Who Is Brett Kimberlin And Why Should You Care?
SPECIAL
Progressive organizations are essentially funding convicted bomber Brett Kimberlin's attacks on right-leaning bloggers.
The Democratic Party is the party of tolerance. We are told this
with regularity. After all, the party tolerates — promotes, actually —
deviant lifestyles, the murder of babies in the womb, legalized theft by
government, general sloth by the populace, terrorists, big government,
coercion, mob violence and thuggishness (workers unions), central
planning (socialism and Marxism), and crony capitalism (which is
essentially fascism).
What it doesn’t tolerate is free speech. In fact, it goes to great
lengths — even engaging in criminal activity — and great expense to
ensure that dissenting views are squelched, particularly the views from
the right. And that’s where Brett Kimberlin comes in.
Kimberlin is a Democratic Party operative. But he has a very sordid
past. He partners with Brad Friedman — a liberal blogger — in two
leftist nonprofit organizations:
The Velvet Revolution and the
Justice Through Music Project (JTMP). He’s also an associate — self-described — of
Daily Kos contributor and Democrat operative Neal Rauhauser.
Kimberlin has made a habit — really more of a career — of attacking
right-leaning bloggers. He does this by abusing the court system, filing
false charges, committing perjury, harassing and intimidating family
members, invading privacy, making veiled threats, and intimidating
workers in the workplace. Bloggers Aaron Walker (who originally blogged
as
Aaron Worthington),
Patterico,
Liberty Chick and
Robert Stacy McCain have all been targeted by Kimberlin.
The Back Story
In the mid-1970s, Kimberlin, then in his early 20s, took up with an
Indiana woman named Sandra Barton. According to Mark Singer in his book
Citizen K: The Deeply Weird American Journey of Brett Kimberlin,
Kimberlin began to show more than a passing — most people would say
unhealthy — interest in Barton’s 10-year-old daughter, Jessica. For
three consecutive summers, 1974-1976, Kimberlin took Jessica on extended
vacations to Disney World, Mexico and Hawaii without Sandra’s
attendance.
Kimberlin began to introduce Jessica to friends as his
girlfriend, claiming their relationship was chaste and he was waiting
for her to become old enough to marry.
By 1978, Sandra’s mother, Julia Scyphers, began voicing her concerns
about the nature of the relationship between Kimberlin and young
Jessica. According to reports, several verbal altercations occurred
between Scyphers and Kimberlin over the issue. On July 29, 1978,
Scyphers
answered a knock on her door. A man she did not know inquired about
items she had recently tried to sell. She took the man into the garage
to show him the items, and the man shot her in the head.
As police began investigating the murder, their attention was drawn
to a suspect who was an associate of Kimberlin – and, therefore, to
Kimberlin himself — in a murder-for-hire scheme. Shortly thereafter,
bombs began going off in Speedway, Ind., the community in which Scyphers
lived. Eight bombs exploded over six days. No one was killed in the
bombings, but a man named Carl DeLong was seriously injured when a gym
bag he found in the parking lot outside Speedway High School exploded.
The blast tore off his lower right leg and two fingers, injured his left
leg and embedded shrapnel in his abdomen. Bomb fragments also injured
his wife Sandra.
After three trials, Kimberlin was convicted of the Speedway bombings.
A jury found him guilty on 33 separate charges. Included in these were
illegal use of Department of Defense insignia and illegal use of the
Presidential Seal: documents he forged and used to help obtain the
explosives used in the bombs. He was also convicted of perjury and
conspiracy to traffic marijuana.
No one was ever convicted in the Scyphers murder, but police
speculated that Kimberlin used the bomb spree to draw police off the
murder investigation. Kimberlin associate William Bowman was arrested on
suspicion of murder, but police let him go when Scyphers’ husband Fred —
who claimed to have gotten a glimpse of Bowman in the front yard on the
day of his wife’s murder — died of cancer two weeks after Bowman’s
arrest. The murder remains unsolved.
While Kimberlin was in prison, DeLong committed suicide in 1983 after
becoming despondent over the extent of his injuries. Sandra DeLong sued
Kimberlin and won a $1.6 million judgment in civil court.
