Press Clippings

by: Juan Melli

Fri Sep 29, 2006 at 11:39:38 PM EDT

Associated Press, Sep 29, 2006: NJ Dems break ranks to support GOP terror bill

By DONNA DE LA CRUZ, Associated Press Writer
Published: Friday, September 29, 2006

WASHINGTON (AP) - New Jersey's two U.S. senators crossed party lines and voted with Republicans to support President Bush's anti-terror agenda, including a military program on how to detain and interrogate terrorists. One political analyst called the move "campaign season votes."
As Democrats on one state politics Web site voiced their dismay, the senators countered Friday that while there were parts of the bill they did not like, they voted for it so that terrorists would be held accountable for their actions.

The Senate approved the measure 65-34 on Thursday, one day after the House voted in favor 253-168. The House voted 250-170 to send the Senate version to the president to sign.

The votes, six weeks before congressional midterm elections, gave the nod to the president's sweeping anti-terrorism legislation that prohibits war crimes while defining such atrocities as rape and torture, and establishes military tribunals to prosecute terrorism suspects.

"I wouldn't want those who have committed acts of terrorism to ultimately find the ability to be free by virtue of a lack of a (tribunal) process," said New Sen. Robert Menendez.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the existing process of detentions was unconstitutional, leaving nothing in place to deal with terrorists, Menendez added.

"It seems to me while it is not the bill I wanted as evidenced by the way I voted on the amendments, I think there has to be a process in place," he said.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg said aspects of the plan will need to be reviewed by the courts, but he voted for it because the country needs to move forward to prosecute accused terrorists.

"With the loss of 700 people on 9/11, the victims of terrorism in New Jersey have waited too long to see people involved in the worst terror attack in our nation's history brought to justice," Lautenberg said.

Rider University political scientist David Rebovich speculated Menendez voted for the measure to take away an issue that Republican challenger Tom Kean Jr. could use against him. Republicans have portrayed Democrats as being soft on terrorism.

"In a 9/11 state like New Jersey, which lost so many people, how could Bob Menendez not give the federal government some leeway and flexibility in finding out or ascertaining what the bad guys might be up to, is what Kean could have said," Rebovich said. "This is one of those campaign season votes."

As for Lautenberg, Rebovich speculated the senator voted with Menendez to show solidarity.

Postings on the popular Democratic blog http://www.bluejerse... were aghast over the votes, with some saying they would no longer support Menendez. Blog founder Juan Melli said he found Menendez's vote "unjustifiable."

"On the one hand, he could have voted against the bill, in which case the GOP would have run ads showing Menendez and (Osama) bin Laden high-fiving each other while sharing margaritas on the beach," Melli posted in a diary on the blog, which he gave permission to The Associated Press to use. "On the other, he could have voted for it, and suffered the wrath of a furious base. He made the wrong choice, both policy-wise and politically."

The Record, Sep 26, 2006
Slinging mud on the blog

By MIKE KELLY
RECORD COLUMNIST

Now that Jim McGreevey has set a confessional standard, it's time for me to come clean.

I'm not the mysterious "bluejersey" blogger.

In case anyone wondered.

Yes, I know -- you have no idea what bluejersey is.

No problem.

This is a tale of New Jersey politics. And the controversy about bluejersey epitomizes why New Jersey politics has become such a joke. It may also explain why voter turnout continues to slide.

Bluejersey.com is a Web site for bloggers -- meaning that anyone is supposed to be able to send a message. Established a year ago by a Princeton graduate student, the blog declares that it is "dedicated to being the progressive source of news, political analysis and activism" for the state.

With that sort of mandate, who could resist Monday's scintillating entry, "Kean Jr and Fiscal Discipline"? Or Sunday's: "Question Authority -- and Authorities."

Get the picture? This blog takes itself very seriously -- which makes it wide open to sabotage.

Which is what happened.

