Tuesday, August 11, 2020

Our reporting on Jeff Sessions, Bill Pryor, and other Alabama politicos made us a target for a Roger Stone cyber harassment campaign via fake Facebook pages


Roger Stone and Donald Trump
(Part 2)

(Click here for Part 1)

How did Legal Schnauzer land amidst Facebook's takedown of pages and accounts associated with Donald Trump ally and self-proclaimed GOP dirty trickster Roger Stone, a story that made global headlines last week?

Facebook released a report on July 8 about its internal investigation, titled "Removing Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior," focusing primarily on the size, scope, and fraudulent nature of the Stone network.

Sarah Jameson
 Last Friday, New York City-based Graphika, which uses artificial intelligence to analyze social media issued a followup report titled "Facebook's Roger Stone Takedown," which focused on how the Stone network operated, the messages it sent, and the people it targeted. Partially with help of search warrants from the Robert Mueller investigation, Graphika determined I was one of those targets. The report provides details about the barrage of nasty, profane comments and emails we began receiving around November 2016. Graphika shines light on just how crude and threatening Stone -- and perhaps other Trump allies -- can be, targeting Legal Schnauzer for what likely can best be described as a cyber harassment and cyber stalking campaign.

Graphika begins describing my experience with the Stone network on page 26 of the report, under the sub-heading "Harassing Behavior":

Harassing Behavior

Some of the network’s activity also suggests harassment or incitement to harassment, sometimes in a coordinated fashion. One such incident was attributed to the “Sarah Jameson” persona. According to legal blog “Legal Schnauzer” in January 2017, a persona with this name sent the blogger at least one “argumentative and ugly” email. A persona more broadly called “Sarah” sent many more messages. The blogger associated the emails with the Facebook account and included a copy of its profile picture.

What seemed to prompt rage-filled responses from the Stone surrogates?  I addressed that question in a post dated January 6, 2017:

Evidence in our spam folder here at Legal Schnauzer suggests a Donald Trump ally and former Richard Nixon dirty trickster somehow is involved in a series of harassing, profanity-filled e-mails we started receiving about seven weeks ago.

The ugly e-mails started around the middle of November after we wrote posts about two Alabamians -- Jeff Sessions (Trump's pick for U.S. attorney general) and Bill Pryor (a Sessions protege and likely Trump nominee for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court).

Were the nasty comments from Stone's network sparked only by our coverage of Sessions and Pryor? Oh, no. Other Alabama-related reports set them off, as I noted in a post dated December 15, 2016:

What were the nutty, creepy comments that we received after our recent reports on Donald Trump nominee Jeff Sessions and likely nominee Bill Pryor? Are the comments connected to longtime Trump ally Roger Stone, a frequent guest on the Alex Jones InfoWars show and admitted associate of the WikiLeaks operation that produced hacked e-mails from the Hillary Clinton campaign?

We will save that second question for another day? But we will dive right in on the first question and note that the deluge of comments, most of which I deleted or sent to spam, seem to come in several categories -- rants about the defamation lawsuit GOP operative Jessica Medeiros Garrison brought against me, rants about the first nude Bill Pryor photo (a second one is coming), rants about our reporting on "Luv Guv" Bentley and his adviser/mistress Rebekah Caldwell Mason, rants about alleged violations here of the Child Protection Act (related to the Pryor photo), bogus claims of e-mail communications with me, and harassing, profanity-filled tirades.

I ran a few of these comments and tried to engage the sender in fact or reason-based dialogue. It soon became apparent that was a waste of time.

We even received nasty comments related to our reports on the unlawful eviction that led Missouri deputies to break my wife Carol's arm. Not content to claim Carol somehow broke her own arm, the Stone bunch included wildly defamatory comments about Carol, even worse than what they said bout me. Of course, these people supported a "pussy grabber" for president, so it probably should be no surprise that they would attack a woman -- even one who had been the victim of police brutality.

Want a sampling of messages that appeared to come from the Stone network, along with my response, in a few cases? Here is one from the Graphika report:


The First Nude Bill Pryor Photograph (It's not him, it's not him!)
Trumpista (sent 11/25/16) -- "You can see what I've told you. Natural (hair) parts do not change over time by themselves. Pryor would have no reason to force a part change, the mid face is not the same, it's visible, measurable, and philtrums grow longer, not shorter with age. Pryor's ears are set higher. He has deviations in his nasal cartilage not visible in the pic of the adolescent nude. The nasal bridge and eye socket are different. You are a liar if you pretend measurable differences are not visible.

"You don't have anyone who investigated the photo on tape saying there was a finding that the picture was of him. You can't, because there was no such finding, and the picture is of someone else."

The Truth -- This person was asked to give her name, contact information, and any expertise upon which the claims are made. Of course, that information was not forthcoming. I have multiple law-enforcement officials and legal insiders -- some of them on tape -- stating that they were involved in an investigation of the Pryor photos when they first surfaced, they traced the photos to Monroe, Louisiana, (where Pryor went to college), and it is, in fact, the Bill Pryor who now is a federal judge. The commenter, by the way, has no answer for the fact that both the young and older Pryor have strabismus (crossed eyes) and attached ear lobes, relatively rare conditions.

We will present more samples, cited by Graphika, in an upcoming post.

(To be continued)

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