According to The LA Steel Show, which interviewed Brett Coleman Kimberlin in January 2008, "[He is] the man behind e-voting investigations of BradBlog.com and the investigative internet journal Raw Story.com."
According to Action Point, Kimberlin was a co-founder of Raw Story.
When I mentioned the connection made by The LA Steel Show on a now scrubbed article at Democratic Underground, a raw nerve was hit in Raw Story's Larisa Alexandrovna.
Putting that strange denial to the side, there is no doubt Alexandrovna and Kimberlin are closely linked. We have the blogger's own words confirming it.
Larisa posts as lala_rawraw at Democratic Underground. In October 2006 she peddled the idea that Brett Kimberlin was an exonerated ex-political prisoner, that he never set any bombs.
you know, you read this and you think you know... but I know Brett... and I know the story of his arrest and what really happened. he has been funding the voter fraud allegations, the afterdowningstreet people, etc... you simply don't know what you are talking about. oh, and he was also the same person who found Clint Curtis, and Diebthroat. wow, he must be a con man after all.....Well, when was Brett Kimberlin allegedly exonerated? According to Michael Jesse of The Indianapolis Star:
i wish this whole post could be deleted because the man has been through a great deal already....
I can only say that he was wrongly convicted, released, sued the government and won. As part of the agreement, he cannot discuss the particulars publicly. By the way, the real interest in those articles calling him a con man is that no one points out that he was the guy who - during the Regan/Quayle election, who came forward and blew the whistle on Dan's little drug problem... see, Brett sold him dope. I wonder why a guy who sued the government and won would suddenly be a con man? Swift boat anyone? ....
he was convicted wrongfully and he even served time for something he did not do while is attorneys fought the conviction... it was overturned, he was exhonirated, and then he sued and won!
he was put into jail because he was talking about Danny Quayle's drug habbit... welcome to Amerika....
i have not denied he sold pot, in fact i actually said so... oh boy, those evil post sellers. but you are right... a man who has spent the last 17 years of his life doing work on behalf of the American citizen should be locked up forever for having sold pot.....
he was wrongly convicted, jailed, served time and then won his case of a wrongful conviction and was exonerated. he sued the government and won. he has since used that money to pay for things like Rock the Vote, etc. the only "crime" he ever committed was that he sold weed when he was in his 20s....
i have an idea... given that as part of the agreement, he has not been allowed to discuss it, consider how someone sentenced to 51 years on terrorism charges is not in jail? how is it someone like this is simply let go and has a clean record on this original charge? ....
the Google pieces that appear are based on the journalists book, after he wet himself... it is a smear piece and it is not accurate for a reason... the journalist is trying to blame his shoddy reporting on his source.
Kimberlin was paroled in 1994 after serving about 13 years of his 50-year sentence. But when he made no effort to pay the DeLong judgment his parole was revoked in 1997 and he went back to prison for about four more years, released again in 2001.I guess the exoneration and compensation reward for false imprisonment was delivered sometime between 2001 and 2006. But we will never know because part of the agreement was the details could not be disclosed. [/rolling eyes]
On November 6, 2004, Kimberlin's Justice Through Music offered $100,000 to anyone who could prove the 2004 Presidential election was stolen. The offer jumped to $200,000 on November 16th.
According to this link, Justice Through Music offered the following advice.
Persons who want to make a tax-deductible contribution to this reward fund can do so through the secure PAYPAL donation button on the right. We want to provide the strongest incentive possible for people to come forward with substantial inside information, so make your donations generous. In the event no one meets the criteria for the reward, all funds donated to the reward fund shall be used to insure that all future votes are verifiable through a countable paper trail.According to centralops.net, velvetrevolution.us was registered on November 12, 2004.
The following is from Time Magazine's Wizard of Odd article:
The turning point for Kimberlin came with an idea to attract attention. Before the 2004 presidential election, he contacted the wealthy head of a foundation in Ohio who practiced transcendental meditation with Kimberlin's sister. After the vote, with a pledge from the benefactor, Kimberlin posted on justicethroughmusic.org a $100,000 reward for any evidence that the election had been stolen. And things took off. First, the reward attracted blogger Brad Friedman, who then co-founded the netroots voting-reform website VelvetRevolution.us with Kimberlin and serves as his face man. The reward attracted other donors (including a politically active relative of mine who last year introduced me to Kimberlin). And it produced several people who claimed to have information on problems with electronic voting. They were prominently displayed on Friedman's site, BradBlog.com. Leveraging his website's popularity, Kimberlin made contact with congressional staff members and other activists, launching coordinated netroots campaigns for the cause.Brad Friedman wrote that this blog entry was "fine coverage on how VR came about."