Last week, someone writing as "cleanupnj" and "usedtobeblue" had the incredible nerve to actually criticize Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez.

I know -- most readers have just collapsed in shock.

Bluejersey's creator, Juan Melli, launched an investigation. Quick as you could say "dirty tricks," Melli discovered that "cleanupnj" and "usedtobeblue" had the same Internet address as the campaign headquarters for Menendez's Republican challenger, Tom Kean Jr.

More shock, right?

Melli further compared information in the blog entries with Kean press releases and concluded that the anti-Menendez criticisms were actually written by Kean's press secretary, Jill Hazelbaker.

Not guilty, she cried.

"Oh, please," Hazelbaker said, adding that she would never pose as a Democrat. "You can't believe what's posted on blogs."

Everyone believed her, right? And, of course, everyone believed Kean when he declared that his own press secretary would never do something so terrible as to anonymously criticize his opponent.

In fact, why would anyone at Kean campaign headquarters ever think of booting up a computer and having a little fun at the expense of the uber-serious Democrats who run Menendez's campaign? Isn't the Kean campaign busy enough trying to convince the rest of New Jersey that their Republican stalwart has no idea who President Bush is?

Which brings all this back to me and my sudden need to confess.

Yes, dear readers, I've actually posed sometimes as a Democrat -- but only in the voting booth. I've also posed as a Republican, too -- in the voting booth.

I confess: I'm bipolitical.

But I'm not "cleanupnj" or "usedtobeblue."

Meanwhile, this Senate campaign drags on. Both candidates declared months ago that they wanted to debate only important issues, and that they would steer clear of mudslinging.

Yeah, right. That pledge lasted all of 13 seconds.

The mud is flowing freely now. In a few more weeks, the floodgates will open, and voters will be tortured with all those informative political ads, featuring ominous music and grim photos of candidates.

As for me, I'm greatly impressed with bluejersey's first rule of blogging: "Don't be an ass."

"That should be enough for most people," it says.

Are the campaigns listening?

The Record, Sep 22, 2006
Kean says aide didn't blog against Menendez

Friday, September 22, 2006

By SCOTT FALLON and HERB JACKSON
STAFF WRITERS

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Tom Kean Jr. said Thursday that his spokeswoman did not post negative messages about his opponent Bob Menendez on a Democratic blog.

But Kean would not say whether anyone else from his campaign staff posted those messages, which contain the same individual computer code, known as an Internet Protocol or IP address, that appears on e-mails that his spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker sends out.

Hazelbaker "does not hide behind blind blog posting," he said when pressed by reporters at a news conference in Hasbrouck Heights.

Messages from people purporting to be former Democrats disgusted by Menendez's alleged improprieties began showing up on bluejersey.net in July.

IP similarities noted

The blog's founder, Juan Melli, a graduate student at Princeton University, began investigating the identity of the posters using code names like "usedtobeblue" and "cleanupnj" on their messages. He said on Wednesday that those IP addresses were the same as the ones used by Hazelbaker when she sends out e-mails.

Hazelbaker has said the IP address was old although e-mails sent recently from Hazelbaker to reporters have the same IP address. The Kean campaign gets its Internet service from Comcast so all the computers at the Mountainside headquarters most likely share the same IP address.

Hazelbaker denied posting the messages Thursday and said it wasn't worth checking to see if anyone else on the campaign did so.

"It's the silly season," she said. "I did not go around to everybody's computers and check them. Anyone who knows me knows that when I have something to say, I say it."

One message that Melli said linked Hazelbaker to the anonymous posts concerned Menendez's relationship with a non-profit group that leased office space from him and is now the subject of a federal investigation.

On Tuesday, Hazelbaker had sought to downplay a contention by Ellen Weintraub, former Democratic lawyer for the House ethics committee, that Menendez's lease did not violate House ethics rules.

