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Internet Attack on Website Consistent With Dirty Tricks

Back in the halcyon Nixon days, we learned of a set of political dirty tricks that were known as “Ratfucking” – a term made famous by Watergate journalists Woodward & Bernstein’s book “All the President’s Men”:

Ratfucking” was a term used by Richard Nixon‘s campaign insiders to describe electoral fraud and dirty tricks they used against their opponents. The term was coined by political operative Don Segretti, who claimed it had come from his college days when he stuffed ballot boxes for student government candidates. Segretti was hired by the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP) to work his ratfucking magic for Nixon in the 1972 elections and funded by laundered money coming in through CREEP slush funds. Segretti and a number of other ratfuckers worked from CREEP to destroy the campaigns of Democratic opponents. Their methods included distributing faked letter and press releases, astroturfing “activists” and “protestors,” disrupting political conferences using the old “order a hundred pizzas in someone else’s name” trick, vote contracting (literally paying people for votes), espionage tactics, and general dickery. One of the ratfuckers happened to be Karl Rove, who was the head of the College Republicans at the time (they teach ’em early).

The most infamous incident related to the ratfucking techniques, besides the Watergate break-in itself, was the release of the “Muskie letters.” CREEP members had gotten hold of Senator Edmund Muskie’s letterhead and started “leaking” letters ostensibly addressed to other Democrats insulting various other Congressmen. One of the Muskie letters, called the “Canuck letter,” implied that Muskie was bigoted toward Americans of French–Canadian descent (Muskie was from Maine). This FUDcampaign reached its heights right in the middle of the 1972 primaries and Muskie’s campaign imploded after his speech denying his authorship of the letters. The Muskie letters were ultimately the starting point that led Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward to begin to unravel the Nixon campaign’s ratfucking methods and uncover the Watergate break-in.

I was reminded of this during the legislative investigation hearings on Gov. Christie’s Bridgegate scandal.

Specifically, during last year’s hearings, a story emerged that David Wildstein had purchased and registered internet domain names with Christie’s Gubernatorial challenger, Democratic Senator Barbara Buono’s name.

WNYC broke the story and reported:

A former Port Authority official who allegedly ordered the mysterious lane closures at the George Washington Bridge has purchased over 50 internet domain names, including those of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s top appointee at the Port Authority and a board member appointed by Cuomo. (The list is at the end of this post.) …

Many of domain names David Wildstein purchased revolve around New Jersey Democrats. Barbara Buono was New Jersey Governor Christie’s democratic opponent in last month’s gubernatorial race, and Milly Silva was her running mate. Fulop2017.com presumably refers to the current mayor of Jersey City, and Bob Sommer is one of Fulop’s advisors. Wildstein also purchased the name of the New Jersey Record reporter who first had the story – Shawn Boburg. Governor Christie’s team is denying any knowledge of the domain name, and Wildstein hasn’t commented.

Given  Wildstein’s history as anonymous blogger Wally Edge, at the time I linked that Wildstein revelation specifically to Nixon’s “ratfucking” operations. I wrote:

• Vindictive Abuse of Power Is Governor Christie’s MO (scroll down and read Update #1).

Well, given recent highly unusual experiences, it is possible that I’ve been a victim of a Christie “ratfucking” operation. Here’s why.

I recently began submitting harshly critical comments, with links to my blog posts, on various Christie 2016 Presidential campaign news stories.

Shortly thereafter, the internet host for my blog was forced to shut down my website because it had come under what appeared to be a sophisticated and massive attack by bots and thousands of internet IP addresses located around the world.

My site was crashed for awhile –

After it was restored, all seemed to be well, until I started getting emails from friends saying they could not register or comment on the blog.

I then noticed that a Google gmail account I had set up to receive email notifications from the blog had been inundated with thousands of user registrations, and that they were pouring in at a rate of about 1 every 2 seconds.

Because I didn’t use this Google gmail account, I just ignored it.

Well, yesterday I got another notice from my website host – and, for the first time ever, a bill for excessive bandwidth use.

It seems that during the month of May 2015, my website had been jammed with over 500,000 fake user access and registration attempts from all over the world.

This attack essentially blocked my site and threatens to shut it down.

Could this be a Christie campaign “ratfucking” operation?