Loren Feldman is a tech blogger of some repute, apparently. Valleywag refers to him as “the Don Imus of Silicon Valley,” which may or may not be a compliment. Feldman, who’s not known for mincing words — I’m not sure what he is known for, but it’s not that — now has some free advice for Fred Baron. As you’ll recall, Baron is the former finance chair for the John Edwards campaign and, coincidentally, current benefactor of Rielle Hunter:

If that’s not a face and voice you want to experience for longer than 10 seconds, here’s a transcript of the relevant portion:

Here’s the first thing, bro. You gotta to stop talking to your kid. He’s got a big mouth, and he’s an imbecile. You already know this. You know this, okay? I know it’s a tough time for you, and you’re trying to circle the troops and get the family back together, but he’s the weak link. The weak link. You know what I’m saying? He’s got a big mouth, and he’s an imbecile involved in this blogging community. He’s already FriendFeeding and Twittering dates when you knew stuff and didn’t know stuff. He’s gonna get you in a lot of trouble, Fred.

“Your kid” is Andrew Baron, co-founder of the popular(?) videoblog Rocketboom. As Valleywag has noted, Rocketboom and the Edwards campaign go way back.

I checked Andrew’s Twitter page and FriendFeed page, and the Google caches of those pages, but I couldn’t find any mention of the Edwards/Hunter fiasco. Feldman’s video was posted on Aug. 15, and I think Google caches everything up to a week ago, right? So if Andrew did give out dates when his dad knew stuff and didn’t know stuff, he deleted it from both pages at some point between 8/15 and 8/18. Which would be par for the course, if you’ve been following this story.

(Hat tip: Fortunate Son)

However, Andrew did defend his dad in the comments at Valleywag:

My father is one of the most awesome people out there and has done more to help the world than most individuals are capable of.

Which seems kind of odd, considering he was commenting on a post about how his own dad sued him to recover the $800,000 he invested in Rocketboom. Awesome!

Update: Okay, I did find some comments from Andrew Baron on the FriendFeed page for uber-techblogger Dave Winer. On 8/10, Winer said (hyperlink mine):

So [Robert] Scoble is famous cause [sic] he took a picture of Edwards with his mistress (he didn’t know) but there’s someone else in the blogging community who is connected to this affair, but he has yet to come forward and offer a perspective. I’ve been wondering whether I shoudl [sic] say anything about it.

And Andrew replied:

If you mean me, I’m still waiting to hear back from my Dad [sic], but in the meantime, I decided that I am very pissed off at JRE - he put his own personal ego way above the good of the world. I just cant [sic] even fathom how he could go so far when the steaks [sic] are so high. Had he become elected the nominee and then people found out, Mccain [sic] might have won and the amount of damage it would do the world is just unfathomable. Hard to imagine a more selfish act.

Andrew made several other comments on the same page, including this one:

I was likely trusted by the JRE campaign because of my Dad [sic], but in 2004 I established a relationship with their online dept [sic] myself. And Im [sic] pretty proud of that actually. I was somewhat of a non-offical [sic] advisor. I was then trying to help the campaign with their video efforts for the 2008 election and was often asked what I thought of Hunters [sic] videos - to which I always replied that I didn’t think they were very effective. With regards to the trip, the online dept [sic] wanted videobloggers to cover it and asked Rocketboom (so I asked Chuck on our behalf) and I also recommended Scoble. Rocketboom’s relationship to JRE was often disclosed on Rocketboom and I always spoke freely about my Dad [sic] to people, like Dave for instance.

(I’m not sure who “Chuck” is.) And finally, Andrew said:

Update: I just spoke with my dad. He said that he had no knowledge whatsoever of John Edwards [sic] affair and just learned about it for the first time about 2 weeks ago.

Which is of course the official line. It makes complete sense that for the better part of a year, Fred Baron has been spending huge amounts of cash on Rielle Hunter and the Andrew Young family, shuttling them all over the place to help them dodge the National Enquirer’s story about John & Rielle’s affair… without having any knowledge whatsoever of John & Rielle’s affair. Why would you even try to connect the two?

Anyway, maybe this is what Loren Feldman was talking about. And now we can add the techblogging community to the story. It’s just another sign that Edwards had no clue what he was getting into when he became the “Internet-savvy candidate.” Actually, if there’s anything he did have a clue about, please let me know.

More J&R stuff:

Continue reading ‘Could Rocketboom Blow Up What’s Left of John Edwards?’