you will see in a moment they are covering up significant wrongdoing on his part.

That case reveals one strange, sordid tale, with Kimberlin contending Allen is a famous Internet troll who has used dozens to hundreds of accounts over the past decade at least, to screw with people across the Internet

While somewhat irrelevant, Allen ends up in jail because of Nagy. Allen had, according to him, made some kind of joking reference about killing Kimberlin. Nagy didn’t see it that way, contacted the authorities, and Allen ends up in jail. A strange interlude in a story full of strange interludes.

Notice how the only person blamed in that encounter is Mandy Nagy.  Notice the poor journalism, simply stating Allen’s representation of what he said rather than quoting when Allen wrote “[w]hatever, maybe I should murder him,” when referring to Kimberlin.  So when Seth wrote that, and went to jail briefly in part because of it, but it wasn’t Seth’s fault for saying something he admitted soon after he shouldn’t have said.  And it wasn’t Brett Kimberln’s fault, for embellishing the story by claiming that Seth was coming to Maryland to kill him when he knew full well that Seth was coming to Maryland in order to defend himself against this frivolous suit.  No, it was Mandy Nagy’s fault, for supposedly snitching him out.  Yes in a moment, they use that word “snitching.”

Indeed, let’s examine that word, “snitching.”  It is a pejorative term for reporting to the police, used by people who think it is somehow wrong and disreputable to do so.  While I always felt Mandy overreacted—I didn’t believe Seth was actually joking, but I didn’t believe he really intended to murder Kimberlin, either—I never considered her conduct to be anything but honorable.  But in the minds of these people, telling the police is considered wrong: they call them snitches.  It is reveals underneath these supposedly upstanding conservatives a criminal mindset.

And do I have to tell you that other members of Team Kimberlin regularly use the same term?

And indeed, they add a new paranoid angle to the story:

Maybe Nagy’s snitching was retribution for Allen making waves over calling Nagy out over her lifting his work with no attribution. Two wrongs and all that.

Now, let’s get to the next paragraph:

Also in the 2010-11 time frame, another blogger who wrote about Kimberlin extensively ends up on the wrong end of a lawsuit from Kimberlin. That blogger is Aaron Walker, although most people knew him as Aaron Worthing on the Internet. Walker ran a blog called Everybody Draw Mohammed. That blog, and his involvement with it, was what led to him using the pen name Aaron Worthing. As part of Kimberlin’s lawsuit against Walker, Kimberlin was able to force Walker’s name out into the public sphere.

Well, isn’t that truncating a few things and getting more than a few things wrong?  First, I didn’t “write extensively about Kimberlin” until Kimberlin attempted to out me.  That is a false statement of the order of events that, what a coincidence, just happens to parrallel what Kimberlin has been saying in court.  In fact prior to that day I only wrote one post that mentioned the man in passing.  Second, my name didn’t come out into the public because of any lawsuit Kimberlin filed against me.  Instead it came out because Ron Brynaert revealed it to the world.

As regular readers know, Kimberlin first attempted to put my name into the public record by improperly putting my information into a court document in the Allen litigation.  On the very same day, he sent a letter to law enforcement stating that he believed that this act of outing me would place me, my wife, everyone who worked with me, and everyone who lived near me in danger from being killed by Islamic terrorists.  In other words Kimberlin admitted to taking actions that he believed would get me killed.

This filing was so flagrantly improper, that I showed up at a pre-set hearing and I convinced Judge Rupp to immediately place it under seal.  Then Kimberlin filed a motion to unseal it, with my name in the caption.  The judge took the extraordinary step of sealing that document and then changing the name of the caption in the system database.  Then Kimberlin filed a motion to unseal that motion and included my name in the body of that motion.  That motion was also sealed.  Even after I accused Kimberlin of deliberately trying to endanger my life, he continued to do so.

On a different track, on the same day I got the first document sealed, Kimberlin then attempted to frame me for a crime.  You can watch this short video outlining how he had done so and presenting the proof that I had not assaulted Kimberlin here:

And on the same day I and my wife were fired from our jobs, because they were in terror of Brett Kimberlin.  I will speak more about that in a moment.

In any case, shortly after Kimberlin filed his false assault charges against me, Ron Brynaert—one of Kimberlin associates and, in my opinion, the man who SWATted Patrick Frey (listen for yourself and decide)—outted me on the excuse that somehow these charges revealed that my pseudonym “Aaron Worthing” was actually Aaron Walker.  Of course nothing available to the public revealed that, and indeed Brynaert would never have been able to determine with certitude that I was “Aaron Worthing” without help.  Oh, and by the way, Ron has admitted to talking to Kimberlin about the incident claiming Kimberlin lied to him and also claiming that he was foolish enough to believe him.  I doubt anyone who knows Kimberlin hasn’t figured out that he is a pathological liar.  It was curious that Brynaert never even bothered to ask me if the charges were true.

