Lieberman Crashed Own Site

Case Closed on Lieberman's Website

Scout Finch, KOS:

It's official. Joe Lieberman and his 2006 campaign staff were either incompetent, dishonest, or both. Atrios has the story.

The Last Honest Man

Those of us who were in Connecticut that day know that Connecticut media was pretty much wall to wall "LAMONT CAMPAIGN HACKED THE LIEBERMAN CAMPAIGN WEB SITE" the entire day of the primary.

A federal investigation has concluded that U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman's 2006 re-election campaign was to blame for the crash of its Web site the day before Connecticut's heated Aug. 8 Democratic primary.

The FBI office in New Haven found no evidence supporting the Lieberman campaign's allegations that supporters of primary challenger Ned Lamont of Greenwich were to blame for the Web site crash.

On the day of the 2006 primary, Joe Lieberman's website came crashing down. Lieberman and his mouthpieces spent the day running around to all the media that would listen, claiming that their site had been hacked by Lamont supporters or other "extremist leftwing elements". Sadly, the media was all too eager to buy into the narrative and they relentlessly pushed the idea that "dirty campaign tactics" by bloggers simply had to be at the root of it.

The problem was, even at the time, it was crystal clear that this was sheer incompetence by the Lieberman camp. Kos pointed to it that very same day:

But now I have the definitive answer as to why Lieberman's site went down.

They are paying $15/month for hosting at a place called MyHostCamp, with a bandwidth limit of 10GB. MyHostCamp is currently down, along with all their clients.

Here's the deal -- you get what you pay for. My hosting bill is now over $7K per month. A smaller site doesn't need that much bandwidth, but if you're paying $15 because your $12 million campaign is too freakin' cheap to pay for quality hosting, then don't go blaming your opponent when your shitty service goes out.

For their part, the Lamont campaign has offered its technical expertise to get Lieberman's site back up (which could be done in an hour by a competent sysadmin), and has added a link to the googlecached version of Lieberman's site at the top of their blog.

Turns out that federal investigators came to the same conclusion in October 2006 after Lieberman's camp demanded a full investigation.


Not Guilty

Ben Smith, Politico:

One of the stranger episodes of the Lieberman-Lamont primary in 2006 was the Lieberman campaign's charge that supporters of his rival (whose web guy, Tim Tagaris, is above) "attacked" Lieberman's website.

Anyway, the FBI has finally gotten to the bottom of it, in case you were wondering. The verdict: Not guilty.

Lieberman Lies Again:
Crashed His Own Website, Blamed Bloggers

Jane Hamsher, FDL:

I started transcribing this video from Lamont/Lieberman primary day 2006 but frankly I'm just too pissed to do it. Although the FBI investigation in to the incident was concluded in 2006, due to the perseverance of the Stamford Advocate the results were revealed today, and found what we all know to be true at the time -- no blogger hacked into Joe's website.

Joe Lieberman crashed his own website.

But that didn't matter. Joe needed a way to own the news cycle, and gave it to himself by flapping his lying weasel lips all day long for the benefit of the cameras. And they let him. Over and over again.

* * * * *

Anyone who reported on this and doesn't want to give the same amount of time to re-evaluating this embarrassment, and what it reflects about our media system that this kind of thing could happen, should find themselves another profession.