Anonymous hacktivist group has emails from GOP thugs who conspired to have me arrested and thrown in jail for reporting accurately on Alabama corruption

Anonymous

Members of the Anonymous international hacktivist group possess copies of emails that prove who was behind my 2013 "arrest for blogging" and five-month incarceration in Shelby County, Alabama, according to a veteran state political insider. The source also says Claud Neilson, the crooked judge who ordered my arrest, quickly started looking for ways to release me, out of concern that I might be killed or hurt while in jail.

Jill Simpson, a whistle blower on corruption in the Don Siegelman case, writes in a recent Facebook post that a member of Anonymous contacted her and said the emails show my reporting on various GOP bad actors -- likely including Jeff Sessions, Rob Riley, Bob Riley, Luther Strange, Jessica Medeiros Garrison, Liberty Duke, and more -- was accurate. That, of course, does not surprise me, but the claim Anonymous possesses emails about my arrest is a surprise -- one with all kinds of implications.

For one, it means Rob Riley and Jessica Garrison filed their defamation lawsuits against me with zero grounds for doing so. That means they should lose their law licenses (perhaps permanently) -- as should other members of the Riley Jackson Law Firm -- and be on the hook for extensive civil damages. Two, the emails likely provide indisputable proof of a criminal conspiracy to kidnap me -- which could land the conspirators in prison for a lengthy spell.

Simpson refers to the Sessions-Riley branch of GOP criminals as "The Alabama Gang," and she explains how she came to learn about their internal communications about a scheme to silence a troublesome journalist, yours truly. Writes Simpson:

I heard . . . from a guy I had never heard of before who said he was a member of the group of Anonymous and they had restored all of Shuler's stuff on a server in India,  where it all remains up to this day from what I understand. Rob (Riley), I heard, got really mad, blaming Roger and myself for Anonymous doing this but we had nothing to do with it, which is one of the reason they went so hard after me on that deal. 

From what the individual with Anonymous said, who called me anonymously, they did not like folks who force journalists to remove true pieces about them from the Web and were putting the truth right back up again, in India, about Rob and Luther. I said, "How do you know it is true?" And then is when I was told, "We have all of the emails of the Alabama Gang." Apparently, Anonymous had been watching them for some time, as that is what I was told. The guy said if either Riley ever runs, we release (the emails) . . . and he said we read them for fun every so often.

Long-time readers might recall a controversy shortly after my release from jail where Legal Schnauzer content about the Rob Riley-Liberty Duke affair appeared at a Web site based in India. Now we know Anonymous was behind that.

Rob and Bob Riley

Claud Neilson, it turns out, was not comfortable being part of a scheme to have me kidnapped and thrown in jail. Writes Simpson:

As for Claud Neilson it is well known to the Alabama Resistance that he was manipulated by the Riley bunch. During the middle of Roger being jailed and after my shaming Religious-Right Republicans for doing the Riley's dirty work against Roger, with an article I did for OpEd News, where I pointed before anyone else that Roger was being held illegally as the only U.S. journalist imprisoned for outing public corruption. I heard from a member of the Religious Right who told me the Riley-Strange bunch had forced this upon folks like Neilson, this deal with Roger. They told me Mr. Neilson wanted an excuse to let Roger go, as he was afraid Roger would get killed after some guy sky dived off his bed next to Roger -- and Neilson was afraid he would be blamed if Roger was hurt. I was told by several religious right folks that they knew this gang of thugs led by Rob (Riley) and (Montgomery lawyer Baron) Coleman might cause Roger to get killed,  and we the progressive left, if we could get Roger's wife to take it down even for a day,  they would let him go and give him back to us and never put him back in no matter what. (The Religious Right folks) recognized what had happen. So as many of you all know I got Andy Kreig to come to Alabama, who I turned to for help to talk to Carol, as she refused to take it down (because) it was true.

[Note: Neither Carol nor I wanted to have it taken down, and I told her via jailhouse phone not to take it down. Two reasons: (1) I knew my reporting was accurate; (2) We knew my arrest was unconstitutional.]

The impact of Alabama's crooked GOP goes well beyond the state borders. Donald Trump and his associates, Simpson writes, can thank Alabama-connected slimers, such as Sessions, Riley, Strange, Garrison, Tripp Vickers (Alabama State Bar), and Ali Akbar (with his Montgomery lawyer, Baron Coleman), for their headaches with the Mueller investigation. It started, Simpson says, in part from efforts to expose Republican corruption in Alabama. In fact, Simpson notes that Ali Akbar threatened her one day after I wrote about Jessica Garrison's sweetheart deal on a $400,000 house in Mountain Brook:

Y'all will see Roger's time line in this piece, which coincides with my time line, as the next day after he ran the Jessica Garrison piece is when Ali Akbar threatened me -- he and his lawyer buddies in Alabama were going to get me shortly. After that is when Stacy McCain (another National Blogger Club member) called my boyfriend, now husband Jim, and said they were going to get me, with Ali's lawyer who happened to be Baron Coleman, the former law-office mate of Tripp Vickers who did all the meaness to me of getting me placed on disability with the Alabama State Bar due to my missing a hearing awaiting surgery for a broken neck with a doctor excuse. 

Looking back, it was awful what they did to both me and Shuler, but I believe it made all of us, our spouses included, more determined than ever to out how corrupt the whole GOP operation is. 

When Trump thinks about his investigation, he should thank those in the Alabama Gang who basically pushed us so far we outed it all, and the Trump bunch should thank them for stupidly running their mouths on what they were doing. With Trump, we tracked their whole weapons-grade propaganda machine, run by Russians and British operatives like Cambridge Analytica, because of folks like Ali and Coleman and Bannon and Rob . If Coleman and Ali -- with Riley and Strange and their buddy Vickers -- had not done what they did, then Trump probably would never have had his whole operation tracked.