The FBI has closed its investigation into the election day blackout of Joe Lieberman’s campaign website. Their finding? That its shutdown was the Lieberman campaign’s fault and no one elses. Not bloggers. Not the Lamont campaign. Not a stray cigarette but cast down from the lips of Tim Tagaris.
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.
Lieberman, who was fighting for his political life against the anti- Iraq war candidate Lamont, implied that joe2006.com was hacked by Lamont supporters.
“The server that hosted the joe2006.com Web site failed because it was overutilized and misconfigured. There was no evidence of (an) attack,” according to the e-mail.
Of course, this is what the Lamont campaign, experts at Blue State Digital, and bloggers around the country said when joe2006.com went down. Lamont’s campaign immediately offered to host Lieberman’s site on their own servers to ensure parity in the closing hours of the election. Instead of realizing their own incompetence cost them at a critical time and taking the offered help, the Lieberman campaign went into rabid attack mode, blaming pretty much anyone who had ever typed the words “Ned Lamont” into a search engine as the culprits for the site crash.
I would say that I hope Ned Lamont, his campaign, and the bloggers that were slander by Joe Lieberman in August 2006 feel vindicated today. But there is nothing satisfying about being proven right when it just doesn’t change the final outcome of the 2006 Connecticut primary.
Update:
Here’s what Tim Tagaris says in response to this to TPM Election Central:
“The sad thing is, Lieberman himself repeated the charge all day in an attempt to discredit his opponents,” Tagaris instant messages to me. “It was broadcast on every cable news channel, and papers from The New York Times to the Hartford Courant wrote about it.”
“And he got away with it — who cares what’s reported today,” Tagaris continues. “He won the election based on a pattern of lies loudly repeated and dutifully stenographed.”
“Now maybe someone will run an investigation into Joe Lieberman’s repeated claim that no one wants to end the war more than he does,” Tagaris concludes.
To my knowledge, none of these outlets have ran retraction stories on their reporting at any point since primary day 2006. Perhaps now that the FBI has had the final word, we will begin to see these publications correct their past mistakes.
Hold Fast 