In 1988, Kimberlin became a national figure when he claimed he’d once
sold marijuana to Indiana Senator Dan Quayle, then a candidate for Vice
President. Kimberlin never provided any evidence to bolster his claim,
and Quayle denied it ever happened.
After serving about 13 years of his 50-year sentence, Kimberlin was
paroled in 1994. When he failed to make an effort to pay the civil
judgment to Sandra DeLong, Kimberlin’s parole was revoked. He remained
in prison until 2001.
In 2005, Kimberlin formed JTMP as a 501(c)3 nonprofit. He quickly
began receiving donations from the George Soros-backed Tides Foundation,
which provides most of the funding for the left-wing hate site Media
Matters; the Barbra Streisand Foundation; and Heinz Family Foundation,
led by Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.). Other
listed
funders
are the Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift, Schwab Charitable Fund,
Threshold Foundation and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
The nonprofits are Kimberlin’s lone known source of income. So those
organizations are essentially funding Kimberlin’s attacks on the
right-leaning blogosphere.
Aaron’s Story
Aaron Walker’s story is so long and convoluted that 10,000 words
wouldn’t do it justice, so my brief summation won’t either. Walker
described it in detail
here.
Prepare for a couple of hours of uninterrupted reading if you want to
read it all. He bolsters his account with police reports, court filings,
copies of emails and surveillance video.
In short, while blogging as Worthington in 2010, Walker learned of
Kimberlin’s story through Patterico (real name J. Patrick Frey).
Patterico and Liberty Chick on Breitbart.com wrote about Kimberlin’s
efforts (through Velvet Revolution) to have James O’Keefe and Hanna
Giles prosecuted for their operation
exposing ACORN as a criminal enterprise. (The articles resulted in Kimberlin threatening to sue Frey for libel and other perceived slights.)
At the time, Walker was also following a case in which Kimberlin had
sued a blogger named Seth Allen in Maryland for defamation. In the
claim, Kimberlin attributed statements to Allen that Allen had not made.
A default judgment was issued against Allen. Allen asked Walker, an
attorney, for help with his case, so Walker provided free, brief legal
advice to Allen. He did not represent Allen because he is not licensed
to practice in Maryland.
When Kimberlin learned that Walker had assisted Allen, Walker became
the target of Kimberlin’s ire. At this time, Kimberlin only knew Walker
as Aaron Worthington, so he filed court documents to try to learn
Worthington’s real name. Walker did not want it made public for a number
of reasons. Kimberlin also went after an attorney named Beth Kingsley
who Walker had retained to handle another matter for him. In an email to
Kingsley, which Kimberlin asked her not to share with Walker, Kimberlin
made veiled threats to Kingsley’s livelihood and threatened to file
ethics charges against her. Then he proposed a settlement that involved
publicly identifying Walker as the person behind the Worthington
persona.
In the settlement offer, Kimberlin also threatened to file criminal
stalking charges against Walker, although the sum total of Walker’s ever
having mentioned Kimberlin in his writing prior to Kimberlin’s court
filings consisted of one paragraph in one article about the Allen case
in which he mentioned Kimberlin’s bombing conviction.
However, once Kimberlin directed his thuggish behavior at Walker, Walker began writing about it.
On Jan. 9, Walker went to court in Maryland in response to
Kimberlin’s court filings in the Allen case. Walker represented himself
in an effort to have court documents revealing his identity sealed and,
he hoped, have Kimberlin sanctioned by the court for his behavior.
Walker says the judge was irritated because Allen failed to appear
and had little patience for what he viewed as a squabble between two
people that didn’t concern the case. So Walker got little satisfaction
from the courtroom. After the case was over, Walker gathered up his
things and began to leave and found himself right behind Kimberlin.
After they exchanged a few words, Kimberlin turned and raised his
iPad. Walker said he did not know whether Kimberlin was trying to strike
him or take his photograph, but he instinctively grabbed the iPad away
from Kimberlin and refused to give it back. Police were called; Walker
gave the iPad to them; they gave it back to Kimberlin.
