It's been quite amusing watching the Paul campaign try to handle the fallout from its staffer who got caught posing as a progressive on Daily Kos to dampen enthusiasm for Jack Conway's moneybomb yesterday.
This morning, Paul-ville released what they believed to have been exculpatory evidence: a comment submitted to their website by someone using the name of the concern troll staffer.
The Paul campaign discovered this when the same person appears to have submitted this ludicrous comment through their website's online form:
Your Name Tom Kubica
Email Tom@randpaul2010.com
Subject Replacement
Category Social Networking
Message I was discovered and banned at DailyKos. I suggest we immediately pull in all of our covert operatives. I'll need someone to replace me at Daily Kos as well.
The IP address associated with the comment, 38.97.124.170, locates the poster in Framingham, Mass. The real Kubica -- who goes, Howard said, by Thomas, not Tom -- is based in Bowling Green.
Of course, anybody could have submitted that comment (including Kubica himself, using IP spoofing or masking techniques), but Paul-ville argued it was proof that the concern troll must have been somebody from outside the campaign and that it cleared their campaign of any involvement. A Paul spokesman insisted to Huffington Post that it proved they were the victim.
"This phony," wrote Paul aide Gary Howard in an e-mail to the Huffington Post on Wednesday morning. "The person is not our intern, someone used our intern's info from his LinkedIn page to pose as him on Kos and post stuff. He even sent us an email through our website email form pretending to get 'caught' working for us."
Uh, yeah...that's real strong proof. Except, as I pointed out above, the web form submission tells us nothing. Anyone could have submitted that note. Moreover, Howard's assertion about somebody having used Kubica's LinkedIn page makes no sense -- Kubica's LinkedIn page had nothing to do with how we identified the user as Kubica. (However, it did lead us to connect him with the Rand Paul campaign.)
Here's the story in brief: we determined Kubica's identity because he registered at Daily Kos using the same e-mail address that he used to author an online petition. From there, we found his LinkedIn page, on which he stated his role with the Rand Paul campaign. We then verified his employment status with Paul's campaign.
And here's the longer version: the registration e-mail was pnkrck15@cox.net. We verified the authenticity of the address at the time of registration. In April, an online petition was posted using that e-mail address using the handle "TomKBert," and TomKbert is the handle Thomas Kubica uses on gmail. Moreover, Thomas Kubica was one of the 29 people who signed the petition on the same day it was created. (Those 29 people signed the petition within a span of 6 hours.) Just in case that doesn't make it clear, the petition called for a redesign of the Campaign for Liberty website (dubbed 'C4L' in the petition) -- and Kubica (including in his alternate handle of tkubic46) frequently touts Campaign for Liberty and 'C4L' (for example, here and here).
Despite this clear trail of evidence, the Paul campaign is standing by Kubica. I suppose that's their right -- Kubica didn't violate any laws, he just violated our community standards, and as a result was outed. And who knows? Maybe this will give his career in conservative politics a boost. After all, Karl Rove didn't exactly have a clean track record as a young political operative, and look where it got him.
As a final thought: remember that the concern troll's goal was to dampen enthusiasm for Jack Conway. The best way to get revenge: contribute to Conway's campaign.
Update: Shhh, keep this one quiet, don't let anybody know, but there's a new poll from CNN out today...and it shows the race all tied up at 46 each!