In doing so, Hazelbaker directed a Record reporter to another political Web site, the National Center Blog, on which a writer suggested that Weintraub did not deserve her current job on the Federal Election Commission. The writer asserted that Weintraub had a conflict of interest because her husband was on the Senate Democratic staff.

An ironic twist

Later that evening "cleanupnj" posted the same information on bluejersey.net, a day before the article appeared in The Record.

"This is the person who speaks every day for Tom Kean," Menendez said Thursday. "How can one believe anything she has to say? If she lies when ... the identification of her address was clearly established by what she has sent to the press in general, why won't we believe she'll lie about a whole host of other things?"

The Kean campaign's attack on Weintraub's integrity has an ironic twist. She was one of three FEC commissioners who took Kean's side in a 2003 ruling on a dispute arising from a mailing in Kean's unsuccessful campaign for Congress in 2000.

The mailing, financed by a then-unknown group called the Council for Responsible Government, noted Kean had only recently moved to New Jersey and had never had a job in the private sector. It urged people to vote only for New Jersey candidates.

New endorsements

Kean wanted the FEC to determine that the flier should fall under campaign finance laws that impose tight regulations on advocacy for candidates, not the very lax rules that govern "issue advocacy."

Three commissioners, including Weintraub, agreed with Kean that the mailing was not advocating for an issue but was targeted against Kean's candidacy. Three other commissioners disagreed, and the issue died without a majority. Kean appealed and eventually won the case in federal court.

Also Thursday, Kean received the endorsements of a handful of Democrats including former Jersey City Councilman Joseph Rakowski, who is also a former acting mayor.

The Menendez campaign launched a new television ad focused on Iraq, saying, "We can stay the Bush-Kean Jr. course, or change it." Kean, whose fund-raising has trailed well behind Menendez's, has yet to begin broadcast advertising.

Staff Writer Josh Gohlke contributed to this article. E-mail: fallon@northjersey.com

Daily Princetonian, Sep 22, 2006
Grad student alleges blog posts are GOP dirty tricks

Kean staffers are behind posts, not disillusioned Dems, Melli says

By Arielle Gorin
Princetonian Senior Writer

  One year ago, Juan Melli GS founded bluejersey.com, a left-leaning blog that he hoped would satisfy his passion for political debate and grant him an occasional respite from mechanical engineering research.

  In the past few days, however, Melli's site has swept him into the midst of a political scandal, one that could implicate the campaign staff of a New Jersey senatorial candidate in one of the nation's most closely-watched election races.

  The controversy involves comments posted Tuesday on Melli's site, submitted by users claiming to be ex-Democrats disillusioned with incumbent Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.). The posts, written under the screennames "cleanupnj" and "usedtobeblue," criticized Menendez for allegedly covering up an ethically-questionable 1994 real estate deal.

  After noticing that the two accounts were linked to the same Internet Protocol address — a computer's unique identifying number on the Internet — and had registered 10 minutes apart and had posted comments 15 minutes apart, Melli became suspicious.

  Following a short investigation, he matched the accounts' IP address to the IP address connected with emails from the campaign office of Tom Kean, Jr., Menendez's Republican opponent and the son of former New Jersey governor and 9/11 Commission chair Tom Kean '57. Melli later discovered a user called "AmadeusNJ" who had posted from the same address as "cleanupnj" and "usedtobeblue."

  Melli claims Kean press secretary Jill Hazelbaker is behind the posts, alleging that the wording of the comments on his site is similar to quotations he has seen attributed to Hazelbaker. He also said the comments on his blog cited information only Hazelbaker and a Record of Hackensack reporter could have known at the time, since they referred to information revealed in a Record article that had not yet been published.

  The New York Times and The Newark Star-Ledger published reports Thursday confirming that the IP address of campaign emails regularly sent by Hazelbaker matched those of the suspicious posts on Melli's website, but since Hazelbaker uses a computer that is part of the Kean office network, the posts could have come from any computer located within Kean headquarters.