So in fact my outting had nothing to do with any suit against me.

And regular readers know what happened next, although it is worth taking the time to review it with you (you will see why in a moment).  Kimberlin filed an abusive peace order against me—sort of like a restraining order, except it for people who are not related by blood or marriage—based on this alleged assault and supposed harassment—which amounted to telling the world much of what Kimberlin was doing to me.  I say, “much of,” because I wasn’t discussing his attempt to frame me at that time.  In any case the criminal charges were eventually dropped, and his first peace order was dismissed on appeal.

And then when it was clear that even with absolute video proof of the crime he committed against me—an attempted framing and charges related to that act—the authorities in Maryland were not going to prosecute Kimberlin, I released on May 17 a massive post.  You can go to the introduction post here, and keep reading.  The title was “How Brett Kimberlin Tried to Frame Me for a Crime (And How You Can Help!)”.  Indeed, if you find any of this story I am reciting hard to believe, go here, and read the links.  As I said in that introductory post, I don’t simply say that Kimberlin did these things.  I present documentary and video evidence that proves he did so that you don’t have to believe my word; you only have to believe your eyes.

Then after I wrote that post, Kimberlin filed a second peace order against me, claiming harassment.  His theory was risible.  When properly understood he was claiming that because he set up Google alerts to automatically inform him when anyone, anywhere on the internet wrote an article about him, that this was the same as me personally emailing him and thus it was harassment.  You got that?  So if you write about Brett Kimberlin anywhere on the internet, he claimed he had a right to hale you into court and slap an injunction on you to stop you from writing about him.  In court, Kimberlin also found another argument: that by writing bad things about him on the internet, I was inciting violence against him.  Mind you, the court found that I didn’t personally threaten him, and I never asked anyone to do anything violent or unlawful toward him.  Indeed, I took steps to protect Kimberlin from violence by carefully redacting out his personal information—such as address and phone number—each time I reproduced a court document.  Despite that fact, the court found I had incited violence against him simply by writing bad things about him on the internet to a general audience—disregarding Supreme Court precedent by name—and told me I couldn’t write about Kimberlin to third parties on the internet for six months.

Incidentally the Supreme Court precedent the judge disregarded was Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), which involved actual threatening language by members of the KKK.  In it the Supreme Court said that:

the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.

Since I had not advocated violence, there was no way a court could find I had incited violence against Kimberlin.  And yet the judge said, “Forget Brandenburg” and proceeded to make up his own standard.

And indeed if merely reporting truthfully that a person had engaged in reprehensible conduct is incitement that can be prohibited, it is the end of journalism.  You don’t think Nixon got a few death threats during Watergate?  You don’t think the executives of Enron feared for their lives—and with good reason?  Indeed as we speak not only is Chris Dorner a danger to the public, I equally suspect that the public and the police will be a danger to him; even an ordinary citizen might be so offended by what Dorner had done, that if Dorner surrendered to them and presented absolutely no danger, they might shoot him in cold blood.  And while responsible people who report on the misconduct of others should take reasonable steps to protect even the guilty from private retribution (and I did), we cannot prohibit anyone anywhere from saying anything bad about anyone.  That is half of what journalism is about.

Fortunately Maryland allows for an automatic appeal of that decision and I applied to the appellate judge—who turned out to be Rupp—for a stay of the most flagrantly unconstitutional part of the order stating I could not speak about him for six months, which was immediately granted pending the final determination on appeal. 

And then that night, after my legal victory, I was SWATted.  You can read about that incident, here.

And then on July 5, 2012, I won my appeal of that second peace order burying it for good.

So that is quite a bit that Kimberlin did to me.

So how did Brooks’ site represent what Kimberlin did to me?

According to Walker, this outing, and Kimberlin’s subsequent alleged harassing of Walker at his workplace and elsewhere, lead to Walker getting fired from his job. That claim has been refuted here and elsewhere, when a leaked e-mail cache was sent to a small circle of people proving that Walker’s employer fired him for his actions, not Kimberlin’s.

That is right, no mention of the attempt to get me killed, the framing, the peace orders, the unlawful deprivation of my First Amendment rights (only vaguely alluded to as “something going on in the legal arena”), or even the SWATting.  All they want to talk about is the fact I lost my job because of Kimberlin.  Of course previously Brooks had stated that Kimberlin was not responsible for the judicial rulings he had personally sought, so maybe Brooks thought Kimberlin hadn’t done anything wrong with those other acts.

