A few days ago I posted Back After A Brief Hiatus — my first activity here on DailyKos in thirteen years. During that time I have faced four frivolous lawsuits from two different plaintiffs, both connected to some degree with the Breitbart operation.
I don’t know how thing work now, but back then there were a total of about a dozen instances where community writers had two diaries on the recommend list at the same time, and I think I was the only one to have accomplished that feat more than once. The third time it happened I got suspended due to manipulative behavior from one of the Breitbart toadies, so my return here makes me the rarest of rare birds.
I ran into Markos at a fund raiser for Lauren Windsor in San Francisco back in 2021. We had a long talk about the prior ten years, and after hearing the details he seemed a bit bemused, but he said it would be just fine if I registered again. I think the fund raiser was in August, and within a month one of my codefendants in the last remaining lawsuit, Rauhauser v. McGibney, had been murdered. The top suspect was Proud Boys counsel Jason Lee Van Dyke, and this came after the FBI previously broke up a previous assassination plot involving the Proud Boys against my attorney and the other defendant.
I didn’t feel much like calling attention to myself at the time, but things have changed since then. You might want to take a bathroom break and refresh your coffee, we’re gonna be here a while.
SWATGATE:
Frivolous lawsuits often come in pairs, one state and one federal. The first two I was named in were filed by a mentally ill attorney in Virginia who’d lost his job because he couldn’t stop obsessing about Brett Kimberlin, a longtime lefty activist in D.C.
Brett is one of the few people out there with a more ridiculous origin story than mine. He was convicted of a series of bombings in the late 1970s, based entirely on evidence collected via hypnosis. His brother had also been a suspect he committed suicide two years after Brett was incarcerated. There was a civil case against Brett and the final result was rather unexpected — an eighteen year prison sentence for the judge, who was charged with extortion for his handling of the case. That judicial criminality combined with Brett completing his paralegal training in prison led to his fifty year sentence ending after just thirteen years. His settlement with the DOJ is sealed and he owns a couple of houses on the Maryland side of suburban D.C.
I met Brett in 2012 when I was working on a white paper about the HBGary intrusion, which I described in some detail in Disinfodrome: Cybercrime & Influence Investigations. His was one of half a dozen NGOs targeted.
Jonathan Ossoff, Beth Becker & Neal Rauhauser
My work in this area led to Congressman Hank Johnson, joined by nineteen other House offices, calling for hearings on the matter.
The staffer who walked that study around gathering support has gone on to do some other political stuff. Here’s a picture of us together in the fall of 2011.
Anyway, a bunch of stuff happened,things kept escalating, and this included Breitbart Texas head Brandon Darby faking political swattings with various right wing characters, and trying to pin them on me. This video from June of 2012 pretty well destroyed that.
And at the end of 2012, the lawyer who had taken over handling the frivolous litigation on the east coast, Dan Backer, made a spectacular discovery error, sending me an entire mailbox full of their plotting, instead of the six pages that would have been responsive. That was the genesis of my OIG complaint against the Dallas FBI field office, which has continued to evolve over the years. There are goodies in there if you care to look, for example the federal court paperwork that got Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers fired by the FBI six months short of the minimum service required for a pension. He was running an informant who was framing union business agents … starting to see a theme here?
REALITY TV VERMIN:
I’m on the autism spectrum, in that place where I can’t stand commercials interrupting video storytelling. No, really, OJ Simpson was acquitted before I knew Johnny Cochran was black. I bought my first TV in my adult life at 35 … and attached it to a video conferencing system a client had given me.
So when I started hearing the name “Kate Gosselin” in late 2012, I assumed this was some failed red district House candidate or something. I eventually learned that after two normal births she’d had a whole litter. She wasn’t standing for any office, so I ignored her. But there were people around me who just could not.
James “Pissboy” McGibney, the informant the Dallas FBI field office directed at me after Brandon Darby failed, was a persistent little cockroach, and he was running cyberstalker ops for Gosselin. He finally filed a frivolous suit against me in Texas in February of 2014. He lived in California, I lived in Illinois, neither of us had ever lived in Texas, and two of the three other defendants also had no ties there. McGibney’s attorney on the case lived in Beaumont, 280 miles from the Tarrant county courthouse. The only thing that is there is … the Dallas FBI field office. Curious, no?
I didn’t know any of the other defendants when the suit was filed — because that’s part of how frivolous litigation works. The goal isn’t addressing a real controversy, they’re used to smear opponents, to launder conspiracy theories into the public record, and in my particular case as an effort to force me to appear in person in Texas.
Two of the defendants were grandmothers who’d had opinions about Gosselin’s parenting. The third was a fellow named Thomas Retzlaff, a convicted felon who sought to publicly intimidate others by broadcasting his association with the Aryan Brotherhood. I’d never heard of him till the suit was filed, I spoke to the man precisely once, in June of 2016 on a podcast after what was supposed to be the final hearing in the case, but Pissboy has spent the last decade fueling guilt by association, despite the fact the only connection between the two of us was the lawsuit he filed.
The attorney on my case, Jeff Dorrell, was the to 1st Amendment guy in the state of Texas, and he was responsible for striking down Texas anti-sodomy laws. McGibney found a picture of Jeff with his mother on a lake cruise in the Houston area. They cropped the photo so his mom wasn’t visible, but a young Asian boy with another party on the cruise was. This was PROOF that Jeff “had a taste for hairless boys”, and they spent years smearing him. I didn’t care for this, but it was good for me — Jeff hung in on the case far longer than he otherwise would have.