  "It was obvious from the beginning," said Melli, a fifth-year grad student who helped organize last year's "Frist Filibuster." That event, which garnered national attention, protested the efforts of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist '74 (R-Tenn.) to prevent Democrats from blocking controversial Republican judicial nominees.

  Posting under multiple accounts to create the impression of grassroots sentiment — a practice known as "astroturfing" by blogosphere enthusiasts — is "dishonest and unethical," though not illegal, Melli said.

  "The facts in the case are pretty obvious and easy to verify," he said. "[The Kean campaign] should have just admitted to it and owned up to [the fact that] someone on their staff did it. The story would have probably gone away, but the cover-up is making this a bigger story than it needs to be."

  Though the Kean campaign did not respond to The Daily Princetonian's multiple requests for comment Thursday, Hazelbaker strenuously denied posting on BlueJersey when contacted by Times and Star-Ledger reporters.

  "I've never emailed them nor posted on the website," she told the Times on Wednesday. "It's a blog. You can't believe what's posted on blogs."

  But a spokesman for the Menendez campaign, Brian Fallon, said he was convinced the Kean campaign was behind the posts and seized on the allegations as evidence of the Republican candidate's dearth of substantive positions.

  "It's sad that Tom Kean, Jr.'s campaign can't talk about the issues, so they resorted to using a website to smear Bob Menendez," he said in an interview, claiming that Kean's positions on topics such as the war in Iraq and stem cell research are the same as President Bush's and therefore objectionable to most New Jersey residents. "It's hard to figure out what's worse: that they're waging an anonymous smear campaign on the Web or that they lied about doing it."

  Meanwhile, despite his dedication to political activism, Melli is beginning to have mixed feelings about all the media attention he has generated.

  "I would be perfectly happy if reporters stopped calling me," he said, noting that blogging is ordinarily just an evening's relaxation for him, the way watching TV is for other people. "I normally never have a problem keeping up with [academic] work — it's only been that way now that this is in the news and reporters have been calling."

  "Personally, I'll be happy when this goes away."

The Star Ledger, Sep 22, 2006
Kean defends aide accused of trashing Menendez on blog

Friday, September 22, 2006
BY DEBORAH HOWLETT
Star-Ledger Staff
Republican Senate candidate Tom Kean Jr. came to the defense of his press secretary, Jill Hazelbaker, yesterday over accusations of campaign "dirty tricks" involving comments posted on a liberal blogger's Web site.

"Anybody who knows Jill knows she talks about (Democratic Sen.) Bob Menendez every day. She doesn't need to hide behind anonymous postings on a political blog," Kean said.

The cyber-spat began when Juan Melli, a Princeton graduate student who runs the political forum Blue Jersey (www.bluejersey.com), posted a blog entry accusing Hazelbaker of using the aliases "cleanupnj" and "usedtobeblue" to pose as an "ardent Democrat" on the site.

Melli said he was bothered by the deceit, not the anti-Menendez content of the posts.

"We don't care if you're a Republican, Democrat or Independent. She doesn't even have to say 'This is Jill,'" Melli said. "We just don't want people to be deceived."

Melli said "it was pretty easy" to trace the posts to a Comcast business account that has the same Internet Protocol address as e-mails Hazelbaker sent in her official capacity with the campaign. The IP address is also the same as numerous e-mails Hazelbaker and other staff have sent to The Star-Ledger over the past few months.

An IP address is a unique number that serves as the address for a Web site, somewhat like a house address or a telephone number. Each subscriber has a unique IP address, according to a Comcast spokesperson who declined to be identified by name.

Sometimes those IP addresses can change, the spokesperson said, but almost all business accounts are "static" and never change.

If an IP address serves a network of computers, it would be impossible to tell definitively who sent a specific communication from the address without going behind the network's firewall.

Melli conceded he could not conclusively prove the posting came from Hazelbaker, but that the content of the posts convinced him it was her.

