Thread by @nimkef

29 Dec 2010

Andy Martin, a political gadfly who ran for President Obama’s former Senate seat in 2010, announced Wednesday in New Hampshire that he will run for the Republican nomination for president on a “birther” platform.

latimes.com/archives/la-xp…

“I’m going to have a tremendous impact on the presidential election, not because I’m the frontrunner. Clearly I’m not,” he said. “But I’ll be driving the agenda in the Republican Party.”

The so-called “birther” movement already had a serious impact in the political landscape in the 2010 elections, Martin said, because “when you doubt the legitimacy of the leader, it undermines the Democratic Party.”

Martin, who calls himself the “king of the birthers,” said he actually believes Obama was born in Hawaii, as has been verified by the state with a Certificate of Live Birth.

He has a colorful history in Illinois politics, inc. a 2010 primary campaign for the US Senate in which he accused Sen. Mark Kirk of being gay

Martin has been sanctioned in federal court for filing 100's of lawsuits & was found unfit to practice law by the Illinois Supreme Court

12 Oct 2008

The most persistent falsehood about Sen Barack Obama’s background first hit in 2004 just two weeks after the DNC speech that helped set him on the path to his presidential candidacy: “Obama is a Muslim who has concealed his religion.”

nytimes.com/2008/10/13/us/…

That statement, contained in a press release [by Andy Martin]

An examination of legal documents and election filings, along with interviews with his acquaintances, revealed Mr. Martin, 62, to be a man with a history of scintillating if not always factual claims.

He has left a trail of animosity — some of it provoked by anti-Jewish comments — among political leaders, lawyers and judges in three states over more than 30 years.

He is a law school graduate, but his admission to the Illinois bar was blocked in the 1970s after a psychiatric finding of “moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.”

Though he is not a lawyer, Mr. Martin went on to become a prodigious filer of lawsuits, and he made unsuccessful attempts to win public office for both parties in three states, as well as for president at least twice, in 1988 and 2000.

Based in Chicago, he now identifies himself as a writer who focuses on his anti-Obama Web site and press releases.

“Everybody uses my research as a takeoff point,” Mr. Martin said, adding, however, that some take his writings “and exaggerate them to suit their own fantasies.”

As for his background, he said: “I’m a colorful person. There’s always somebody who has a legitimate cause in their mind to be angry with me.”

When questions were raised last week about Mr. Martin’s appearance and claims on “Hannity’s America” on Fox News, the program’s producer said Mr. Martin was clearly expressing his opinion and not necessarily fact.

It was not Mr. Martin's first turn on national television. The CBS News program "48 Hours" in 1993 devoted an hourlong program, "See You in Court; Civil War, Anthony Martin Clogs Legal System with Frivolous Lawsuits," to what it called his prolific filings.

(Mr. Martin has also been known as Anthony Martin-Trigona.) He has filed so many lawsuits that a judge barred him from doing so in any federal court without preliminary approval.

He prepared to run as a Democrat for Congress in Connecticut, where paperwork for one of his campaign committees listed as one purpose “to exterminate Jew power.” He ran as a Republican for the Florida State Senate and the United States Senate in Illinois.

When running for president in 1999, he aired a television advertisement in New Hampshire that accused George W. Bush of using cocaine.

In the 1990s, Mr. Martin was jailed in a case in Florida involving a physical altercation.

Theories about Mr. Obama’s background have taken on a life of their own. But independent analysts seeking the origins of the cyberspace attacks wind up at Mr. Martin’s first press release, posted on the Free Republic Web site in August 2004.

[archive]
web.archive.org/web/2021121022…

[In] “Obama Nation,” the widely discredited best seller about Mr. Obama by Jerome R. Corsi. Mr. Corsi opens the book with a quote from Mr. Martin.

In his original press release, Mr. Martin wrote that he was personally “a strong supporter of the Muslim community.”

But, he wrote of Mr. Obama, “it may well be that his concealment is meant to endanger Israel.” He added, “His Muslim religion would obviously raise serious questions in many Jewish circles.”

Yet in various court papers, Mr. Martin had impugned Jews.

A motion he filed in a 1983 bankruptcy case called the judge “a crooked, slimy Jew who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race.”

In another motion, filed in 1983, Mr. Martin wrote, “I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did.”

In an interview, Mr. Martin denied some statements against Jews attributed to him in court papers, blaming malicious judges for inserting them.

But in his “48 Hours” interview in 1993, he affirmed a different anti-Semitic part of the affidavit that included the line about the Holocaust, saying, “The record speaks for itself.”

When asked Friday about an assertion in his court papers that “Jews, historically and in daily living, act through clans and in wolf pack syndrome,” he said, “That one sort of rings a bell.”

He said he was not anti-Semitic. “I was trying to show that everybody in the bankruptcy court was Jewish and I was not Jewish,” he said, “and I was being victimized by religious bias.”

In discussing the denial of his admission to the Illinois bar, Mr. Martin said the psychiatric exam listing him as having a “moderately severe personality defect” was spitefully written by an evaluator he had clashed with.

Mr. Martin, who says he is from a well-off banking and farming family, is clearly pleased with his newfound attention. But, he said, others have added to his work in “scary” ways.

He said, he did not necessarily ascribe to a widely circulated e-mail from the Israeli right-wing activist Ruth Matar, which includes the false assertion, “If Obama were elected, he would be the first Arab-American president.”

In 1973 the Illinois Supreme Court refused to grant Martin a license to practice law in the state due to such conduct as attempting to have a parking violation thrown out because it had been "entered by an insane judge" and ...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Mart…

for commenting that an attorney, who suffers from a mild case of cerebral palsy, was "shaking and tottering and drooling like an idiot." The court also cited Martin's Selective Service record, which attributed to him "a moderately severe character defect manifested by

well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character."

Martin then became involved in consumer advocacy and referred to himself as "the people's attorney general". He took credit for being the first to file suit under the civil component of the RICO Act,

as well as the first to file antitrust actions against the Big Three television networks for anticompetitive practices in network affiliation agreements.