Whatever Happened To Useless Attorney Aaron Walker Of Manassas, VA?

This article is third in a series that examines the present-day circumstances of the assorted weirdos, hacks, shills, creeps, and nutjobs who coalesced around the attacks on Brett Kimberlin from 2011-2012. The first installment was about the ineffable weirdness of Seth Allen. The second article focused on the grating insanity of Ron Brynaert. 

Remember ‘Aaron Worthing’? He was the pseudonymous creator of Everybody Draw Muhammad, a blog that pretended to celebrate free speech by publishing ‘cartoons’ which strongly resembled anti-Muslim bigotry scratched on a middle schooler’s notebook in ball point pen. ‘Aaron Worthing’ wouldn’t reveal his own name, but he encouraged contributors to do so, inviting Islamic terrorists to do their worst the whole time. In fact, you could say that ‘Aaron Worthing’ was absolutely obsessed by the need to feel personally targeted and endangered, as if it was the ultimate proof of his faith — a trait that would lead him directly into the fires of hostile litigation over and over again, like a child with short-term memory problems who cannot learn to stop touching the stove while it is hot.

We now know that ‘Aaron Worthing’ was in fact Aaron Walker, a Manassas, Virginia attorney with a Yale law degree, personality deficits, and an outsize ego. Exhibiting the special-snowflake syndrome that has made him so arrogant over the years, Walker claimed to suffer from dysgraphia when he demanded a private testing room and internet access in order to take the bar exam, then successfully sued LSAT under the Americans with Disabilities Act when he was refused these privileges. Rather than join a firm or hang a shingle with his bar card, however, Walker earned a living as in-house counsel at a home healthcare services provider by day and blogged on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Journalism and Big Government websites by night. Blending legalistic moralizing with his flair for fantasy, Walker wrote a bizarre ‘alternate history’ novel about a superhero who mitigates the horror of the 9/11 attacks; the project brought him closer to University of Texas law school webmaster Dustin Farahnak, who heroically tried to edit Walker’s stream-of-semiconsciousness text into something readable.

All of which is to underline the special qualities that make Aaron Walker such a useless attorney: he regularly ignores the rules of the court regarding page limits, his legal ‘scholarship’ is just shoddy screeds full of imaginary facts presented as evidence of his inane conspiracy theories, yet he remains a vexatious and trigger-happy litigator. In fact, Walker once tried and failed to sue this website for calling him a “useless attorney,” which is a sure sign of just how useless he really is.

Farahnak was also close to blogging Los Angeles Assistant District Attorney John Patrick Frey and Breitbart writer Mandy Nagy, sharing their interest in a former federal prisoner named Brett Kimberlin. Kimberlin’s activism had made trouble for fraudulent conservative hitman James O’Keefe, a protege of both Breitbart and Frey. Farahnak encouraged Walker to take up the cause of Seth Allen, a mentally ill man who had libeled his way into a lawsuit by Kimberlin. Walker first tried to assist Allen anonymously and unofficially, but he was licensed to practice law in Virginia, not Maryland, and his amateur-hour shenanigans quickly unraveled. When he learned that his real name would inevitably be exposed to Kimberlin by the court, Walker wrote an email to warn his employer that jihadis would soon be gunning for his workplace; when his shocked supervisor searched his office, they discovered that instead of doing his assigned work, Walker had transformed company property into a Kimberlin stalker’s shrine. The company terminated the employment of both Walker and his wife, who also worked at the firm, and asked him to publicly disassociate himself for the protection of their remaining employees; in a classic Walker reply, he took umbrage at the email interrupting dinnertime with his spouse.