  In defending Hazelbaker, Kean did not flatly deny that the blog posts came from his campaign computers. Asked where they could have come from, he said, "I don't know."

He then dismissed the whole dust-up as "nonsense" instigated by the opposing campaign.

"Bob Menendez is a guy who has staff follow us every day with a video camera. They blog on our site all the time," Kean said. "This is absolutely ridiculous. It is the sign of a desperate and flailing campaign."

Democrats jumped on the issue, calling it more "dirty tricks" ripped from the "play book of Karl Rove," the White House political adviser.

"This is Karl Rove with a keyboard," Democratic committee chairman Joe Cryan said. "His attempt to dismiss the significance of this incident is just another in a pattern of abuses."

Menendez said Kean should be held accountable, not staffers.

"This has been one continuous campaign of deceit; one continuous campaign of smear," Menendez said. "At the end of the day, he (Kean) is responsible for his campaign."

Menendez also launched a new anti-war television ad yesterday, in which he says Kean "follows George Bush on Iraq," while Menendez voted against the war.

At a news conference, Menendez accused Kean of ducking questions from families of active duty service members about his stance on the war.

A group called Military Families Speak Out has complained publicly that Kean has refused to answer its questions on Iraq. The organization, which supports Menendez's call to withdraw troops within a year, said that while Kean met with them, his answers were incomplete and he has refused repeated requests to clarify his position.

"The war in Iraq is the most important issue," Menendez said. "If you can't explain to New Jerseyans why you are sending their sons and daughters to war, you have no right to ask for their vote."

Kean said he has made his stance on Iraq abundantly clear. He has said he would have voted to authorize the use of force, given the information that was available at the time. He has called for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and said he now favors withdrawing troops as soon as possible, but without setting a timeline.

Deborah Howlett covers politics. She may be reached at (609) 989-0273 or dhowlett@starledger.com

Associated Press, Sep 22, 2006
Kean aide denies posting notes

Anonymous comments critical of Menendez on Democratic blog
Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 09/22/06

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

HASBROUCK HEIGHTS — A spokeswoman for New Jersey's Republican U.S. Senate candidate Thomas H. Kean Jr. on Thursday denied posting negative comments about his opponent on a Democratic blog.

Kean spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker said she has never posted as a Democrat or posted on BlueJersey.com and never e-mailed it comments about U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez.

"Silly season is upon us," Hazelbaker said. "I take Menendez to task on a daily basis for his ethical failings and nonexistent record, and I will continue to do so. I don't need to hide behind an anonymous post."

At a Bergen County news conference, Kean said "a sure sign of a failing campaign is when they stop attacking me and start attacking my staff."

The comments came the same day several newspapers reported that the founder of BlueJersey.com alleged that negative comments about Menendez were traced to computers at Kean campaign headquarters.

The Kean campaign said the Internet protocol, or IP, address in the e-mails was an old one, although e-mails sent recently from Hazelbaker to reporters have the same IP address.

The Kean campaign gets its Internet service from Comcast so all the computers at the Mountainside headquarters likely share the same IP address.

Juan Melli, the Princeton University graduate student who founded BlueJersey.com, said he saw two postings come in that had the same IP address and became suspicious. His site administrator tracked the address, a unique number assigned to a computer or a network of computers or other devices, to a Comcast node in Union but hit a firewall.

In a telephone interview Thursday, Melli said he was pretty certain the postings came from Kean's campaign but needed an e-mail from them to verify it. So he called a friend who had recently received an e-mail from Kean's campaign and the IP addresses were the same.

UPI, Sep 21, 2006
GOP staffer accused of blog attacks

PRINCETON, N.J., Sept. 21 (UPI) -- New Jersey Democrats accuse a Republican campaign staff member of online dirty tricks aimed at U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J.

At issue are anonymous postings sent under the names "cleanupnj" and "usedtobeblue" to a Web site, bluejersey.com, the Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., reports. Juan Melli, who founded the site, says he has tracked the attacks on Menendez to Jill Hazelbacker, press secretary for the Republican candidate, Tom Kean.