Blogger Brad Friedman (http://BradBlog.com) has joined forces with several other blogger and indy news sources to create http://velvetrevolution.us, which seems to be taking names and preparing for what they hope to be a grand collaboration between protest elements.Brett Kimberlin was never mentioned. The "other blogger and indy news sources" were not discussed. One can go through BradBlog archives tagged VelvetRevolution.us and see that Brett Kimberlin wasn't mentioned until May 31, 2007, approximately four months after the Time Magazine article was published.
Even then, Brad downplayed Brett's primary role in creating Velvet Revolution.
The activist, Brett Kimberlin, is a director at Justice Through Music, which is a co-founder, along with The BRAD BLOG of the Election and Media Reform organization, VelvetRevolution.us.Brad wrote:
Kimberlin was recently featured in an article by the Lonestar Iconoclast, George W. Bush's "hometown paper" in Crawford, Texas, after the release of his anti-war "Happy Springtime (Bush is Over)" song and video...which we highly recommend, by the way.Kimberlin isn't mentioned in the second link from the above paragraph.
Stacking the cards refers to a process by which not enough information is provided to readers in order to form their own opinions.
VR's co-founder becomes Justice Through Music rather than Speedway Bomber Brett Kimberlin. If you go to the RawStory link, you'll see a comment by Storm, an Op-Critical band member. You'll see a statement by Justice Through Music spokesman Craig Gillette. You won't see any mention of Kimberlin. In Brad's October 2007 piece More Dead Cause of Ohio, Velvet Revolution wasn't mentioned, as if he didn't want to associate Brett's name too much to VR.
The Lonestar Iconoclast Connection
The Lonestar Iconoclast link from above leads to a 404 error message. Yet we still have access to it through archive.org. Oopsies, now that leads to "Page cannot be crawled or displayed due to robots.txt."
The article was written by Nathan Diebenow, and he made a fascinating disclosure. Below is a screenshot I took from that article before it was blocked.
Kimberlin was also featured in another Diebenow piece written in December 2007 titled Plumbers 2.0 (Page cannot be crawled or displayed due to robots.txt).
"I believe this guy (Connell) is the equivalent of the Watergate plumbers. I mean, there are so many folks in the Bush administration that are former Nixonites like Cheney and Rumsfeld," said Kimberlin, referring to the break-in of the Democratic National Committee’s offices that lead to President Nixon’s resignation.The article also included this (emphasis mine):
"They have that mentality: ‘Nixon is a good guy. He got screwed over. The ends justify the means.’"
Right now, VR is sorting out the information they already have on Connell, but they are searching for more from his employees in order to "bring him to justice" through congressional hearings.
"We’ve found he’s really been involved in every major GOP election issue or scandal since at least 2000," said Brett Kimberlin, founder/president of VR, in an interview with the Iconoclast.On May 20, 2009, Bradblog informed its readers Diebenow got VR frontpage coverage. VR has a formula. They come up with various campaigns and then ask for donations. One of them was called Disbar Torture Lawyers.
The link to that Iconoclast article now leads to "Error 404 - Page Not Found." A while back I was able to locate the edition. It is also no longer available but a screenshot was taken of the front page.
The end of Diebenow's piece directed readers to RestoreJusticeAtJustice.com. That redirects to Velvet Revolution.
On a side note, at the bottom of the VR affiliate's front page an Eric May is referenced. He is basically a kooky conspiracy theorist with ties to anti-semitism. See CNN's Some suspect conspiracy in Holocaust Museum case.
In part 2 of Incestuous Relationships, we'll look more closely at the connections between Velvet Revolution and Raw Story.
Related Links (get out your checkbooks!):
Stop Domestic Terrorism
Standing For Voters
Standing For Voters' donation link currently redirects to Velvet Revolution's donation page, as does Indict Breitbart Dot Org.
www.StopTheChamber.com: A VelvetRevolution.us Campaign
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