Enraged at losing his job this way, Walker escalated his next contact with Kimberlin in the lobby of the Rockville County courthouse. First, he grabbed Kimberlin’s iPad — telling one judge later that he feared it might be a bomb, but telling another that Kimberlin was merely taking his picture — and then allegedly struck Kimberlin with his fist, a charge that Walker denies. The slow frame rate of the courthouse security camera video doesn’t capture enough of the event to back up either party’s account, but Walker ignored a consequent seven-day ‘cooling off’ period ordered by Judge Cornelius Vaughey, and spent an hour in jail after the next hearing, an embarrassment that he has tried to re-litigate several times since January of 2012. Claiming that Kimberlin ‘forged’ his medical records after the incident, Walker raised such a martyr’s cry that for most of that year, he had the full-throated support of major right wing institutions in his quest to ‘clear his name.’ The Franklin Center, Breitbart News, Pajamas Media, Michelle Malkin, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Gateway Pundit, and Glenn Beck’s The Blaze.com all amplified Walker’s narrative without question. Dan Backer, ‘free speech’ lawyer to billionaires, took up Walker’s ridiculous state and federal lawsuits against Kimberlin, declaring them “the case of a lifetime” until they were finally dismissed with prejudice at both levels.

For the high-powered enemies that Kimberlin had made in the course of his long, strange career, Walker was now a very useful tool, replacing the unreliable and defeated Seth Allen as primary legal antagonist. But three years later, none of those conservative outlets still reports on Walker or his courtroom activities against Kimberlin. In fact, BU is practically the only website that even takes note of his legal rantings anymore; rather than receive a chorus of support, Walker’s endless legal grudge-match with Kimberlin (and lately, the state of Maryland) has become an embarrassment that most past allies of Walker studiously ignore. The reasons for this transition are not hard to discern. Walker has undermined his credibility with a steady stream of deranged pleadings that have reached epic length — his most recent brief is three times longer than the court’s page limit — without ever breaking away from the bad habits of argument and writing that have caused every single judge to eject his litigation before the trial phase. Walker’s attempt to insert himself in a marital dispute between Kimberlin and his wife during 2013 was also a disaster of epic proportions, forcing many conservative observers to admit to themselves that his vindictive preoccupation was at best unhealthy, at worst criminal. Matters became worse when Kimberlin decided he had experienced enough of this behavior, and filed his own enormous lawsuits, whereupon Walker tried to organize the defense — and only ended up as a discredited pariah with their shared pro bono legal counsel.

That episode also saw Walker submit an over-long, allegedly perjurious brief to a Maryland divorce court which made sick and sensational claims about Brett Kimberlin’s family. Nor did Walker feel limited by the court’s rejection, for his ally William Hoge rushed to the courthouse in order to copy and post the flimflam document online before it was sealed. This has also become part of the Aaron Walker template: putting the entire Kimberlin family in his crosshairs with long, fantastical smears, he keeps trying to get his deluded lies admitted into some public record somewhere, that he might trumpet his fables as judicially-recognized ‘truth.’ Similarly, the blogs of Walker and his co-defendants have been primary means of ‘Google-bombing’ Kimberlin’s family, nearly destroying his daughters’ social lives and forcing them to change schools. His new lawsuit against the Kimberlins and the state of Maryland makes unrepeatable claims about the Kimberlin children.

Yet while his masturbatory imaginings are disgusting, they are also hilariously overwrought, straining the credulity of readers long past the breaking point. Rather than support his cause, Walker’s litigation thus tends to isolate him from any support outside of the very small remaining ‘scene’ of ravening anti-Kimberlin fandom that mainly lives in Hoge’s blog comments now. As BU has reported before, Walker maintains his grip on a small audience by encouraging their participation in his fantasy world with terrible legal advice aimed at ‘getting’ Kimberlin through a tendentious conspiracy theory about former BU writer Bill Schmalfeldt. Having briefly become very useful to a lot of powerful people, the still-unemployed Aaron Walker is now more useless than ever before, and so he clings to his last pretenses of usefulness this way.

