Somewhere between the time in October 2010 he threatened to sue
Patrick Frey and the decision last week to make a similar threat
toward Ali Akbar, Brett Kimberlin crossed a Rubicon of desperation
and burned the bridge behind him. In the past three weeks,
Kimberlin and his allies have escalated their deceitful war against
conservative bloggers to the point that it cannot be ignored, and
must now be fought to a conclusion with the entire political world
watching.
A convicted perjurer and drug smuggler, Kimberlin became
infamous as the “Speedway
Bomber” who terrorized an Indiana town in 1978. Kimberlin
somehow managed to secure a well-funded role in the progressive
movement after being released from federal prison in 2001. Ten days
ago, when I covered Kimberlin’s bizarre activities in an
American Spectator column (“Terror
by Any Other Name”), the director of the 501(c)3 non-profit
Justice Through Music Project was just beginning to gain renewed
attention. On May 25, a broad spectrum of conservative online
activists joined together for “Everybody
Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day” to call attention to
Kimberlin’s harassment and intimidation of bloggers who wrote about
his criminal history.
During his 17 years in federal custody, Kimberlin became a
skillful “jailhouse lawyer,” filing more than 100 legal proceedings
on his own behalf and, over the past two years, he has deployed
those methods in a series of lawsuits and criminal accusations
against his chosen targets. Another non-profit Kimberlin
co-founded, Velvet Revolution, made headlines by offering rewards
for evidence of wrongdoing by public figures including GOP
strategist Karl Rove and U.S. Chamber of Commerce president Tom
Donohue. And then a left-winger who used the alias “Socrates” began
to speak out on a number of Internet forums, expressing his
suspicion that Kimberlin and his Velvet Revolution partner,
prominent liberal blogger Brad Friedman, were running a dishonest
scam.
“Socrates,” it turned out, was an eccentric young Massachusetts
resident named Seth Allen. Believing that Velvet Revolution’s
frequent accusations of Republican election fraud and other
right-wing crimes were a bogus fundraising gimmick, Allen started
doing online research, discovered Kimberlin’s infamous history and
persistently wrote about it, getting himself banned from several
progressive websites in the process. In October 2010,
Kimberlin sued Allen for more than $2 million, charging him
with “defamation, libel, cyberstalking, and tortuous interference
with business.” That lawsuit tipped the first in a series of
dominoes that have been sequentially toppling with increasing
rapidity ever since. The Kimberlin saga is a many-layered onion of
a story, and attempting to peel the whole onion to explain it all
in a single article presents an enormous challenge to any
journalist. One
liberal blogger this week called it “as densely peopled and
subplotted as a 19th century Russian novel.” But this complex tale
recently took two dramatic turns that have made it much easier to
understand:
- At a
May 29 hearing in Rockville, Maryland, a district court judge
ruled in favor of Kimberlin in his dispute with Virginia lawyer
Aaron Walker, who had provided legal assistance to Seth Allen. Not
only did Judge C.J. Vaughey impose what amounted to a gag order on
Walker — who is apparently forbidden to write or speak publicly
about Kimberlin — but the police slapped the cuffs on Walker and
hauled him to jail for having allegedly violated a previous court
order. Within a few hours, Walker was freed on his own
recognizance, but his arrest sparked widespread outrage.
- Late last week, Kimberlin took aim at 26-year-old Ali Akbar, an
influential young New Media professional who is president of the
recently formed National
Bloggers Club. Akbar pledged the Club’s support in defense of
Walker, and last week an attorney for Kimberlin’s
Velvet Revolution sent a legal notice to Akbar, evidently in
anticipation of a planned lawsuit. The notice from lawyer Kevin
Zeese was clearly written with publicity value in mind, and
declared that Akbar and his organization were to blame for
“countless death threats … the release of massive amounts of
false and defamatory information on to the Internet, and unleashed
stalking and harassment” against “Velvet Revolution, Justice
Through Music and their staff.”
