Mulieris Dignitatem: Aaron Walker Court Hearing Confirms Kimberlin-Rauhauser Collaboration

31 May 2012

Aaron Walker Court Hearing Confirms Kimberlin-Rauhauser Collaboration

Aaron Walker Court Hearing Confirms Kimberlin-Rauhauser Collaboration

Aaron Walker Court Hearing Confirms Kimberlin-Rauhauser Collaboration

Posted on | May 31, 2012 | 23 Comments and 175 Reactions

FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
Democrat campaign consultant Neal Rauhauser accompanied convicted terrorist Brett Kimberlin to a Tuesday court hearing in Maryland, confirming their continued collaboration in an apparent effort to harass and intimidate conservative bloggers.
Kimberlin appeared in Montgomery County (Md.) District Court for a final hearing Tuesday on his “peace order” against blogger Aaron Walker, who was arrested at the conclusion of the hearing on charges that he had violated terms of a previous peace order through “incitement.” Judge C.J. Vaughey ruled that Walker’s blog was responsible for encouraging death threats to Kimberlin, who was convicted in 1981 for a series of bombings in Indiana.
Investor’s Business Daily reporter David Hogberg attended the Maryland hearing and reported that he spoke to “Kimberlin and his associate Neal Rauhauser” at the courthouse in Rockville. Kimberlin was spotted earlier this month at a New Jersey courthouse where Rauhauser faced charges of harassing Mike Stack, an Internet activist who played a prominent role in exposing the Anthony Weiner sex scandal.
The partnership of Kimberlin and Rauhauser is one of the elements of a lawsuit Walker filed in January against them and former Raw Story editor Ron Brynaert, which alleges:

“Defendant Kimberlin had on some date prior to November 14 [2011] formed a conspiracy with Defendants Brynaert and Rauhauser to stalk, harass, defame, intentionally inflict emotional distress and commit other illegal and/or immoral acts against any person perceived as an ‘enemy,’ particularly anyone who dared to accurately describe Defendant Kimberlin’s criminal past and any person seen as helping any target of this conspiracy.”

Walker, a Virginia attorney, was apparently targeted for harassment after he provided legal assistance to Seth Allen, a liberal who had blogged about Brett Kimberlin’s criminal history. Like Walker, Allen was also arrested on charges of harassing Kimberlin. Patterico writes of Kimberlin’s “abuse of process” in such proceedings:

Kimberlin learned a technique that he later used against Walker: namely, having your critics arrested in civil court.
Namely, this serial litigant [i.e., Kimberlin] forces his critics into his jurisdiction with a frivolous civil action. If Kimberlin’s critics complain that the action is frivolous, he calls that criticism “harassment,” and through a process of seeking frivolous peace orders and/or filing frivolous criminal complaints, obtains an arrest warrant for the critic. When the critic shows up to court as required, he or she is arrested on the trumped-up charges.
Success! The story becomes about the critic’s arrest. The critics look worse because authorities seem to take Kimberlin’s side; and he gets the satisfaction of putting his critics behind bars, even if for a short time.
Alternatively, Kimberlin and his supporters can use the threat of arrest to try to frighten civil litigants into staying out of court.

Patterico — the blog name of Los Angeles deputy district attorney Patrick Frey — has accused Kimberlin, Rauhauser and Brynaert of engaging in a “campaign of political terrorism.”
Frey was the target of “SWATting,” wherein hoax phone calls are used to deceive police into believing the target has committed a violent crime in his home, resulting in police raiding the location in anticipation of a confrontation with an armed suspect. The late Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart, who was identified as an enemy by Kimberlin, discussed “SWATting” in a radio interview with Hugh Hewitt shortly before Breitbart died in March. Frey and Walker discussed their experiences with Kimberlin in an interview last week on the Glenn Beck radio program.