"Oh, please, I'm very busy. I don't have time to focus on Blue Jersey," Hazelbacker told the newspaper.

Menendez, appointed to the Senate when Jon Corzine was elected governor, and Kean, son of the popular former governor, are in a tight race. In fact, New Jersey, which last elected a Republican senator 34 years ago, is one of the few places where a Democratic incumbent might lose this year.

Melli, a Princeton graduate student, said that the blog postings attacking Menendez claimed to be from "an ardent Democrat" and were sent under two names registered within 15 minutes of each other. He said the IP address they were sent from match the IP address on e-mail Hazelbacker has sent under her own name.

Associate Press, Sep 21, 2006
Kean campaign denies posting blog comments

By JANET FRANKSTON
Associated Press Writer

September 21, 2006, 6:51 PM EDT

HASBROUCK HEIGHTS, N.J. -- A spokeswoman for New Jersey's Republican candidate for U.S. Senate on Thursday denied she posted negative comments about his opponent on a Democratic blog.

Kean spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker said she has never posted as a Democrat or posted on BlueJersey.com and never e-mailed it comments about U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez.

"Silly season is upon us," Hazelbaker said. "I take Menendez to task on a daily basis for his ethical failings and nonexistent record, and I will continue to do so. I don't need to hide behind an anonymous post."

At a news conference in Bergen County, surrounded by more than 20 Democrats who said they will vote for Kean, the candidate said "a sure sign of a failing campaign is when they stop attacking me and start attacking my staff."

The comments came the same day several newspapers reported that the founder of BlueJersey.com alleged that negative comments about Menendez were traced to computers at Kean campaign headquarters.

But the Kean campaign said that the Internet protocol, or IP, address was an old one, although e-mails sent recently from Hazelbaker to reporters have the same IP address.

The Kean campaign gets its Internet service from Comcast so all the computers at the Mountainside headquarters likely share the same IP address.

Kean declined to say whether he would admonish someone on his staff if the person had posted negative comments on the blog. Blogs are akin to online journals.

Juan Melli, the Princeton University graduate student who founded the blog, said he saw two postings come in that had the same IP address and became suspicious. His site administrator tracked the address, a unique number assigned to computer or a network of computers or other devices, to a Comcast node in Union but hit a firewall.

In a telephone interview Thursday, Melli said he was pretty certain the postings came from Kean's campaign but needed an e-mail from them to verify it. So he called a friend who had recently received an e-mail from Kean's campaign and the IP addresses were the same.

Although Melli said the postings were not illegal, he said they were dishonest, and would like Hazelbaker to come clean.

"She's basically been exposed as lying about this," Melli said. "If they wanted to disprove this, they should show us what their IP address is."

Menendez campaign spokesman Matthew Miller used the cyberspat to attack Kean's ethics. Kean has been a frequent critic of Menendez's ethics while portraying himself as the more moral candidate.

At the gathering, some Democrats stood behind Kean as nearly a dozen other self-proclaimed "Democrats for Peace" heckled him.

The political theater continued as the hecklers tried to hold up signs sporting various slogans in front of Kean and his surrogate speakers. Then Kean supporters held up their own blue placards to block the others.

Joe Rakowski, a former Jersey City councilman and acting mayor, said he and other Democrats support Kean.

"There's a lot of animosity around Bob Menendez," Rakowski said.

___

Associated Press Writer Donna De La Cruz in Washington contributed to this report.

New York Times, Sep 21, 2006
Blog Thinks Aide to Kean Posted Jabs At Menendez
By Jonathan Miller (B3)

The Internet postings came from people calling themselves ''cleanupnj,'' ''usedtobeblue'' and ''AmadeusNJ.'' They said they were concerned Democrats, ''lifelong liberals,'' and they were troubled by the United States senator from New Jersey, Robert Menendez.

