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Posted
Monday, December 24, 2007 3:09 PM
| By
Chadwick Matlin
Are Bill and Hillary in a lover’s spat? A visit to presidentbillclinton.com or williamclinton.com redirects right to Barack Obama’s homepage. This is the same Obama that Bill Clinton hasn’t been too fond of recently. We’ve heard rumors of dissention within the Clinton ranks, but has it really gotten this bad?
No. Those Clinton domains were registered in 1998 by Joseph Culligan, a private investigator and part-time domain squatter based in Miami. Last week, after ABC News discovered Clinton was readying an Obama attack site, Culligan was inspired to drum up publicity for his own private investigation Web site, webofdeception.com. He redirected the Clinton domains, which had lay dormant for years, to Obama’s site, hoping that somebody would take the bait.
Well, it worked. Wonkette published a post on the redirects today, which piqued our interest on an unsurprisingly slow news day. I tracked the domains back to Culligan, who also owns domains based on the names of Barack Obama and Patti Solis Doyle, Hillary’s campaign manager.
Domain-name trickery is nothing new on the Internet. Just last week somebody tried to convince journalists that Hillary Clinton registered BarackOsama2008.org. But Culligan’s antics are an avoidable headache for the Clinton camp. Culligan says he doesn't hold any animosity toward the Clintons and that 42 “was a great president.” (He wouldn't say which candidate, Democrat or Republican, he supports.) He has offered to give Clinton the domains every year since '98, free of charge, but he’s never heard a response. “When Clinton is ready for his name, I’m ready to give it back."
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