Rauhauser is a Democrat social-media consultant who has described himself as a “hacker.” Rauhauser is a founder of the consulting firm Progressive PST and was a speaker at the 2010 “NetRoots Nation” conference sponsored by Daily Kos, a popular liberal blog. Using the blog pseudonym “Stranded Wind,” Rauhauser in September 2010 urged DailyKos readers to “put an end to [Glenn] Beck’s career.” (Rauhauser’s Daily Kos blogging privileges were revoked in July 2011.)
In September 2010, blogger Patrick Read described how Rauhauser “organized a squalid group of anonymous twitter-users as a means to attack the tea party and conservatives alike.” Rauhauser’s so-called “beandogs” used Twitter messages with what Read described as “extremely graphic language including masturbation, pedophilia, violent threats, racism, sexism, religious bigotry.” Read observed that Rauhauser’s “beandogs” showed “a penchant for exposing personal information about their targets and misrepresenting factual information.” Rauhauser’s activities, exposed by Read and Tea Party activist Michelle Lessick (@ZapEm on Twitter), became known as “TwitterGate,” which I wrote about in October 2010:

Rauhauser has claimed that the TwitterGate accusations were a “smear” and a “paranoid delusion.” Claiming that Allen’s writings about Kimberlin were a “smear,” Rauhauser falsely asserted that Kimberlin “was cleared of” his criminal convictions “almost 20 years ago.”
The collaboration between Rauhauser and Kimberlin apparently began, sources say, because of Kimberlin’s use of his tax-exempt non-profit group Velvet Revolution (of which liberal blogger Brad Friedman is director) to attack the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the cybersecurity firm HBGary, alleging among other things that “Gary was hired . . . by the Chamber to infiltrate and destroy [Velvet Revolution] and its staff.”
HBGary’s Internet accounts were hacked by members of the “Anonymous” criminal conspiracy last year, and several members of the group (the so-called “LulzSec” hackers) have been indicted on felony charges. As I reported last week, federal officials are continuing to investigate the “Anonymous” conspiracy, and those sympathetic to “Anonymous” say they suspect that the group’s former public spokesman Barrett Brown may be one of the unindicted co-conspirators identified in court documents as providing evidence against the accused hackers. Since publishing my May 24 post about the “Anonymous” probe, I have been told that investigators have been working for “six to nine months” to “build evidence” against additional suspects in the hacking conspiracy.
Rauhauser is suspected of using the “@AnonyOps” Twitter account. On Tuesday, after the Maryland hearing where Walker was arrested — a hearing that Rauhauser reportedly attended — “@AnonyOps” posted a link to an image of Judge Vaughey’s ruling in the Kimberlin-Walker case:

The “@AnonyOps” Tweet was sent at 11:31 a.m. Tuesday, just half an hour after Judge Vaughey’s ruling was issued, and was re-Tweeted 12 minutes later by “@OccupyRebellion,” another Twitter account believed to be associated with Rauhauser and/or Kimberlin.
In February, Rauhauser posted an eight-page PDF document entitled “Andrew Breitbart’s ISR Cell?” The acronym “ISR” apparently refers to the military term “Intelligence, Security and Reconnaisance.” In that document, Rauhauser suggests that Breitbart was doing the bidding of HBGary, with Thomas Ryan of Berrico Technologies acting as a “cut out” between Breitbart and HBGary CEO Aaron Barr. This suspicion on Rauhauser’s part was apparently based on a single e-mail from Barr to Ryan — one of the thousands of e-mails that the “Anonymous” hackers stole from HBGary — in which Barr cited an October 2010 article about Brett Kimberlin by Breitbart.com contributor Mandy Nagy, written under her Internet pseudonym “Liberty Chick.”
In October 2011, Rauhauser described himself as doing “protective service work” for a client who is “the head of a Washington D.C. NGO” — a description that might fit Kimberlin, whose 501(c)3 Justice Through Music Project has collected about $1.8 million in contributions since its founding in 2005.
If indeed Kimberlin is now a “client” of Rauhauser, this would explain their evident collaboration in targeting Aaron Walker, Patrick Frey, Seth Allen, Mandy and other critics of Kimberlin for harassment and intimidation. Whether fees paid to Rauhauser involved the use of tax-exempt funds obtained by Kimberlin’s non-profit organizations, and whether such “protective service work” — which looks very much like an orchestrated effort to stifle First Amendment rights — would be legal under IRS regulations, remains to be determined.
It was Aaron Walker’s 28,000-word account of his ordeal with Kimberlin on May 17 that drew my attention to the case of Brett Kimberlin, the infamous “Speedway Bomber” terrorist who briefly gained notoriety in 1988 by claiming to have sold drugs to Republican Dan Quayle. While I had never heard of Kimberlin before May 17, the mention of Rauhauser in Walker’s account caught my eye because of Rauhauser’s previous involvement in the “TwitterGate” controversy and the fact that Rauhauser has worked for a number of Democrat candidates.

– Robert Stacy McCain, Whereabouts Unknown