And indeed his description got a great deal also wrong.  I never claimed Kimberlin contacted my employer and that contact got me fired (though I suspect he did contact them after I was fired).  And as for an email proving that I was fired for poor performance, that is simply false.

What they have is a email from my employer’s lawyer claiming I had been fired for poor performance.  Simply put, it is a lie.  This is actually very common conduct for employers who fear being sued—and honestly, whenever you fire a lawyer, shouldn’t you worry at least a little about being sued?  This is a profession known for being litigious, after all.  So what they did was actually so common there is actually a legal doctrine built around it in the discrimination context: pretext.  This refers to when the stated reason for firing a person was false, hiding the real (and usually discriminatory) reason for firing that person.  See, e.g. St. Mary’s Honor Center v. Hicks (1993) (explaining that a “pretext for discrimination” is proven when the Plaintiff “shows both that the reason was false, and that [unlawful] discrimination was the real reason.”)

Now let me be very clear.  They didn’t unlawfully discriminate against me as far as I know.  But the concept is parallel.  They gave up a false reason to cover up their real reason.  Indeed much of the email was laughably false, claiming for instance that I posted on the morning of January 9 on my Everyone Draw Mohammed blog when I had done no such thing or faulting me for following the President of the company’s specific instructions on storage.

And while the email was unethical, it is in response on a reasonably felt concern.  If I lacked honor, they would have had good reason to fear that I would either sue them or file a bogus EEOC complaint.  For instance, on the day I informed them of Kimberlin’s stalking was effectively the day that many on the senior staff learned that I had three learning disabilities.  I know my dismissal had nothing to do with my disabilities, but if I was dishonorable I could claim it to the EEOC and tie them up for a few months as their conduct was investigated.

A more serious charge would have been if I claimed I was fired for participating in the Everyone Draw Mohammed movement.  As you may or may not now, this was a free-speech, anti-terrorism movement designed to push back against those who said that they would kill anyone who dared to draw Mohammed.  This would have been a reasonable surmise of the facts, and in that case, would that have been unlawful discrimination?  I will point out that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination based on religion.  So for instance, if your boss asks everyone to pray and you refuse and you face discrimination based on that refusal, that is discrimination based on religion.  So if I blasphemed a faith and was fired for doing so, would that be religious discrimination?  That is a tougher question, with which I could have tied them up in litigation for years, even if I lost.  And if I won such a suit, that could have been even worse for them.

But I am an honorable man, so I have never made either allegation.  I have filed no action against them and no complaint with the EEOC.  I am disappointed in how they responded to this situation, but I am not angry.  They were just scared.  Patrick Frey will tell you that their receptionists were terrified to even sit at the front desk.  So while their conduct is disappointing, I don’t blame them.  I blame Kimberlin.

But just because I know I would never make a false claim against them, didn’t mean that my former employers knew that.  And looking over all the facts they had a rational fear of being sued or subjected to a false EEOC complaint.  So their lawyer most likely told them the wisest thing was to start pretending this was for performance and not related to Kimberlin and they followed his advice.  Either that or they got the idea themselves.  While I have never participated in that kind of dishonesty, I know for a fact it happens quite a bit.

I will add that if you believe or suspect that I was fired because of my participation in the Everyone Draw Mohammed movement, I will respectfully disagree, but I will also point out that they only found out about my participation because of Kimberlin’s actions.  So if I was fired for that reason, my dismissal would be his fault, too.

But Brooks’ writers focused on that, because they believed they had proof I was lying on that point.  They don’t.  They only have the hearsay of an attorney who was not on site and had an obvious motive to lie.  They have some interesting evidence against me, at best, but why one would trust a lawyer who was afraid of getting sued is beyond me.

And as for the rest of my story, you never had to rely on my word: you only had to rely on your own eyes.  Which is why Brooks’ site omits all of those allegations.

They go on to exonerate Neal Rauhauser of any criminal wrongdoing.  Well, I know more than they bother to disclose and more importantly the FBI knows, too.  We will see if they decide to prosecute him based on that evidence.

And the conspiracy theory continues:

Needless to say, Breitbart did his part in shaping the narrative about Kimberlin. And like all things Breitbart did in the media, he did it with grandiosity, building a sense of mystery and menace around the three men mentioned in those few tweets.

But then, Breitbart died.

...

[T]his left the Kimberlin narrative somewhat fading, except for Aaron Walker, who continued to blog about Brett Kimberlin and fight online with various Twitter profiles about Kimberlin.

