I contacted her because I was able to find tweets from Weinergate-related accounts that had already been deleted, and they told a story that other media outlets weren't reporting.
Some of the Weinergate twitter accounts were fake.
So we worked together on the following story, which wasn't published until late in the evening on June 17, and after Rep. Weiner had already resigned: Fake Identities Were Used on Twitter in Effort to Get Information on Weiner.
Then things got complicated. Preston was hounded on Twitter over legitimate journalistic complaints by conservative bloggers such as Patterico and Ace of Spades, but also was being menaced by many bloggers that have direct ties to Andrew Breitbart, and anonymous sock accounts. On a Sunday night - June 26 - Preston asked me to defend our work publicly on Twitter so I did.
As a result, I was targeted by hackers and trolls and someone illegally obtained an expunged arrest record from twenty years ago - I was arrested in Florida for arguing with police officers who refused to investigate a rape and abduction from a nightclub and the charges were immediately dropped - and posted it at the Patterico website.
After Preston spoke to New York Times lawyers the next day, she told me she couldn't contact me for a while and would have to go "dark." We had a public falling out, and a biased version of events can be read at this link.
(Stranahan would later tell me that Preston claimed that she never spoke to me or heard of me, but he's directly involved in Weinergate shenanigans)
This link will fill in some of the background details, but be warned, since I no longer believe that the blogger behind that account is an innocent victim, since she likes to post Anonymous and 4chan related cartoons on her blog, and those are the trolls behind the post-Weinergate menacing.
Anyway, Preston seems to be hinting she might finally follow up this story...but she hasn't talked to me in three months and I know more about post-Weinergate events than anyone else...especially considering I have a lengthy interview with Dan Wolfe which I still haven't published.
Weinergate and the NY9 special election is a crazy story, for sure. Trolls, pranksters, fake twitter accounts, yellow journalism, Democrats hoping to gain by losing, and lots of paranoia. But the craziest thing is EVERYONE in the media and blogosphere has ignored it for three months.
Here's some more random Jennifer Preston Direct Messages to me. Maybe some were hacked...but since she has ignored me for three months I highly doubt she's an innocent victim. Preston has many, many ties to hackers and pranksters, and seems to be a fan.
(I have tons of info at www.twitter.com/ronbryn that i haven't yet written up...interested readers should start at the top and read all the way to May 27 until I put it in a more readable format...)
One thing I'll note before the first Direct Message is that I didn't agree with Preston at all that all the girls were fake in June. It wasn't until late August that I learned and proved on my Twitter account that every single Weinergate "victim" lied about many key things and that the media reports were sketchy. Andrew Breitbart and Lee Stranahan were two sources which helped me put everything together.
So I now agree 100 percent with what Preston told me on June 14.