Mr. Menendez, they said, was up to no good. For instance, did you notice that a Congressional lawyer who Mr. Menendez said cleared him of ethics issues regarding a controversial real estate deal died last year? Wasn't there something fishy about that?

But the liberal Democratic hosts of BlueJersey.com, the Web log where such comments were posted, smelled something fishy about the postings, and said they traced them to a computer inside the campaign headquarters of Mr. Menendez's Republican opponent, Thomas H. Kean Jr.

They suspect the person behind the postings, which have appeared on the site regularly since July, is Mr. Kean's campaign spokeswoman, Jill Hazelbaker. Ms. Hazelbaker called the accusations ''nonsense,'' and said neither she nor anyone else she knows of in the office had anything to do with the postings. ''I've never e-mailed them nor posted on the Web site,'' she said on Wednesday. ''It's a blog. You can't believe what's posted on blogs.'' She declined to make Mr. Kean available to discuss the matter.

The Kean campaign's technical adviser said that the Internet protocol, or I.P., address that linked the posts to the Kean headquarters was an old one, ''from over a month ago.'' But an e-mail message Ms. Hazelbaker sent to a reporter on Wednesday shares the same I.P. address.

An I.P. is an address, much like a telephone number, that in most cases is specific to an individual computer. But in this case, the Kean campaign registered a business account with Comcast, and it is likely that the entire office shares the same I.P. address -- so the postings could have come from any computer within the headquarters in Mountainside, N.J.

The founder of BlueJersey, Juan Melli, a 25-year-old graduate student of mechanical engineering at Princeton, said on his site Wednesday that these postings appeared to have come not from fellow Democrats but from inside the enemy camp.

Republicans ''see their smear campaign collapsing before their eyes,'' Mr. Melli wrote, adding, ''so they've resorted to astroturfing blogs to try to stop the hemorrhaging.''

Mr. Kean, a state senator, has made ethics a cornerstone of his campaign, accusing Senator Menendez of using his office to help friends and contributors, which is why BlueJersey Democrats took particular delight in the notion of a Kean campaign aide faking Internet postings.

The cyberspace spat sprang up on Wednesday as a new poll, by Quinnipiac University, showed Mr. Kean ahead of Mr. Menendez with likely voters, 48 percent to 45 percent. The margin of sampling error was 3.7 percentage points.

Mr. Melli said in an interview that he had long been suspicious of the pro-Republican posters on his blog. He checked registrations this week and found at least four commentators who had registered since July with the same I.P. address, and noticed that it matched the address found on signed e-mail messages others had received from Ms. Hazelbaker.

Then at 7:15 p.m. Tuesday, Mr. Melli saw a post concerning Mr. Menendez's relationship with a nonprofit organization that won federal grants and also rented office space from him.

Mr. Melli said he thought the posting's content would have been known only to Ms. Hazelbaker and a reporter from The Record of Hackensack, who was working on the story, and the source for his article.

But Ms. Hazelbaker said many others could have been privy to that information, which concerned recollections of a former lawyer for a Congressional ethics panel over whether Mr. Menendez had sought permission for the rental relationship.

Matt Miller, a Menendez spokesman, said he had no connection to the BlueJersey squabble. Commenting on Ms. Hazelbaker, he said, ''If I had proven to be such an embarrassment to my campaign and caught in a lie publicly, I'd resign before I was fired.''

Ms. Hazelbaker said, ''Their candidate is struggling, he's desperate, and the target of an ongoing federal probe,'' referring to recent subpoenas issued to the nonprofit agency.

She said that it was therefore no surprise that the Menendez campaign was trying to blame her for the postings on the Web site. ''It's no surprise they'd be up to tricks like this,'' she said.

Now, Mr. Melli and his blog's readers are looking anew at postings like the one from AmadeusNJ the day after the subpoenas were issued. ''Why, oh why did Corzine nominate Menendez?'' the poster wrote. ''It's really a shame that something like this might prevent Dems from taking back the Senate.''