The story was fading!  So it was important to kick it into high gear.  And notice the complete omission of my monster post describing how Kimberlin tried to frame me (and got me fired, and tried to get me killed by terrorists) or Kimberlin’s latest Peace Order.  Not this is depicted as coming out of the blue.

Then, in the spring of 2012, Breitbart blogger, and rape fetish pornographer, Lee Stranahan came up with the idea of “Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day.” He pitched the idea, using the old adage about sunlight and disinfectant and whatnot. Crazily enough, purely based on his position as a Breitbart blogger, Stranahan managed to get many of the most popular and influential blogs on the conservative side to participate.

And of course they smear Lee with the usual scurrilous charges.  And by the way, what relevance is that to this story?  It is done because they wish to smear him.

And in fact, the event, in their minds was part of a larger conspiracy:

But, when you get right down to it, what “Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day” really was, was simply a google bomb. It was a manipulation of search engine optimization, so that when anyone searches Brett Kimberlin, all they’ll find is a raft of stories about the darker parts of Kimberlin’s life and not the mentions about the lawsuit or other legal issues that were headed Andrew’s way.

Not only did it continue the narrative of how AWFUL Kimberlin is, it also insured that any non-negative posts about Kimberlin were buried under a mountain of other results. Results that might link to URLs related to the aforementioned suit against Breitbart maybe?

That is right, it was part of the plan to distract people from the horrible crime that… O’Keefe and Breitbart didn’t commit.

And this is a gem.  They refer to “Erick Erickson’s alleged ‘swatting’” which relates to Brooks SWATting trutherism.  And thus we see poor little Brett suffering, while Breitbart gets away with it the horrible non-crime of non-wiretapping:

Again, keeping all the negativity on Kimberlin and thrashing the guy in about as public, and brutal, way as possible.

And instead of anyone wondering or thinking about the pretty straightforward wiretapping case Kimberlin had against O’Keefe and Breitbart, everyone was focused on Kimberlin. Our takeaway: during the last couple years, many participants wasted a lot of energy, and some conservative dupes were suckered out of money over several “conservative” bloggers’ hyperbolic nonsense, all due to O’Keefe’s wiretapping blunder in Maryland.

I mean what are we upset about?  I have only lost my job (as did my wife), been framed for a crime, been intentionally exposed to threat of death, been SWATted (as was my wife, since she lives with me), had my freedom of speech wrongly stripped from me?  And Patrick was SWATted, and has been defamed and sued scurrilously.  And so forth and so on.  What are we complaining about?

But all of that is just a bunch of noise to distract us all from the awful crime that... James O’Keefe never committed in the first place.

Brett Kimberlin couldn’t have written it better himself.  That is, assuming he didn’t actually write it himself.

Or maybe all of this is just the latest expression of Brooks’ impotent rage after he was outted as holocaust-denying anti-semite who bizarrely jew-baits me despite the fact I am not Jewish.  No matter how you slice it, Brooks is a major schmuck.

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My wife and I have lost our jobs due to the harassment of convicted terrorist Brett Kimberlin, including an attempt to get us killed and to frame me for a crime carrying a sentence of up to ten years.  I know that claim sounds fantastic, but if you read starting here, you will see absolute proof of these claims using documentary and video evidence.  If you would like to help in the fight to hold Mr. Kimberlin accountable, please hit the Blogger’s Defense Team button on the right.  And thank you.

Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.  And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here.  And you can read a little more about my novel, here.

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Disclaimer:

I have accused some people, particularly Brett Kimberlin, of reprehensible conduct.  In some cases, the conduct is even criminal.  In all cases, the only justice I want is through the appropriate legal process—such as the criminal justice system.  I do not want to see vigilante violence against any person or any threat of such violence.  This kind of conduct is not only morally wrong, but it is counter-productive.

In the particular case of Brett Kimberlin, I do not want you to even contact him.  Do not call him.  Do not write him a letter.  Do not write him an email.  Do not text-message him.  Do not engage in any kind of directed communication.  I say this in part because under Maryland law, that can quickly become harassment and I don’t want that to happen to him.

And for that matter, don’t go on his property.  Don’t sneak around and try to photograph him.  Frankly try not to even be within his field of vision.  Your behavior could quickly cross the line into harassment in that way too (not to mention trespass and other concerns).

And do not contact his organizations, either.  And most of all, leave his family alone.

The only exception to all that is that if you are reporting on this, there is of course nothing wrong with contacting him for things like his official response to any stories you might report.  And even then if he tells you to stop contacting him, obey that request.  That this is a key element in making out a harassment claim under Maryland law—that a person asks you to stop and you refuse.

And let me say something else.  In my heart of hearts, I don’t believe that any person supporting me has done any of the above.  But if any of you have, stop it, and if you haven’t don’t start.