Finally, someone is throwing the book at shyster Matt Arnold and his fake nonprofit Campaign Integrity Watchdog and he now owes attorneys fees. Finally.
According to a report from Colorado Politics, Arnold subpoenaed blogger Dan Njegomir to appear before an administrative law judge to discuss Njegomir’s investigative journalism work for Colorado Pioneer Action. Njegomir’s work, it should be noted, was unrelated to the campaign finance complaint that Arnold was alleging and Njegomir believed the subpoena had more to do with payback for the negative blog posts Njegomir wrote exposing Arnold for his political retribution scheme.
From the post:
“If I had any lingering doubt about that, it evaporated only hours after I had published a blog post on the subpoena itself. That’s when the Colorado Springs Independent, an alt weekly, included me in its latest broadside against ColoradoPolitics.com’s news affiliate, the Colorado Springs Gazette. The Independent, which sees itself as a rival to the Gazette and takes a periodic poke at the hometown daily, revealed the amount Pioneer paid me for my work — and attributed that information to Arnold. The idea, evidently, was to make me appear compromised as a journalist over a bygone line of work.”
But here’s the problem – Pioneer Action’s expenditures aren’t public information. You can’t search for its expenditures on TRACER, the state’s campaign finance database, for example. So where did Arnold get this information? From another subpoena that he served on Pioneer. The catch is that the court Arnold was not supposed to use that information for any reason other than to bolster his argument in his complaint. He was not to disclose this information to the Colorado Springs Independent to compromise a journalist who wrote the truth about his extortion schemes.
The judge said he would hold him in contempt of court for violating the non-disclosure order but an ALJ doesn’t have that power. So, instead, he awarded attorneys fees for the extra time spent on this issue. And that, PeakNation, is how Arnold is now in almost in contempt of court and definitely responsible for attorneys fees to clear up this mess.
If he were responsible for attorneys fees on more of his crusades, we suspect he would find another line of extortion work.