This is absurd. I called Suellentrop, who is a friend, for insight. He just laughed when I mentioned the HRC speculation. He'd gotten the story from an e-mail tipster who did not ask that his identity be held secret. "I strongly believe that the all-caps e-mail I received about this is not from the HRC campaign," he told me. Chris and I talked, and then he and his source talked, and the upshot was that his source is happy to go on the record about being his source.
The man's name is Floyd Schneider. According to records maintained at FEC.gov, he has never donated to a political candidate. But he was the subject of a 2900-word BusinessWeek story in 2002 called "The Revenge of the Investor" that described him as a "citizen investor" who "turned the powerful information resources of the Internet against interconnected networks of promoters who use the Net to peddle stocks." He's quoted in The New York Post's story, and has apparently had a beef with Armstrong since the late 1990s:
Floyd Schneider, a New Jersey mortgage broker and investigator of penny-stock scams, said he was a repeated target of Armstrong's attacks because he criticized the finances and business models of firms Armstrong supported.The funny thing about this little micro-scandal is that it mirrors the exact same dynamic as the micro-controversy over the outing of Daily Kos front-page diarist Armando. The original culprit in that story was a fellow Kossak calling himself "jiggy flunknut" whom Armando had gone after full-bore after the Kossak posted a poorly-sourced item about the alleged upcoming indictment of Karl Rove; jiggy flunknut's item then became the basis for a larger media story in National Review Online. That's the thing about the 'sphere: The people most likely to want to take bloggers down are not campaign hacks, who have bigger fish to fry, but all the little people who feel dissed or screwed by the big boys along the way."[Armstrong] was among the nastiest and ugliest stock touts from that era," said Schneider. "The stocks he touted were dogs and rigged, so it makes sense that he had a deal with promoters."
UPDATE: Boy, this Schneider fellow seems to get around. According to this St. Louis Post Dispatch story: "Since 1998, he has posted more than 30,000 messages on Internet stock boards, raising questions about companies and digging into the backgrounds of their officers, directors and consultants. He has been sued by three of his targets and racked up nearly $60,000 in legal bills." He's also a known quantity to The New York Post business reporter who wrote the Sunday story, in that he's been in his stories before, and apparently helped Infoseek founder Steven Kirsh "bust up global money-laundering operations." At least one of the lawsuits against him charged him with making false and defamatory statements; he was a target of an early "cyber-smear" lawsuit, as well, though that case was ultimately dismissed. Pseudonyms -- those again! -- he's used in the past include "The Truthseeker" and "Flodyie."
--Garance Franke-Ruta