The Star Ledger, Sep 21, 2006
A Kean aide denies a hand in blog hits on Menendez

Thursday, September 21, 2006
BY DEBORAH HOWLETT
Star-Ledger Staff

Someone on the liberal political blog Blue Jersey has been posting -- gasp! -- anonymous criticisms of Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez.

And the blog's founder said yesterday he has traced the bogus postings, through Internet addresses and other evidence, back to Jill Hazelbaker, the press secretary for the Senate campaign of Republican state Sen. Tom Kean Jr.

  Hazelbaker dismissed the claim as "nonsense" and denied the campaign had anything to do with the postings.

"Oh, please," she said. "I'm very busy. I don't have time to focus on Blue Jersey. ... I don't blog."

Disguising one's identity to sway "grass roots" opinion is known on the Web as "astroturfing." It's hardly a crime -- people use fake names on the Web all the time -- but it can be an egregious breach of a site's etiquette that can get the poster barred from the site.

Juan Melli, a graduate student at Princeton University who created Blue Jersey (www.bluejersey.com) last year as a forum to discuss politics, said he wouldn't tolerate such tactics on his site.

"This is an open forum for honest debate," he said.

Besides using a false identity, he claimed Hazelbaker pretended to be an "ardent Democrat" in her efforts to shill for Kean. "She lied," he said. "This is a campaign tactic that's not part of the honest debate. ... This is the online equivalent of push-polling."

Melli said the posts were made earlier this week under pseudonyms "cleanupnj" and "usedtobeblue," which were registered on the Web site within 15 minutes of each other.

The posts challenged a story by one of the site's 10 contributors in which a former House ethics lawyer, Ellen Weintraub, appeared to corroborate Menendez's claim that he got verbal clearance in 1994 to rent a property to a nonprofit agency he helped to win millions in federal funding. The agency paid Menendez more than $330,000 in rent. Federal investigators have subpoenaed records from the deal as part of an ethics inquiry.

The poster "cleanupnj" questioned Weintraub's impartiality, pointing out, "She is also married to (Sen.) Russ Feingold's legislative director. Unbiased source? A conflict of interest certainly."

Melli said that as the Web site administrator he was able to see that the postings shared an IP address -- a unique number, much like a phone number or street address, assigned to a computer, network or other device to allow communication over the Internet. He traced that address from Princeton to a Comcast "node" in Union, before hitting a firewall. Kean's campaign office is in Mountainside, six miles away.

  But, Melli said, the IP address matched exactly the IP address in an e-mail that Hazelbaker had sent in her official capacity to a third party, who shared it with Melli. He said it is also identical to the IP address used to make a series of partisan challenges to Menendez's biography on the Wikipedia Web site.

"I doubt Comcast would assign the same IP address to two different businesses," Melli said.

Hazelbaker argued that the address Melli published -- 70.90.20.85 -- is not the campaign's IP address. It is, however, the same IP address that appears on numerous official campaign e-mails sent by Hazelbaker to The Star-Ledger through the course of the campaign.

Hazelbaker said last night that she could not explain why that IP address shows up on her e-mail, but that the campaign's technical staff assured her Melli had it wrong. She declined to say what the campaign's IP address is.

Like a telephone number, an IP address identifies a piece of computer equipment, not the person using it.

Melli said he became convinced that the poster from the Kean campaign IP address was Hazelbaker when he read a newspaper story on the Senate race yesterday in which the reporter quoted Hazelbaker using virtually identical language to that used by the anonymous poster.

The post prior to the story's publication also included factual information that only Hazelbaker would have known, Melli said.

Hazelbaker insisted Melli was wrong and questioned his motives.

"It's nonsense. That's my comment," Hazelbaker said. "We're talking about a left-leaning blog whose candidate is imploding. I don't blog and it wasn't me. Period."