That afternoon, Kimberlin filed a criminal assault complaint against Walker. He alleged that Walker:
attacked me physically while exiting the courtroom. He
hit me on the shoulder and chest and pushed me, and grabbed my iPad away
from me and refused to return it. Mr. Walker has been harassing me and
stalking me online for months, and as we were exiting the Courthouse /
Room 5 / Floor 9, he said he was going to continue harassing me, and as
we left the courtroom, he grabbed my iPad, hit me in the face, shoulder
and chest and wrestled the iPad away from me. Several people witness
[sic] this event and the police were immediately called. They got my
iPad back and safely escorted me from the building. Mr. Walker tried to
come at me several more times but was restrained.
On the night of their altercation in the judicial building, Kimberlin
exchanged emails with Walker’s former attorney telling her, in essence,
that he would file additional charges against Walker if Walker
continued to write about him. He also contacted Neal Rauhauser
(mentioned earlier) who wrote about the incident, casting Kimberlin as a
victim. He sent two more emails that night to Walker that Walker
considered threatening, extortionate and defamatory.
Over the course of the next several weeks, Kimberlin filed a lot of
paperwork with the court system alleging all sorts of grievances on him
by Walker, including assault charges over the altercation. He also
obtained a peace (restraining) order prohibiting contact by Walker,
though Walker had never contacted Kimberlin except in response to court
filings. The fallout of all this was that Walker was suspended without
pay by his company because the company president feared that Kimberlin —
a convicted bomber — might bomb the company. Walker’s wife, who worked
for the same company, was also suspended without pay.
On May 17, Walker wrote his long article about his dealings with
Kimberlin. On May 19, Kimberlin went to court and obtained another peace
order against Walker. Walker continued to write about Kimberlin; and on
May 29, when Walker went to a Maryland courtroom, he was arrested for
violating the peace order. In essence, Walker was arrested for writing
articles about a public figure: a clear violation of Walker’s 1
st Amendment rights.
As mentioned earlier, Walker is not alone in his dealings with
Kimberlin. Frey and Liberty Chick have been threatened with lawsuits.
Frey claims that someone called police, gave Frey’s address and said he
had shot someone, causing police to show up at his house with guns
drawn. This practice, called “swatting,” is becoming a prevalent tactic
the left is using against right-leaning writers and bloggers.
Circumstantial evidence points to Kimberlin.
Michelle Malkin writes
that Frey has told her the entire story of his dealings with Kimberlin
and “his plight will send chills up your spine when he’s ready to tell
it.”
He has also received
threatening tweets from a man named Ron Brynaert, an associate of Kimberlin.
Robert Stacy McCain claims he was forced to take his family and flee his home as a result of threats from Kimberlin.
What Is It With Democrats And Terrorists?
The left’s embracing — and funding — of convicted domestic terrorist
Kimberlin is eerily similar to its embracing of convicted bomber Bill
Ayers.
Ayers groomed President Barack Obama and launched his political
career. Yet his association with a man who, as part of the Weathermen
Underground, set off numerous bombs — including one that may have killed
a San Francisco police officer — has not hurt Obama’s standing in the
least.
In the
2010 election,
a number of Democratic candidates used Rauhauser’s firm to help with
their social media efforts. Rauhauser also hired a number of people to
tweet
libelous and vulgar tweets about
Tea Party activities during the height of the Tea Party’s activities.
The progressives’ ideas of bigger government, more spending and “hope
and change” can’t stand up to arguments against smaller government and
liberty. So the leftists resort to thuggery, intimidation and the courts
to silence their detractors. But right-leaning writers (
joined by some on the left) see Kimberlin’s attacks for what they are: an assault on free speech — and, therefore, freedom itself.
That the left and Democrats would even embrace convicted domestic
terrorists like Kimberlin and Ayers — and, in fact, invite them into
their inner circle and encourage their tactics — demonstrates that the
progressives who have taken over the party are true enemies of America.
Iran, which has denied clandestinely developing nuclear weapons
technology, is now bragging its nuclear achievements have brought power
and prestige to the Islamic world.
