Which one of you did this?

Here’s a fun little tale of the Internet:

Last week, LGM received a $5,000 donation from a company called International Materials, located in Delray Beach, FL. A few hours later, [ETA: The complaint came a week after the donation. The Huff people were expecting it and complained when they didn’t receive it, which is how the donor discovered his mistake] We were informed by the company that the money had been sent to us by somebody not authorized to make the donation, and that we needed to send it back.

I myself know someone who was scammed in a similar way — money being purportedly sent to them, which they were told to send back, with the money that was sent turning out to be fictitious — so as Semi-Official General Counsel I advised that we ask for some more details before attempting to return the money.

At this point whoever owns the company started getting irate, and made some vague rumblings about legal action. When we finally got more info from the company, it turned out that an admin had been instructed to send the $5,000 to gailhuff.com.

I clicked on this link and discovered that it was a hyperlink to this post of mine, about former Massachusetts senator Scott Brown, who when I wrote the post in December of 2019 was ambassador to New Zealand (a sinecure he had been rewarded with for being one of Trump’s earliest establishment GOP supporters). The post is about how Brown had just been named to succeed John O’Brien as dean at New England Law, an especially scammy law school that I had blogged about several times back in the day, when O’Brien was paying himself nearly the $900,000 per year in salary alone.

Brown started his deanship in January of this year. In a very surprising move that some area journalist might want to dig into, he resigned just eight months later. (Given that his electoral political career appears to be dead and that prior to the Trumpian sinecure he was essentially running some MLM diet drug grift, the notion that he would voluntarily just up and quit a several hundred thousand dollar per year job involving no heavy lifting eight months into it is suspicious to say the least).

Anyway, I did a couple of minutes of googling and discovered that “Gail Huff” is none other than Gail Huff Brown, Scott’s wife, who last week announced she was running for Congress in New Hampshire. Somehow or the other, what was supposed to be a link to her PAC ($5,000 is the maximum individual donation to a PAC) got turned into a link to my post about her husband.

It may not be the greatest sign for her campaign that a week later that hyperlink is still going to my post.

Now that all has been explained LGM is giving the money back, but exactly how this happened is still a deep and compelling mystery.