But the state of Maryland’s new response to Walker’s fourth amended complaint demonstrates just what a useless attorney he really is. In addition to blasting his weak arguments, the state’s attorney hammers Walker over his lack of standing to sue and his apparent poor comprehension of basic legal principles (res judicata, anyone?):

In Maryland, there is a presumption that a statute is Constitutional meaning that Plaintiff Walker bears the burden of proving that §3-803 and §3-805 are unconstitutional. […] Despite this burden, Plaintiff has included no analysis as to why these statutes are unconstitutional. Instead, Plaintiff merely makes bald and unsupported contentions that these statutes are unconstitutional. Thus, the Third Amended Complaint on its face has should be dismissed. Additionally, Plaintiff Walker seeks to overturn Galloway v. State, 365 Md. 599 (2001), a case which tested the Constitutionality of §3-803 (formerly cited as Md. Code Art. 27 § 123), yet Plaintiff similarly cites no analysis to form the basis of his contention.

Plaintiff’s challenge to the constitutionality of these statutes under the United States Constitution must be dismissed because Plaintiff may not bring a constitutional challenge directly under the United States Constitution, he must bring it pursuant to §1983 or some other statute.

Walker is still suing Kimberlin over that brief arrest in Judge Vaughey’s courtroom three years ago. He’s also suing Maryland because a state’s attorney briefly filed charges against him under Grace’s Law, a statute specifically enacted to criminalize the cyberstalking and cyberbullying of children, at Mrs. Kimberlin’s request. And having once touted himself as Tetyana Kimberlin’s brave defender, Walker is now suing her for filing those charges in an effort to protect her family from his crazed legal buffoonery. Maryland dropped the charges on almost the same day they first defeated Walker’s lawsuit, yet he has pursued his claim that Grace’s Law is somehow unconstitutional (‘because the internet exists’) long after a reasonable person would have thanked their lucky legal stars and walked away. Maryland’s response on this point is simple, elegant, and devastating:

Here, neither §3-803 and §3-805 clearly discriminate against interstate commerce as these statutes on their face, do not regulate commerce as they are criminal statutes which criminalize stalking and harassment, i.e. dangerous conduct. Accordingly, these statutes do not “incidentally burden interstate commerce” because the statutes do not regulate commerce. Even assuming arguendo that these statutes do regulate commerce (which is not true for Plaintiff Walker) the local benefit to these statutes outweigh an insignificant unlikely burden on interstate commerce because these statutes criminalize stalking and harassment both in person and by electronic means. Plaintiff Walker’s constitutional challenge to §3-303 and §3-805 of the Criminal Law Article based on the dormant commerce clause must be dismissed and a declaratory judgement issued finding the statutes constitutional should be entered.

According to our sources, Walker’s most recent attempt to foist his ridiculous lawsuit on the state of Maryland and the Kimberlin family did not go as planned last Thursday. He had scheduled two hearings on the same afternoon in order to maximize his chances of getting his latest amended complaint, which includes all his new and old smears of the Kimberlins, submitted into the public record. But this time, the judge cut Walker off as he launched into his usual spiel about Kimberlin’s distant past, a refrain which is all too familiar to the Maryland state bench by now. The judge then scheduled a new hearing for next Friday, triggering speculation that the legal system may have finally had enough of Mr. Aaron Walker.

At BU, we have predicted for a long time that Walker’s aggressive disregard for the rules of the courts, his fanciful legal filings, and shady cross-jurisdictional lawyering would get him into serious trouble one day. It seems very possible that moment is now upon us — that Walker will finally be sanctioned for conduct unbecoming of an officer of the court, leaving him a more useless attorney than ever before and potentially leading to his disbarment. Unable to stop touching hot stoves, Walker will end up badly burned one day, proving nothing about his faith but everything about his own obsessive mind. After all, this is a man who makes his long-suffering wife check under the car every day for bombs while he watches from the safety of the house with his pistol in hand, then tries to re-litigate a three year-old embarrassment for the umpteenth time. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result, then Aaron Walker is easily the biggest lunatic in this whole saga — which is really saying something.