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After Criticizing Jason Leopold, Blogger Seixon Claims Death Threat and Forged Emails.–

By on July 26, 2006 9:52 pm

1. Background.

Jason Leopold, who used to be a reporter for the L.A. Times and the Dow Jones News Service, has had a bad last few years. His story on former Enron official Thomas White included several plagiarized paragraphs, and its main revelation was an email that Salon editors were unable to verify (the email was suspected to have been fabricated). Salon then retracted Leopold’s article.

When in 2005 Leopold’s book was withdrawn on the eve of release, Howard Kurtz profiled Leopold in the Washington Post:

[A] Salon executive said the source cited by Leopold [in his Enron/White story] as providing the e-mail insisted he had never spoken with Leopold. . . .

The [press] release [sent out for his book] fleshes out a troubled career. Leopold says his grand larceny conviction in 1996 was for stealing compact discs from his employer, a New York music company, and reselling them to record stores. He says he was fired by the Los Angeles Times “for threatening to rip a reporter’s head off.” Leopold says he quit Dow Jones Newswires in a dispute over his beat but later learned the news service was planning to fire him because of a correction to one of his Enron stories: “Seems I got all of the facts wrong.”

Kurtz also suggested an explanation for some of Leopold’s more bizarre actions:

Leopold says he engaged in “lying, cheating and backstabbing,” is a former cocaine addict, served time for grand larceny, repeatedly tried to kill himself and has battled mental illness his whole life.

2. Leopold’s TruthOut.Org Stories on Rove and his dispute with blogger Seixon.

In May, 2006 Leopold reported for TruthOut.org that Karl Rove had been indicted by the Grand Jury. In June Leopold reported that the Grand Jury had issued an indictment, Sealed v. Sealed, and that the sealed indictment might have been of Rove (the story was discredited here).

When a DailyKos diarist suggested that Leopold’s story should be taken with “a block of salt,” another diarist from Canada named AnonymousArmy posted a comment on DailyKos that accused Leopold of falling for a fraudulent story from a conspiracy theorist, a posting that triggered a vicious dispute between Leopold, AnonymousArmy, George Gooding (an American living in Norway who blogs as Seixon), and other internet posters and commenters. The blow by blow accounts are quite tedious, but can be reviewed at Seixon here, here, here, here, and here (tip to Instapundit). The misdeeds involve allegations of repeated lying by Leopold, an anonymous posting accusing Gooding of molesting small boys, and a call to Gooding’s parents in the US. Given Leopold’s established record of using sock puppets, he can’t be ruled out as a suspect in making the anonymous charges of child molestation.

3. Death Threat.

The situation has deteriorated so substantially that today Gooding reports receiving a death threat:

At approximately 7:00 AM Central European Time I received a phone call from a blocked number. The person on the phone told me I had written naughty things on my blog, and then laughed when I asked them who they were.

“You’re a dead man.”

This is what the person on the line told me right before hanging up.

I called my local authorities and they told me to come down to the station. . . .

I told the police that I believed this person to have been Jason Leopold. Due to the number not showing on my phone, I said I could not be 100% sure who it was. The voice on the phone sounded like Leopold’s voice which I have heard on at least one radio interview.

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