Such an accusation is ludicrous to anyone familiar with the
attempt of Kimberlin and his surrogates to intimidate their chosen
enemies. One of the weapons apparently employed by Kimberlin’s
operation is a website that was originally targeted at the late
Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart but which, in recent months,
has been used to smear Kimberlin’s foes. While Kimberlin has denied
any association with the site, its attacks on various individuals
(myself among them) are so closely synchronized with Kimberlin’s
growing enemies list that no reasonable person could believe the
pattern is coincidental. Many observers suspect that, if Kimberlin
himself is not directly responsible for the site, it is operated by
his hired associates, who include notorious Democrat Party
operative Neal Rauhauser. In February, Rauhauser published an
eight-page
document that outlined a twisted conspiracy theory attempting
to connect Breitbart and the 2011 Anthony Weiner scandal to a
variety of unrelated phenomena — but that’s an onion layer of this
weird story we’ll leave unpeeled for now.
Monday afternoon, the website that I’ve ironically started
calling “Not Brett Kimberlin” unloaded on Ali, publishing the
address and a photo of his mother’s home in Texas. Akbar lives in
another state, but had listed his mother’s Fort Worth home as the
address of the fledgling National Bloggers Club on some business
papers, and the “Not Brett Kimberlin” site’s attack on Ali had
consequences that were certainly unintended by his attackers.
First, it got the attention of Texas law enforcement authorities,
who don’t like it when outsiders expose innocent citizens of the
Lone Star State to potentially dangerous harassment. Second, this
escalation sparked a scramble-the-jets alert among conservative
activists, because Ali is one of the Right’s best-connected young
operatives. A web-page designer and consultant who worked on John
McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, Ali has demonstrated a
remarkable flair for organizing Republicans and Tea Party activists
through social media. His Twitter account — simply @Ali — has more than 11,000
followers, and his network includes scores of the most active
voices online as well as powerful GOP operatives.
When I first met Ali in October 2009, he had flown into upstate
New York to work for conservative Doug Hoffman’s third-party
congressional campaign in a special election that proved to be a
crucible for the burgeoning Tea Party movement (see “Battle
Cry in the North Country”). He subsequently worked as a New
Media aide to Scott Brown’s 2010 Senate campaign, where he arranged
for conservative bloggers to get front-row seats at the jubilant
victory party in Boston (see “Downtown
Scotty Brown”). More recently, Ali has organized the popular
invitation-only “Blog Bash” at the annual Conservative Political
Action Conference, where in February this year, they presented Breitbart with the
“Changing the Narrative Award.” That event helped launch the
National Bloggers Club, whose board members include bestselling
author and nationally syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin, who has helped
turn the conflict with Kimberlin into a conservative crusade.
By now, a year after the cybersex scandal that brought down
Weiner, this slow-building march toward an online Armageddon has
drawn in many of the most prominent bloggers on the Right,
including Patrick Frey, a Los Angeles County deputy district
attorney who runs the Patterico site. When Frey began
writing about Kimberlin in October 2010, he was immediately
threatened with a lawsuit. Frey was later targeted for a
“SWATting,” whereby hoaxers called 911 and, claiming to be Frey,
said he’d murdered his wife, prompting a
raid that Frey has described in frightening detail. Red State
editor Erick Erickson says he, too, was recently the target of a
“SWATting.”
Neither Frey nor Erickson has specifically blamed Kimberlin for
these dangerous hoaxes, but the use of this tactic against
conservative commentators has finally called major national
attention to the Kimberlin saga.
Wednesday, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Georgia)
sent a letter Wednesday to Attorney General Eric Holder,
demanding an investigation of “threats and intimidation [that] have
no place in our national political discourse,” which prompted
Arlette Saenz to write an extensive story on the ABC News
website. Thursday, Texas Rep. Kenny Marchant became the
first House Republican to issue a statement in support of
conservative bloggers who say their First Amendment rights are
threatened.
The American Center for Law and Justice also joined the fight
Thursday, offering legal representation to Akbar and the National
Bloggers Club. This avalanche of action is only beginning, and more
is being demanded.
Today, Friday, June 7, has been declared National Blogger Day of Silence,
the brainchild of the award-winning conservative blogger known as
Ace of Spades, who called for congressional action: “They are our
representatives; we would like some representation.” Each
of the bloggers joining this protest will publish exactly one post
about the Kimberlin case — and nothing else during the entire day.
This 24-hour silence of the conservative blogosphere will be a show
of solidarity by what Professor Glenn Reynolds, who blogs as
Instapundit, has
called An Army
of Davids, an online army standing ready to fight this
battle to its conclusion, in full expectation of a triumphant
victory.
