This week we learned that Sean Hannity COULD NOT shut up about the sad conspiracy theory that young DNC staffer Seth Rich WAS MURDERED BY HILLARY CLINTON. He couldn't shut up about it because then he might have had to cover things like "Donald Trump's Russian Oval Office Spy Pee Orgy." And Sean Hannity did not want to!
So he swirled and twirled around, dancing and shimmying and waving his hips to keep you from looking anywhere but there. And as he did so, he got a new best friend (besides Julian Assange), and that new best friend's name was Kim Dotcom, and he is A LUNATIC.
Here is everything you need to know about the person with whom Sean Hannity wants to share his "microphone." (Penis.)
Who Is Kim Dotcom?
Kim Dotcom (aka "His Royal Highness King Kimble the First, Ruler of the Kimpire," aka "Kim Tim Jim Vestor," aka "Kim Schmitz") is the Vienna sausage of campy 1990s computer hacker movie tropes. He's a self-described "fat kid and school drop out from a poor family [who] made his dreams come true," by stealing and conning his way into millions of Ameros on the Internet. Like most self-aggrandizing Internet millionaires, he likes to spend his stolen money on extravagantly useless crap like yachts, giraffe statues, super-powered golf carts, and sexy silicone-injected bikini parties to prove that, honest-to-God, he really does have some friends in the real world.
Kim got his start back in the early 1990s trafficking in stolen calling cards. When he was about 13 years-old he lied/bragged to Forbes about being a super-ultra elite hacker man and got caught by German police. In 1998 he got busted again, this time for ripping off private phone switchboards in Germany to call his own bulletin board service in Hong Kong. He was charged, among other things, with 10 counts of data espionage and 11 counts of computer fraud, but was let off with probation on account of "youthful foolishness." Boys will be boys!
Years later, Kim would claim that he not only hacked into NASA systems, but also the FBI, the CIA, and the Pentagon so he could read news about the Gulf War. He also claims to have broken into Citibank, stolen $20 million, and donated it to Greenpeace. And really, in the days before Pokemon, fidget spinners and Internet porn, what else is a sheltered pre-teen without any friends supposed to do except lie uncontrollably?
Would these chubby cheeks lie? Yep.
During the dot-com boom, Kim fancied himself a venture capitalist. Naturally, he had to commit insider trading in 2001 when he bought a German retail web site, invested a bunch of cash to drive interest, and promptly cashed out. He fled Germany and ran to Thailand, where he was found crying in a closet and cradling a shotgun, insisting that he be called "His Royal Highness King Kimble the First, Ruler of the Kimpire."
Having skirted German jails a second time, he moved to Hong Kong in 2003 and started the totally real, certainly not fake, Kimpire Limited, an investment firm with with an "artificial intelligence-driven hedge fund." Put aside your techno/legal harrumphs about using robots to game financial markets, Kim never registered the company with the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, or the SEC. He was never allowed to accept real money for his fake company or its bogus technology, and was fined HK $8,000.
Finally, after years of fraud had left him a joke in cyberspace and a con artist in the eyes of capitalists, Kim moved to New Zealand and found his true calling in the world of Internet piracy when he established Megaupload in 2005. Created as a cloud storage dumping ground for large files, for the most part Megaupload was a warehouse for bootlegging music, porn and big box office movies. It was only a matter of time before U.S. lawmakers teamed up with Hollywood and federal authorities and accused Kim of racketeering, conspiring to commit copyright infringement, and conspiring to commit money laundering.
The U.S. raided his home in New Zealand and seized $17 million in assets, freezing his 64 bank accounts, and the FBI arrested him like a common international criminal. A series of mind-numbing appeals in New Zealand courts have since challenged seizure of his assets, with New Zealand courts ultimately ruling that the scope of the seizures was too broad, but also ruling in favor of his extradition to the U.S. to face criminal charges.
When life gives you lemons, give a foreign government several million dollars to look the other way.
Since 2010, Kim has dumped millions of dollars into New Zealand's tiny economy in the form of political donations and "investments," effectively purchasing his residency in 2010, despite his criminal history. Kim then began to waddle into politics, first by attempting to buy political favor with the mayor of Auckland, and then through the formation and financing of The Internet Party, a left-wing political group that failed miserably in 2014.
Lately, Kim has tried to meddle in U.S. affairs. In recent weeks he's cultivated a bromance with Sean Hannity. In order to curry favor, Kim forged FBI documents to further the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, even though it's already been widely debunked. Kim's already befriended Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange, together trumpeting a hypocritical cry for transparency and accountability.
What a cute couple, like a match made in 4Chan.
Ever the martyr, Kim says his is a fight for free speech on the Internet, and that he's illegally been spied upon and targeted by evil Hollywood types who want to lock him away for being a god-awful thief. While there's some evidence to suggest he's simply a misguided idiot (and pathological liar), there's more evidence that he's just an incompetent crook. Kim claims to fight for freedom of speech and net neutrality, although he himself made hundreds of millions of dollars by trafficking in stolen content, and now openly supports a president who's trying to kill net-neutrality.
In a sane and rational world, nobody would really care about a three-time loser like Kim Dotcom; however we live in the upside-down world where chauvinist assholes can hawk bullshit and make home movies with paid porn stars posing in rented yachts with rented friends to give the appearance that they're enviable douchebags. Kim has scammed his way into a fortune, bought his way out of legal trouble, and jumped into fringe politics as a joke. Sound familiar?
Finally, I leave you with a music video of Kim Dotcom's trance/techno/whatever music.
And now you may OPEN THREAD!
[ Forbes / Wired / Vice / Telegraph / Grantland / Gizmodo / Ars Technica / Sydney Morning Herald / Newsweek / Hollywood Reporter / Daily Beast / der Spiegel / Fast Company ]
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