The Man Who Exposed Jonathon Gruber Videos is a Tribe Member

[maz]

I'm not in favor of the Affordable Care Act, but what are the odds that the man who discovered and brought to the public's attention the videos of Obamacare architech Jonathon Gruber calling American voters "stupid" is apparently a tribe member?

And what are the odds that nothing is going to happen with the Affordable Care Act, and that the law will stand no matter how much it is exposed as a tax on the people and not healthcare?

He found the Jonathan Gruber videos — and no media outlet would call him back

The man who changed the ObamaCare debate was at a gas station when I reached him, and he wasn't dying to talk.

"I really want to stay out of the limelight," said Rich Weinstein, a Philadelphia investment adviser. "This is not about me."

Still, Weinstein would not be coaxed into an on-camera interview, or even provide a photograph. He doesn't want his 15 minutes.

This helps explain why a self-described regular guy was able to unearth what the media could not. Few news organizations could afford to have a reporter spend a long period searching for a needle in an online haystack, especially without a tip that the needle existed at all. Maybe everything that Gruber had to say about the law he helped devise was boring. But Weinstein kept at it, although he did give up the search for awhile during his kids' lacrosse season.

Last December, Weinstein found one video in which Gruber, an MIT professor,  said that ObamaCare subscribers wouldn't get tax benefits if their states didn't set up health care exchanges, meaning they would be losing out to those in states that did create the websites.

That's when Weinstein used every means he could think of, from Facebook to phone calls, to get the attention of journalists. He says he tried getting messages to Fox News, Forbes, National Review, Glenn Beck and a network affiliate in Philadelphia where a friend worked. Nobody bit. Nobody called back.

"It was so frustrating," Weinstein said. "I tried really hard to give this to the media. I had this and couldn't get it to anybody that knows what to do with it." All he wanted, Weinstein says, was a train ride to D.C. for him and his lawyer, and "I was going to give them everything for nothing, no money, all I wanted was autographed pictures of the people I was working with to hang on my office wall."

Crickets.

He finally posted a comment on the web page of the Volokh Conspiracy, a group of conservative lawyers whose blog is hosted by the Washington Post. A conservative activist picked it up, and Forbes wound up carrying a piece by contributor Michael Cannon, dubbed by the New Republic "Obamacare's Single Most Relentless Antagonist."

It wasn't until shortly before the midterms that Weinstein found what came to be known as Gruber's "stupidity" video. He plastered it on his Twitter feed days later, sometimes inserting the names of journalists to try to grab their attention. This time, the news was quickly picked up by Fox, the Daily Caller and other media outlets (but not the broadcast networks or major newspapers).

But even then, Weinstein was sounding cautionary notes on Twitter. 

"Did first 2 interviews ever- both with orgs on the left. Hope I'm not turned into a crazy or sound 'stupid.' Videos speak-o for themselves"

And: "Just to be clear, I don't actually live in my mom's basement wearing a tin foil that!"