Paul Lemmen was my first follower on Twitter. The TKPOTD for eight years ago today was about Paul, his involvement with Team Kimberlin, and his return to the Light Side.

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Paul Lemmen is an ex-con. He was a military impersonator, a fraudster, and a con man, and he went to federal prison for it. He’s now on supervised release. Paul is also a blogger. I became aware of him because he was the first person to follow me on Twitter, so I clicked over to check out his An Ex-Con’s View blog. That was in late May or early June of last year. Like so many of us, Paul was blogging about Brett Kimberlin and he seemed to be on the side of the good guys.

Then something happened. Paul’s supervised release was threatened, apparently because someone was accusing him of writing defamatory stuff (sound familiar?). The Popehat Signal went up, Paul got some pro bono legal help, and things settled down for a while.

Then Paul switched sides. He began aligning himself with Team Kimberlin. That alignment stayed intact until early this year, when Paul decided that he had had enough of the dark side. Since then, he has been assisting those of us on Team Lickspittle in finding information about Team Kimberlin.

Yesterday, Paul came out of the closet and publicly apologized to those he injured last year. Gentle Reader, I can’t tell you everything I know about his situation, but I am convinced that what Paul did last year was done under duress.

Paul has a lousy reputation because of his past, so it’s not surprising that people are cautious. They should be, but, thus far, he has been an invaluable source of inside information concerning much of Team Kimberlin’s activities in 2012.

UPDATE—I’m not surprised that there have been so many negative comments about Paul Lemmen. He’s done a lot of bad things. He has a great deal to make amends for.

He has also been an invaluable source of intelligence on the operation of Team Kimberlin, providing leads that have been backed up by other sources. I am thankful for his help.

UPDATE 2—One question being asked is why Paul Lemmen decided to come out of the closet now. Remember that he had be put under pressure of having his supervised release revoked. On 7 October, @BreitbartUnmasked tweeted this—Given that implied threat from Team Kimberlin, I can understand why Paul might want to come clean. You can’t blackmail someone by threatening to tell information that is already published.

UPDATE 3—I have known the identity of @RMNixonDeceased since January.

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I still haven’t exhausted all the leads I received from Paul.

Paul spend the last years of his life as an orthodox priest, quite a change from the middle years of his life.