San Diego GOP Twitter Accounts Shuttered After Dirty Tricks Revealed

San Diego’s Republican Party Chair Tony Kvraric has never been one to shy away from controversy. Or sleaze, for that matter. But when it comes to using social media as a platform for his shenanigans, he’s met his match with Twitter. His personal account, @TonyKrvaric and the account for @SDRepublicans were shut down yesterday after an internal investigation prompted by complaints from the local Democratic party revealed that the local GOP was behind assorted fraudulent Twitter accounts purporting to be affiliated with various Democratic officials in San Diego, including @SherriLightner, @ToddPhilips, @MatKostrinsky, and @MartiEmerald — in addition to one impersonating the County Democratic Party, @sddemocrats, and its chair, @JessDurfee..

Kvraric kept up his online tomfoolery up to the very end, with his last tweets centering on a tour of the @OccupySD site, that he was looking for local democrats to photograph them for the purpose of using the photos to embarrass them in the future. And, of course, he was full of negative comments, turning his nose up at the rabble. He acts like he thinks his feces smells sweet or something.

In a press release issued yesterday afternoon Democratic Party Chair Jess Durfee was quoted, “I applaud Twitter for acting quickly to shut the deceptive profiles down, Childish and unethical conduct online is nothing new, but I am disappointed to see that my Republican counterpart and his party may have been behind it. The idea of Tony Krvaric posting as @JessDurfee is just creepy.

“From hiring a spy to shadow a Redistricting Commissioner to pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into failed signature-gathering efforts, this has been a busy year for San Diego Republicans,” Durfee added. “Now apparently they can add Internet fraud to the list. In the meantime, Democrats have out-registered them countywide, and we’re looking forward to out-campaigning them in 2012.”

In reality, Krvaric is nothing more than a small time hustler who’s conned his way into a position of some small importance, giving his arrogance and narrow-minded attitude a public platform. When called upon to account for questionable activities in the past, Krvaric’s strategy has been  to dismiss allegations of wrongdoing as mere pranks.

When the blog Raw Story revealed that Krvaric was the co-founder of Fairlight, an assemblage that software industry officials say evolved into a international video and software piracy group that was one of the world’s largest crime rings of its sort, he dismissed the story, telling fellow Republicans, “Apparently there’s a hit piece floating around on me, “exposing” my wild high school, teenage years where I was in a computer club where we swapped Commodore 64 games (similar to how kids swap mp3 music files these days)…”

Fairlight co-founder Bacchus (Pontus Berg) suggested that Krvaric (aka Strider) as still in charge of in charge of Fairlight in an article published in 2004, shortly before an international crackdown on the group by law enforcement. That crackdown included raids and computer seizures in Southern California. And a fellow cracker was sentenced to 30 years in prison for similar activities.  But Tony would have us believe that it was all just part of his childhood fun and games.

Accused of rigging the Mayoral endorsement by the San Diego GOP in the 2008 elections, Krvaric simply denied being aware that there was any other candidate besides Jerry Sanders running for the job.  That was news to Steve Francis, a prominent local GOP activist, who was quoted as saying, “He knew I was very very serious and did not discuss with me before the Sanders quickie endorsement.”

Fellow republicans have been critical of Krvaric’s methods for years. There is even a  web site dedicated to exposing his misdeeds dating back to the 2008 elections.

“What’s really wrong here,” said Republican and Alpine Planning Group member George Barnett in a post quoted in an East County Magazine article by Miriam Raftery, “is that the Republican movement, and its direction under the recent County party chairs, has become a ‘corruption’ with repugnant activity (that I personally view as immoral) as the norm.”

This is, we’re pretty sure, just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to local Republican Party dirty tricks efforts.  We’re pretty sure that we’ve seen a pattern in online forum comments lately that points to an organized campaign of using shadow email accounts to post defamatory remarks about a variety of causes not dear to the Grand Old Party.

Do we have any proof? Nope. But where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And we would certainly expect that Krvaric and his associates are prepared for an “Anonymous” type hacker checking them out.