I posted yesterday about the blogosphere buzz over Julian Sanchez tracking down the identity of the guy at the RNC Convention who kicked a woman while she was on the ground being restrained by three FBI agents. Here are the latest developments:
Jerralyn Merritt of TalkLeft receives the following email from the alleged RNC Kicker:
Ms. Merritt,
I’m Sorry, but you must have the wrong person. (This is a little strange.) Please inform your sources. Thanks.
Scott
Julian Sanchez posting on Reason’s Hit and Run blog receives a rather more elaborate denial, complete with alibi:
Yesterday, I reported that numerous people believed that they knew the identity of the person who appears in this video, purportedly kicking a restrained protester: They believe the person on the tape is Wharton student Scott Robinson, who interned in Washington, D.C. this summer. At this point eight of them, seven D.C. interns and a University of Pennsylvania political science student who says he lived across the hall from Robinson for a year, have provided comments for attribution, claiming to be certain the person on the convention video is the student and intern they know. (Various others have sent anonymous statements to myself and other bloggers to similar effect.)
On Thursday evening (technically very early Friday), I spoke with Robinson. He conceded that he was in New York at the time, volunteering at the Republican National Convention, but says that he was not at the Andy Card speech where the incident took place around noon that Wednesday. He said he had been out late Tuesday night and didn’t wake up before midday, as he was only working evenings. He also gave me the name of the Wharton fraternity brother with whom he stayed that week, with whom he said he’d been at the time of the Card event. That person, whose name I’m omitting at his request, declined to say anything on the record when contacted via email.
Posted by Julian Sanchez at September 17, 2004 04:12 PM
A person claiming to be from the NTUF has posted on Julian’s original Hit and Run thread, as well as my blog the following disclaimer:
For the record, Scott Robinson left NTU Foundation’s internship program well before the GOP convention. Whether or not Mr. Robinson is indeed the same person depicted in the convention video, National Taxpayers Union and National Taxpayers Union Foundation repudiate violence in all forms.
Mr. Robinson was a summer intern with NTU. He participated in a fellowship program, which was sponsored by an outside organization. That program brought him to Washington in mid-June of this year. That internship ended–as planned–in early August, several weeks before the alleged incident in New York City.
If you have additional concerns, you should contact the law enforcement agencies that may be involved to determine the status of any legal proceedings.
It is a shame that the original source of this story, Reason Hit and Run, didn’t adequately clarify the fact that Mr. Robinson was long gone from our organization before the GOP convention and this chain of blogged events occurred.
Pete Sepp
Vice President for Communications
National Taxpayers Union and FoundationPosted by: Pete Sepp | September 16, 2004 10:55 PM
The above post by Mr. Sepp is from my blog. The post on Hit and Run is substantially the same, but Hit and Run doesn’t have permalinks to comments, so you’ll have to find it in the thread. As you page through the Hit and Run thread, you might watch for a poster who claims to be Dave Stanley, CEO of the NTUF, saying Sepp was the photo cropper who trimmed Mr. Robinson right out of the intern group photo on the NTUF’s website – before – after. From this, we might suspect Pete of believing the intern in the picture was the kicker.
Anyway, researching Mr. Robinson has been educational. Did you know there’s a group called The Protest Warriors, motto: Fighting the left….doing it right. Robinson belongs to the Penn chapter of this organisation:
Anyone who wants to is welcome to join our U of Penn chapter for the periodic updates. There are numerous other towns and colleges with chapters. You can browse by state. Just go to this link and click on “register”. There are no obligations and if you decide to, I’m sure that you will be glad that you did. Pass this on the word to fellow anti-protesters…..”
posted by Scott Robinson at 12:35 PM | 0 comments
which has this to say on it’s homepage about the RNC:
Operation Liberty Rising
On August 29th, the RNC will begin, and ProtestWarrior will be there to take on the hordes of leftists whose entire goal is to silence, to hate, to scream out of existence the idea that freedom can flourish throughout the world. Details to come…
Who knew?
The Protest Warriors have a manly logo that prevents anyone mistaking them for lefty peacenik types.
So, just because a Protest Warrior was at the RNC convention and a bunch of his friends and coworkers say they think it’s him in the kicking video doesn’t mean it’s true.