Police State Attacks Small Businessman Just For Blackmailing Mitt Romney

Federal stormtroopers of the New World Order have leveled six counts of wire fraud and six counts of extortion on 34-year-old Michael Mancil Brown, alleging that the Tennessee-based information entrepreneur sought a $1 million angel investment from Mitt Romney for a data privacy start-up. The pitch — which Brown is also accused of sending to PricewaterhouseCoopers and the GOP — sought anonymized seed capital, in the form of bitcoins, for a small business that specialized in not releasing copies of Mitt Romney's tax returns. Brown is further charged with the so-called crime of seeking funding for a second business that specialized in releasing Romney's tax returns. (You may recall the details of this Swordfish hacking drama from election time last year.)

But even if this nice young man's involvement can be proven in a court of law, WHAT, we ask you, EXACTLY is the crime here? This is such a sick perversion of why “We, The People” empowered government regulation of private enterprise in the first place. Just Shameful. Way to cut a man's boot straps just as he was pulling himself up.

The closest thing to inappropriate that we can see here is that Brown did not yet actually have the tax returns to release. According to the indictment, a federal grand jury in Nashville believed that Brown may have been “falsely claiming that he had gained access to the PricewaterhouseCoopers internal computer network and had stolen tax documents for Romney and his wife, Ann D. Romney, for tax years prior to 2010.”

Big deal, right? Who cares? As Mitt Romney surely knows, faking it until you make it is just part of the everyday hustle of small business. Back in 2003, commenting software innovator Nick Denton put up a big old fake banner ad on Gawker for the New York real estate broker Corcoran just to trick other businesses into advertising over stuff about Tina Brown being dumb. Before moving to America, Vice magazine lied to the press about dotcom media baron Richard Szalwinski's interest in funding them, which impressed Szalwinski so much that he actually decided to fund them. Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion this year, and practically all they do is steal photos and words from other places — just like poor Michael “Man + Pencil” Brown is accused of doing!

The deep irony here is that if you people had shown the common sense to elect Mitch Romney last November, it's hard to imagine his federal government pursuing such a frivolous case against such an honest business man.

j/k, u guys.

[via the Register ]