Jeff died of natural causes on August 21st of 2021. Tom Retzlaff was murdered on September 1st. The lawyer on the companion frivolous federal suit in California, Jay Leiderman, died of a heart attack on September 7th. Leiderman was a clumsy litigator and he had procedurally mooted the case against me in the winter of 2014, but he and McGibney still associated.
AVOIDING FRIVOLITY:
OK, so now you know a bit about what I have faced in this area. Here are some things activists need to watch for before there’s court paperwork.
- Activists groups will have vulnerable individuals in them. Social media is an adult day care for individuals with psych conditions that have worn out their family and friends. Bipolar and OCD among those who are institutional memory for groups is really common — the world is run by those who show up. This is fine … until a group does something extraordinarily effective.
- Infiltration is the eternal problem, the right has budgets 10x the size of the left, they can literally employ long term players to just act like they’re activists, gathering information that is then used at the worst possible moment. If your group is at all effective, you’ve been psych profiled and there’s a plan for how to wreck your efforts.
- The greater part of being effective comes down to ignoring things that are engaging, urgent, but at best useless. Endless efforts hunting nuisance personas that have never been tied to a specific individual, or who are tied to people who are functionally irrelevant, are the things I immediately avoid. All this does it burn up time, wind people up, create opportunity for bullshit controversies to damage working groups, etc.
I’ve re-written this section three times. There’s just no nice way to say it, dirty pool is the rule, the American right and their numerous allies in law enforcement all behave like Hitler youth. The sleazier they are in their dealings, the more highly regarded they become.
I self described as an activist for many years, and I was puzzled and irritated by the think tank folks in D.C. that would not engage. Now, for better or worse, I’ve become one of those people, and NoDAPL is what drove me to it. Those people got hit with a frivolous lawsuit from the pipeline company. I called Jeff Dorrell, described what I saw, and he said “Absolutely, we’ll own that pipeline company when we’re done.” I came at it three or four different ways, and never got a response from the NoDAPL crew. They never invoked the TCPA, got crushed in court and that the loss was completely unnecessary just crushed my spirit.
OBTAINING LEGAL COUNSEL:
How does a chronically ill man with no fixed address get the best 1st Amendment lawyer in the state? Well … I’ve been extraordinarily effective in all sorts of things, using little to nothing in the way of resources to do so, and this was just another “hack” — I spent an afternoon looking around after the suit was filed and there was what looked to me like a hundred million candlepower flare marking the way.
I just … I see things in ways other do not.
If you find yourself in trouble, it’s the hardest thing in the world, but you need to unplug while you react, then come back later and work on how you respond. If you just can’t do this, for whatever reason, you need someone in your corner who can. And then you have to find a lawyer who will take your case, either on principle, which is why I have the support I do in Texas, or because they see a path to recovery, which is what would have happened for those NoDAPL ninnies, had they simply answered the phone.
I’ve gotten a bit wiser over the years. I stopped taking walk on talent for anything I do in 2021. Today my circles are reporters, researchers at NGOs, retired mil/intel veterans … and as many lawyers as are willing to engage.
Having problems with the Dallas FBI field office, I contrived a way to spend a couple years working for the federal public defenders.
Having a fancy document search setup in Disinfodrome, I found something interesting a year or so ago and made sure it got to The 65 Project.
There are a number of organizations that formed after the Capitol Siege — like Lawyers Defending American Democracy, or the ABA Task Force for American Democracy.
Again, how does a non-lawyer like me gain access to such things?
“I’ve got a precedent setting 1st Amendment case with my name on it” goes a long way towards opening doors in this area. That’s enough to get me sixty seconds for an elevator pitch, and it works far more often than not.
After the second appeal in Rauhauser v. McGibney, Pissboy started sniveling about “reverse lawfare”. This was a conspiracy theory based on the notion that I had intentionally baited him into filing malicious police reports and two frivolous lawsuits. That is prima facie stupidity, but I think I’ve conclusively demonstrated that I am nothing if not a patient ambush predator. I’ve been on right wing extremism for the last fifteen years and I’ve spent ten of those years pondering how to school the next frivolous plaintiff that appears.
Some people do talk a lot online, but nobody has been foolish enough to try.
That being said ...
PROFFER:
Having brought home that gold belt buckle from a couple rodeos, I MAY be available to advise someone who ends up on the receiving end of a SLAPP suit.
These are my expectations:
- I have no interest in whatever burning social issue you thought you were influencing and will not be joining your mailing list, Discord, etc.
- I communicate with identifiable individuals named in frivolous litigation for the purpose of locating counsel and I prefer Signal for this.
- Once counsel is established I MAY do other things, but only if I’m properly engaged and the work product is protected by attorney client privilege.
- The nature of the things I do tend to be assisting an expert witness who can pass a Daubert hearing in the area in question, and as such my name never shows up in court filings.
- Mutual discretion is mandatory; during litigation I never mention your case, and you never mention my name. There may be cause to share details after the conclusion of a case, but this requires a discussion between us leading to mutual agreement.
- Initial Consultation is pro bono. I have received a lot of assistance along the way and I pay it forward. If there’s actual work it’s nice to have the $30/month cost of a phone dedicated to the job covered. It may be prudent to acquire a laptop for the case, these are typically sub-$500 used Dells.
So there you have it. Make initial contact via DM, send me a Signal number, and we’ll see if you can benefit from some of the slogging I’ve had to do. I make no promises, but at the very least you will leave knowing some “ground truth” on SLAPP suits.
