Ron Paul Spambot Caper: Political Sabotage and Dirty Tricks?

Kurt Nimmo / TruthNews | December 6, 2007

As it turns out, the spambot unleashed back in October and blamed on Ron Paul supporters originated from a “criminal botnet of compromised computers run out of Ukraine,” according to SecureWorks, a company that specializes in information security.

“While the total count of Ron Paul spam messages that actually landed in peoples’ inboxes can’t be known, it certainly was received by millions of recipients,” writes security researcher Joe Stewart, in a SecureWorks report. “All this was done using around 3,000 bots.”

“There were 162,211,647 e-mail addresses targeted, Stewart writes though many were likely bad or outdated,” explains Wired. “Stewart’s detective work identified the botnet as part of a criminal operation in Eastern Europe called Reactor Mailer that offers spammers a convenient web interface to manage their illegal campaigns. The Ron Paul spam was managed by a spammer-for-hire who goes by the handle ‘nenastnyj’… The political messaging was a departure for nenastnyj, and for the Reactor Mailer network, which is normally hired out by scammers offering fake watches, work at home opportunity and male enlargement products.”

Who hired nenastnyj remains a mystery, along with his or her motives. The Ron Paul campaign has speculated that the spam might have been the work of a misguided supporter, or someone trying to make their candidate look bad.

And who would attempt to make Ron Paul look bad? Let’s hazard a guess… somebody high up in the Republican party, somebody who is worried about the establishment apple cart ending up end-over-end by the momentum of the Ron Paul revolution?

Can you say “Watergate”?

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“During their Watergate investigation, federal agents established that hundreds of thousands of dollars in Nixon campaign contributions had been set aside to pay for an extensive undercover campaign aimed at discrediting individual Democratic presidential candidates and disrupting their campaigns,” Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward wrote for the Washington Post back in 1972.

These “dirty tricks” included:

Following members of Democratic candidates’ families and assembling dossiers on their personal lives; forging letters and distributing them under the candidates’ letterheads; leaking false and manufactured items to the press; throwing campaign schedules into disarray; seizing confidential campaign files; and investigating the lives of dozens of Democratic campaign workers.

In addition, investigators said the activities included planting provocateurs in the ranks of organizations expected to demonstrate at the Republican and Democratic conventions; and investigating potential donors to the Nixon campaign before their contributions were solicited.

Such behavior was not uncommon, as COINTELPRO was in full-swing at the time.

It should be noted that “Karl Rove … pimped for Richard Nixon’s chief political dirty tricks strategist Donald Segretti,” according to Wayne Madsen. Segretti was convicted of distributing forged campaign literature and was sentenced to six months in prison. “One notable example of his wrong-doing was a faked letter on Democratic presidential candidate Edmund Muskie’s letterhead falsely alleging that U.S. Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a fellow Democrat, had had an illegitimate child with a 17-year-old,” explains Wikipedia.

Madsen continues:

Rove’s own tendency to be sick-minded originates with his mentor Segretti. The 2000 GOP primary was a chance for Rove to hone his skills in dirty tricks. His target then was Senator John McCain who appeared to be within striking distance of Dubya in South Carolina after the then-GOP maverick’s surprise upset victory in New Hampshire. Rove’s operation proceeded to target McCain with false stories: McCain was a stoolie for his captors in the Hanoi Hilton (this from a lunatic self-promoting Vietnam “veteran”); McCain fathered a black daughter out of wedlock (a despicable reference to McCain’s adopted Bangladeshi daughter); Cindy McCain’s drug “abuse”; and even McCain’s “homosexuality.” In the spirit of Segretti, Rove engineered a victory for Dubya but at the cost of trashing an honorable man and his family. Muskie, McGovern, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Hart, Tsongas, Clinton, Biden, Dole, Perot, and others had all seen the Segretti/Rove slash and burn tactics before….

Rove’s dirty fingerprints could also be seen in the Iowa Senate race between Tom Harkin and GOP candidate Greg Ganske. A few months ago, a story was leaked that the Harkin campaign had employed a spy within the Ganske campaign. To put this in a Rove context, we must go back to the 1986 Texas gubernatorial race in which Rove’s candidate Bill Clements was taking on Democratic Governor Mark White. Just before a debate between the two candidates, Rove spun the story that his office had been bugged. No proof. But the insinuation that White’s people had carried out the bugging was reported by the media. In the election, Clements defeated White. Rove stashed away more political capital into his already heavy knapsack of ill-gotten IOUs.

In other words, when it comes to attacking their own, Republicans are not shy, especially when the attackers suffer from the same sort of personality disorder Karl Rove obviously suffers from.

Of course, this is all speculation, as there is no evidence the Republicans arranged the spambot caper. On the other hand, cui bono comes into play. Include numerous corporate media attempts to discredit Ron Paul — the most disgusting to date coming from the Swanson frozen food baby, Tucker Carlson, who attempted to slime Paul by associating his support base to pimps and prostitutes — and in general under-report his achievements, if not skip reporting them altogether. And then there was the Glenn Beck attack, equating Paul’s supporters to anarchists and would-be Timothy McVeigh psychopaths, an effort that did not play out exactly as Beck wanted.

Obviously, the muckamucks in the Republican party are running scared from Ron Paul, thus it makes sense that somebody from their ranks plotted the spambot caper, now revealed to have originated from a criminal organization in Eastern Europe.

It will probably only be a matter of time — after the election, of course — that somebody connects the dots.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the corporate media to set the record straight.

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