The first email came at 12:41, the second at 5:38. The first was entitled "SPITZER'S ABUSE OF POWER", the second, "Spitzer Caught Spying"; both were sent by updates@nyfacts.net.

The same email went to Phillip at The Albany Project, Jay Jochnowitz at the Times-Union and Liz Benjamin at the Daily Politics. Presumably, more people got it as well.

The emails contained the full version of two slash-and-burn pieces by Fred Dicker of the New York Post, dedicated, as the subject lines suggest, to the Bruno-Spitzer conflict.

Nyfacts.net is, as the TU points out, carefully shielded to mask the identity of whomever put it up. The TU followed up:

NYFacts.net didn’t respond to an e-mail inviting it to tell more about itself. A visit to Web sites with variations of the name turned up blank pages (not “page not found” errors, though). The .com versions led to ads for a firm offering ways to earn money on the Internet.

Moveover, a check of NYFacts.nets’ Internet registry shows that whoever create [sic] it took extra steps to shield its identity. Its registration was dated today Monday, using a special proxy service that offers private registration.

Bruno’s office said it knows nothing about this.

So here's the really funny thing: this email didn't go to any of the regular Daily Gotham email accounts, the ones linked on this site and used in normal correspondence. It went instead to my account on the New Democratic Majority domain. And that's curious.

I use that email address mainly for my correspondence relating to NDM; on Daily Gotham business, I use my Daily Gotham email. However, there is no conceivable way that anyone linked to Joe Bruno could have the email that this went to. That's just not possible.

We've seen several anonymous web sites pop up in New York politics over the last few years. First, there was StopBloomberg.com; then, StopYassky.com. I've corresponded with both, and notably, both of these efforts were Democratic ventures. Given that I've used the NDM email strictly and exclusively for business related to Democratic politics, I'm reasonably sure that whoever is behind this effort is, in fact, a Democrat, more to the point, a politically active Democrat. It's completely impossible that anyone could deduce the particular email address that the NYFacts.net email went to from any context on The Daily Gotham.

The conclusion is clear: whoever sent this knows that the person who uses my NDM account, namely myself, is also the editor of The Daily Gotham. And that in turn is a very small crowd, maybe, at best, sixty or seventy people, all Democrats. Perhaps somebody really needed the money.