The more I dug into Brett Kimberlin’s background the more suspicious I became. See, Kimberlin was convicted of the bombing primarily on the testimony of witnesses under hypnosis. Yep, it was during that decade or so when hypnotic testimony was all the rage, before enough skeptics asked for proof and showed the massive problems.

This doesn’t mean he was innocent. And he was convicted. But followup appeals after hypnotic testimony was debunked were denied because it was moot - Kimberlin had been released.

On to the more current issue. See, it all starts with James O’Keefe and Andrew Breitbart.

Back in July of 2010, the non-profit organization Velvet Revolution submitted an official request to the Maryland Attorney General, that O’Keefe, Giles, and Breitbart be prosecuted for violating wiretap laws for their actions in the ACORN tapes. As you may have heard, Breitbart went nuts. As part of their investigation and preparation for counter-attack they discovered that Brett Kimberlin was associated with the organization. He was friend and frequent associate with one of the two officers, is alleged to have helped found it, and had a financial connection. Specifically, he had loaned it $4,500. (fwiw, the various bloggers misread the form and say the loan goes the other way. Nope.)

The first mud flew in a Breitbart article [breitbart link] written by Mandy Nagy aka liberty chick. It was a wholehearted slam of Brett Kimberlin. It is a masterpiece of the style, telling the truth but not all the truth, clearly but subtly identifying opinion, and choosing words that have many semantic cues.

Kimberlin threatened to sue. And in fact did so, though the suit wound up going nowhere.

Where things turned frustrating for the right, however, is when Frey (patterico) and Walker (Aaron Worthing) and Stacy McCain became involved. See, they crossed the line. The suits Kimberlin brought against them for their posts were not dismissed.

What really made it ugly was the physical incident between Walker and Kimberlin. Keeping to just the facts as recorded by camera and independent testimony, Walker approached Kimberlin and seized Kimberlin’s ipad. There may have been shoving and punching but the camera view isn’t clear enough to tell. When the court officials moved in and separated, Walker surrendered Kimberlin’s ipad, asking the officials to delete all the files on it. The officials did not do so and returned it to Kimberlin.

Walker claims that’s all he did, and he did it because Kimberlin was taking photos even when asked not to do so. Kimberlin amended a suit claiming physical damages, which he backed with a belated medical report. (in other words the damages could have occurred later.)

Now, Kimberlin is… not a good person. He’s like a lot of convicts with whom I worked in prison, and very fond of nuisance lawsuits over a variety of reasons. As one semi-infamous example, in 1999 he sued Orrin Hatch (among others) for undue influence against his parole.
[As an informative digression, while the charge was dismissed the uncontested facts included that Hatch did speak to the parole board about Kimberlin’s then-upcoming parole which was subsequently denied. The element that was dismissed was “undue influence”.]

Anyway, Kimberlin is fond of what’s commonly called lawfare, throwing nuisance suits by the hundreds. So it becomes easy to dismiss him without even paying attention to any of the rest of the facts. But as I’ve already noted, in this case the other side is far from pure.

To summarize in conclusion: Breitbart supporters are engaged in mudslinging and lawfare with the founder of one of the organizations that requested charges for the ACORN videos. Neither side has people I want to consider friend or ally, but in this case Kimberlin’s got a bit more “right” than the right.